Foundation Capital

Hookum Horns, whose favorite episode is number 159 from back in 2021 with a shoe guard.

General partner at Foundation Capital about finding and investing in the future of AI.

That was a fun one.

She's been in the news quite a bit.

After the acquisition, I spent a little bit of time with the company that acquired us, decided to take a bit of a break, do a hard reset, not just sort of locally optimized areas I'm already familiar with, but learn about some new areas and such.

So both my co-founder and I, we hung out at Foundation Capital as EIRs and we started Turing about eight years ago.

So when we started Turing, a lot of the intuition was driven by the fact that we had worked with some very talented remote engineers all over the world.

And one of the sort of common pieces of... advice when starting a company is that it's helpful to do it if you have some profound insights that are not as widely understood.

And then I was very lucky.

I met with Paul Holland, who was a GP for nearly two decades at Foundation Capital, who agreed to help me and mentor me.

And he's like the person who helped me to ensure that I was a top best practice VC versus just a strategic VC.

And it's interesting because you need to have this strategic and financial mind optimized to the maximum for both, otherwise something is not going to work.

You see, this is interesting.

And this is what I learned from Paul Holland.

So at Foundation Capital, you were not allowed to say the word deal because that's transactional.

Suddenly the entrepreneur is not a human, he's a number.

Ended up meeting my partner, Bunny.

Uh, he was at Foundation Capital for a couple decades.

Uh, he wanted to start a brand-new venture firm focusing on super early stage, so that's pre-seed, seed stage, enterprise-only B2B companies.

Um, I thought that's really compelling.

The fee structure is mouthwatering.

Um, the seed round in question came from Foundation Capital.

If you don't know, they were early investors in Solana and Cerebras, and even in household names like Netflix.

So, uh, I think the guys at Foundation Capital obviously know what they're doing.

They've seen what Imperial is building out with Armada, and I've, I've been delighted actually by my trading experience there.

Um, I'm saving a huge amount on fees in a way that I haven't saved before, so that's very, very exciting.

Imperial is, uh, really, really cool.

I'd recommend everyone at least dabble their fingers in it.

I'm Mia Farnham, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will be talking through the articles and goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past week.

Our first piece this week is a post on X from Steve Bazzallo over at Foundation Capital.

And the idea is that every startup obsesses over its cash runway, and the clock it actually should be watching is its relevance runway.

Plenty of companies right now raised a big round a couple of years ago and have years of cash on paper.

[lips smack] Uh, well, so in this case, the-- when I was learning, like deriving kind of early stage sales from, um, first principles and also I was more working with, uh, and being educated by, uh, like more senior founders like Angus Davis, who's the founder of, of SwipeLobby.

Um, now he's a partner, I think, at Foundation Capital, or like Sean Black, who was the founder of, uh, SalesCrunch.

He was previously the head of inside sales at, um, at Trulia, and then he had gone into software entrepreneurship.

So I mean, I think the, the things that they helped me not do, right? The mistakes that to avoid, and then now, um, you know, I, I spend most of my time, uh, working with early stage software companies, um, doing what I like to call, uh, founder-led sales, uh, personal training in the founder-led sales factory.