Inside Field Ventures: From 3 Unicorn Bets to Starting His Own Fund

Yeah, I love that.

Can we talk about a specific example maybe of maybe when you had to tell someone to push the brakes, or maybe you were helping them think through customer discovery, or even shared, like, the timeline that that has taken?

Yeah, yeah.

I think, um, it probably happens with every business.

You know, I think when a founder finds a category they find to be compelling, they then see so many shiny objects.

A- and they wanna go after every shiny object because they've seen that there's multiple points in their industry where there are gaps, and they wanna solve every gap as ma- as fast as possible.

And so it's pretty much every investment that we look at, whether it's a company pre-inception, pre-seed, seed round, it might be, they've got a good idea of, generally speaking, of what that wedge is, but then they get attracted to the next thing, and we gotta tell them to pump the brakes because oftentimes they've not even validated that they, their own wedge product will work.

So why are we gonna go to product two when product one is not solved for yet?

And what are ways to validate? I'm curious of-

Yeah

... specifics or things that you hear from customers, or even just, like, customer pool on a product use.

Yeah, no, it, it's, it's tough because, um, lots of customers will tell you what, whatever you offer them that they want.

Uh, um, but they won't tell you that they'll pay for that, um, [chuckles] and then they won't tell you that, that it's critical to their, their job or their function or their workflow.

And so what we're trying to stress test for these folks is, is what you're building deeply embedded in the workflow of the end customer? One quick way to kinda test that out is talk to the end customer and say, "Hey, here's this product I gave you today.

If I were to..." And you let them play with it for, let's say, a month or two months, it might be.

And you tell them at that point, tell them, "If I took this away from you, like, what would happen?" And if they're like, "Ah, I'd keep going.

Not a big deal." All right, then you've not proven that you've got the [chuckles] right product in place.

But if they're like, "Hey, I've now...

This product you've given me is actually indispensable for me at this moment in time," now we're like, okay, once you've hit that threshold, someone's gonna pay for that, and hopefully you've demonstrated you can provide outcomes to their business that makes them, um, more important in their company, drives more revenue, what have you as well.

I love that.