I often get asked how I ended up becoming a venture capitalist. When people ask me how they can become a VC, I point them to my partner Seth Levine’s excellent blog posts How to become a venture capitalist and How to get a job in venture capital (revisited). But it occurred to me today – after getting another email asking me how I’d become a VC, that I wasn’t really answering the question.
Amy likes to remind me that when I was an entrepreneur, I used to regularly give talks at MIT about entrepreneurship. I’d say – very bluntly – “stay away from VCs.†I bootstrapped my first company and, while we did a lot of work for VCs, I liked taking money from them as “revenue†(where they paid Feld Technologies for our services) rather than as investment.
Feld Technologies was acquired in November 1993. Over the next two years, I made 40 angel investments with the money I made from the sale of the company. At one point in the process, I was down to under $100,000 in the bank – with the vast majority of our net worth tied up in these angel investments and a house that we bought in Boulder. Fortunately, Amy was mellow about this – we had enough current income to live the way we wanted, we were young (30), and generally weren’t anxious about how much liquid cash we had.
Along the way, a number of the companies I had invested in as an angel investor raised money from VCs. Some were tough experiences for me, like NetGenesis, which was the first angel investment I made. I was chairman from inception until shortly after the $4m VC round the company raised two years into its life. Shortly after that VC investment, the VCs hired a new “professional†CEO who lasted less than a year before being replaced by a CEO who then did a great job building the company. During this period, the founding CEO left and I decided to resign from the board because I didn’t support the process of replacing this CEO, felt like I no longer had any influence on the company, and wasn’t having any fun.
But I still wasn’t a VC at this point. I was making angel investments with my own money and working my ass off helping get a few companies that I’d co-founded, like Interliant and Email Publishing, off the ground. I was living in Boulder at this point, but traveling continuously to Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle where I was making most of my investments. During this time, I started to get pulled into more conversations with VCs, helping a few do some diligence on new investments, encouraging some to look at my angel investments, and investing small amounts in some VC funds whenever I was invited to invest in their “side funds for entrepreneurs.â€
One of the VCs I overlapped with while in Boston was Charley Lax. Charley was a partner at a firm called VIMAC and was looking at some Internet stuff. I was one of the most prolific Internet angel investors in Boston at this point (1994 – 1995) so our paths crossed periodically. We never invested in anything together, but after I moved to Boulder, I got a call from Charley one day in early 1996. It went something like:
“Hey – I just joined this Japanese company called SOFTBANK and we are going to invest $500 million in Internet companies in the next year. Do you want to help out?â€
Um – ok – sure. I didn’t really know what help out meant, but on my next trip to San Francisco I had a breakfast meeting with Gary Rieschel and Jerry Yang. SOFTBANK had recently invested in Yahoo! and presumably the breakfast was to vet me. I remember it being pleasant and ending with Gary saying something like “welcome to the team.â€
I still didn’t really have any idea what was going on, but I was making angel investments and having fun. Charley proposed being a “SOFTBANK Affiliate†which had a small monthly retainer, a deal fee for anything I brought in, and a carry on the performance of any investments I sourced. Informal enough for me to play around with it for a while.
I was in Boston the following week so Charley emailed me and said “can you go check out this company Yoyodyne and tell me what you think?†So I went to a generic office park near Boston and met with two people who would become close friends to this day. The first was Fred Wilson, who had just started Flatiron Partners (SOFTBANK was an investor in Fred’s fund) and the other was Seth Godin, the CEO of Yoyodyne. I vaguely remember a fun, energetic chat as we met a few people at Yoyodyne, ran through the products, and talked about how amazing the Internet and email was going to be as a marketing tool.
My formal report back to Charley was short – something like “Seth’s cool, the business is neat, I like it.†SOFTBANK and Flatiron closed an investment in Yoyodyne a few weeks late.
Suddenly I was a VC. An accidental one. And it’s been very interesting since that point back in 1996.
(Brad has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over 20 years and is currently a managing director at Foundry Group.)
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