Zap's Wrap March 3rd

hi friends,

I spent the week in San Francisco with a bunch of awesome founders.

Geordan, Nick, Harlan, Mike, Jared, Eric, and Andrew.

Thank you to my friend Andrea at Rho for the hospitality and to Mike for having Avi on his team take us out to dinner!!!

We released episode 4 of FOUNDERS ONLY with Joey Kim who is building Longview Restoration. We talk about:

• Why game selection matters

• How he raised $4.3M

• How he went from venture GP → founder

• Culture and building people up

I think these keep getting better and better! You can listen and watch here. 

Oh, and, I made my 26th and 27th investments!!!! Will share more details soon…

Startup jobs

• My friend who runs a digital marketing agency for cosmetic dentists is looking for someone to take it over as CEO. They do ~$1.5M annually. They would get equity + salary.

• Joey Kim with Longview is hiring for a Customer Experience Liaison. This role would work out of the Lighthouse!

• Jimmy Speyer w/ Glasshouse is hiring for an Associate Account Executive. This role would be in their Cool Springs office 3x/week and have the chance to learn from the pro seller Jimmy himself.

• Brooke Tuttle with Offload (above!!!) is hiring for Senior Software Engineer. 

• Tristan Wilson with Edgevanta is hiring for a Founding Customer Success Manager.

• Randy Rausch with 4IR is hiring for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer.

• I have MULTIPLE startup ops opportunities. Chief of Staff + VP of Ops. Both full-time in person.

Events

• AI Leaders, Tuesday, March 3rd

  • ​We're bringing together people who are doing the thing- making decisions, shipping products, managing teams building with AI in production. ​Share over food and drinks about what's working for you right now.

• Sip & Smoke, Wednesday, March 4th

  • I am sharing about early stage investing at a cigar event with Travis!! I haven’t ever smoked a cigar lol, but hopefully will be an interesting conversation (:

• FOUNDERS ONLY, Thursday, March 12th

  • Founders only hang @ the Lighthouse

• Cofounder Connect, Thursday, March 19th

  • Meet coders and sellers to potentially team up with (:

• Startup Run Club, Friday, March 20th

  • Run 3-4 miles with breakfast after!

Things on my mind lately:

1. Building a bridge between San Francisco and Nashville feels like meaningful work. There's serious capital in SF, and honestly, I'm learning that investors are more open to meetings than you'd expect, they're actively looking for differentiated deal flow, and Nashville represents exactly that.

2. I've been growing more skeptical about whether raising a venture fund is actually what I want to do with my life. A recent experience where I found myself playing the "bad guy VC" with a founder really crystallized something for me. Being a fund manager means your LPs are your customers and startups are the product and that dynamic just doesn't align with what gives me energy. I want to be on the founder's side, always.

3. Raising venture capital is a very specific game, and most Nashville founders simply don't know how to play it. I'm thinking about building programming, and eventually requiring it, for the founders I shop out to my VC network. The goal is to close that gap and give them a real shot.

4. Talent is the real moat. Nobody in Nashville is building around it, but it's the single biggest thing every founder in my network is desperately asking for. I've been decent at it in an ad hoc way, but I want to figure out how to truly productize and scale startup talent acquisition in Nashville.

Personal

Stopped in Bozeman on the way home from SF for some R&R. Thanks to Tim who let us use his place!! Failed at getting a group pic, but we had a crew!!!

to the moon,

zap⚡