investors coming into the round, because they get different perspectives around the table and it doubles the networks that they’re utilizing. So if we’re leading an investment, we typically want to bring in another group who we think is a good fit. And vice versa. Other groups bring us in when they’re trying to build a syndicate with a team. We don’t have sharp elbows. We’re not trying to drive to a certain amount of dollars in a company, or a certain amount of ownership. We’re much more focused on building the right syndicate so we can work collaboratively.
X: How active are you, and in what ways are you active?
JF: We’re pretty active. We’ll typically take a board seat or board observer seat, and we’ll work pretty closely with the team in everything from recruiting new team members to their next round of funding to identifying first customers to pricing models and business models. It really depends on the stage and challenges the companies are facing.
X: Everybody says they do that kind of thing. But, as I’ve experienced personally, and also heard from many entrepreneurs, that often doesn’t happen.
JF: Yeah, so there’s a couple things we do differently. One is that we always have two team members working with a company rather than just one. The purpose of that is that we each, even internally, may bring different perspectives and can help different members of the company’s management team in different ways. I might have a strong relationship with the COO, the CFO, or the CEO, and another team member might be really strong with the VP of product or VP of engineering—so we can basically double the resources we’re bringing to the company. Also, whenever there’s an issue, if one of us isn’t available, the other is always available.
The other thing is that because Theresia and I founded this really as a boutique firm, we’re much more focused on company building. Theresia and I will never be on 15, 16 boards at any given time anymore. That was in our early days. Today, we’re much more focused on spending the time with the investments we’ve made. We’re not trying to build an empire, so we can afford the time to do that and do that well.
X: What about the type of entrepreneurs you work with—has that changed? Are the people who are becoming entrepreneurs different?
JF: That’s an interesting question. I do think that the nature of innovation is much broader. I’ve been in the industry for 21 years and, I mean, there’s just a lot more innovation across a much broader set of categories, which is really exciting. Just take security software. I mentioned about a third of our portfolio is in security software. That’s because security software is a much broader and bigger category than it ever was. You’re no longer just trying to build a wall. You sort of assume that there will be a breach—so you’re trying to identify where the breach happened. And then you get into containment, monitoring containment, and eradication. The size of the market, the breadth of the problems you’re trying to solve, has gone up logarithmically.
Social media didn’t exist 15, 20 years ago. And you have a whole host of innovation around how to use your networks and your relationships. IoT [Internet of Things] in the home didn’t exist before. Voice as a category is new. So if you just look across the wide range of industries that are being innovated, the breadth is unprecedented. So you’re also seeing a lot broader set of entrepreneurs coming forward with interesting ideas.
X: One question that I know that you get asked is about diversity. There’s so much data around the business benefits of diversity of all types, not just women. Are people from more diverse backgrounds trying to become entrepreneurs? Do you see that changing?
JF: Well, I think actually when you see the breadth of innovation that we’re talking about, and new categories, you’re also seeing a lot broader set of entrepreneurs coming forward with interesting ideas. And that does touch on people with different
