Listen on YouTube // Apple // Spotify
You can also watch/listen to the entire episode on X.
Who you’ll learn from
Vanessa Larco spent nearly a decade as a Partner at NEA. Then she walked away to start a fund built on one bet: the companies OpenAI won’t kill.
OpenAI deprecated Sora and quietly killed checkout inside ChatGPT within months of launching them. Not everything the frontier labs touch wins, which leaves far more room for startups than the doom narrative suggests. Vanessa invests in the teams that live in that gap: founders who out-ship everyone chasing them long enough to build the durable moats underneath.
At NEA, she backed Robinhood through its 2021 IPO and led the firm’s investment in Greenlight, with board seats spanning Mejuri, Assembled, and Cleo. Before venture she was a product leader at Box, Microsoft, and Twilio, and a founder who raised and sold her own startup. She’s now co-founder of Premise, a new fund backing technical founding teams building the next category-defining companies.
Discussed in this episode
- The “OpenAI won’t kill it” framework for spotting durable AI companies (and why not everything OpenAI ships actually wins)
- Why the “it’s just a wrapper” dismissal cost VCs real deals, and the kayak/AWS parallels that explain why
- Why Premise only backs technical founding teams, and the shipping speed that becomes the real early moat
- How the old go-to-market playbook is breaking, especially in DevTools, and what replaces it
- Why someone on the founding team has to “nerd out” on distribution, and why no-playbook moments are where you growth hack
- How to run a conviction-based investment committee, and why big funds drift toward consensus whether they like it or not
- Why running a fund is just running a startup: fundraising, product, and customer success by another name
- The unanswered question Vanessa keeps circling: how to give experienced GTM talent space to rewrite the playbook
Episode Highlights
1:51 – Technical vs. non-technical AI founders
4:37 – The bottleneck of hiring AI talent
5:15 – Do old moats still exist?
6:36 – Cloud era lessons vs. today’s AI layer
9:18 – The shift to the distribution era
11:38 – Interview: Vanessa Larco (Premise VC)
12:40 – Companies OpenAI won’t kill
13:37 – Consumer habits vs. enterprise AI
15:05 – Moving beyond the “wrapper” stigma
17:39 – Thesis building vs. founder curiosities
20:11 – Sourcing & the “Surreal” community
22:26 – Learnings from NEA & Lightspeed
24:06 – Rethinking the investment memo
26:43 – Consensus vs. conviction investing
31:26 – Running a VC fund like a startup
35:04 – Building internal automation tools
37:35 – Distribution moats & DevTools
39:38 – Sourcing new GTM playbooks
41:12 – Parallel to the AWS boom
43:55 – Human psychology vs. AI tools
47:06 – SF’s best cookie spots
Thank you to our sponsor partner: AngelList
GTMfund’s LP base spans from individual operators to institutional allocators, and AngelList has been instrumental in supporting all of them. They handle everything from investor onboarding and accreditation to distribution and tax documentation, creating a seamless experience across geographies and fund types. Plus, all of this is available on a single, modern platform.
For an LP-base like ours, with over 350 C-suite and VP-level operators, this kind of white glove service and seamless workflows is so important. It’s also instrumental that we support our institutional LPs that we’re fortunate to work with, and AngelList is able to do so every step of the way.
If you’re looking for a platform that can support any type of LP investing in your fund, learn more at www.angellist.com/gtmfund.
Key takeaways
1. “Companies OpenAI won’t kill” is less contrarian than it sounds.
The fear that OpenAI will build and crush everything is fading. In the last few months they deprecated Sora and quietly killed checkout inside ChatGPT after the partnerships turned out harder than expected. Not everything they ship wins. That leaves a lot more room for startups than most people assume.
2. Product velocity is the only edge that matters early.
If you built it in a month, someone will copy it in a month. Vanessa isn’t betting on the feature, she’s betting the team can keep shipping better and faster than everyone chasing them. Perplexity and 11Labs won because they out-shipped the field. The old moats still apply, network effects, proprietary data, integrations, change management, they just take time to build, and your job is to stay ahead until they do.
3. Only back technical founding teams.
At least one co-founder has to be highly technical and accomplished. Those are the people staying current on the latest AI frameworks and rewiring the roadmap the moment new capabilities ship. Teams without a strong technical founder lag on exactly the thing you can’t afford to lag on.
4. Distribution is where the new playbooks get written.
The old go-to-market motion is breaking, especially in dev tools. “Launch a video on X/Twitter and go viral” is not the only way, and CMOs hired off the old playbook often don’t know the new one. Someone on the founding team has to nerd out on distribution the way the technical founder nerds out on the product. When there’s no playbook yet, you can growth hack your way to a breakout. Once there’s a playbook, you just spend your way there.
5. A two-person fund is a startup.
Vanessa and her co-founder Mercedes built Premise as a company. The product IS the fund. Fundraising is fundraising, deploying is shipping features, portfolio support is customer success. They run KPIs, treat management fees as an R&D budget, and are mapping CAC to LTV. Both are former founders, and they say they wouldn’t have partnered with anyone who wasn’t.
6. Conviction gets harder as the room gets bigger.
Every fund wants to be conviction-based, but put 20 people around a table and humans drift to consensus. When the most senior partner says “I don’t get it,” conviction is hard to hold, especially when your career sits with those same people. The fix isn’t agreeing on every deal, it’s agreeing on the process and how you grade it, then disagree and commit.
Follow Vanessa Larco
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessalarco
- X / Twitter: https://x.com/veelarco
Follow GTMnow
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
- X / Twitter: https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
- Podcast directories: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast
- Sophie’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
- Max’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/
- Paul’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsirving/
The GTMnow Podcast – subscribe to support
It would mean the world to us if you subscribe to the show on your platform of choice. This helps support our growth, which in turn helps us continuously bring on bigger guests and deliver the content that you want to hear most.
The GTMnow Podcast shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes, The GTMnow Newsletter editions, and other content.
GTMnow is run by GTMfund, an early-stage venture firm made up of 350+ go-to-market executives from the fastest-growing companies.
VC 14 Episode Transcript
00:00 – 00:15
Max Altschuler: It’s a crazy, exciting time to invest, especially for you, your bio investor and companies that OpenAI won’t kill. Vanessa Laco, founder and GPT Premise. How are you seeing distribution as a moat in this day and age?
00:15 – 00:28
Vanessa Larco: We spend a lot of time on distribution. I think there’s so much opportunity to have a new playbook. And the truth is, I’m looking at a lot of these like mid to late stage companies. The old go to market playbook is like not the thing a lot of people need.
00:28 – 00:40
Max Altschuler: You know, in 2023 when a lot of this AI stuff started really picking up speed, beauty, etc.. The expression I think people used in VC was, oh.
00:40 – 00:56
Vanessa Larco: I there still are some people that will say like, there’s no tech here. The product is amazing, but what I’m betting on is that you can keep shipping at a very rapid clip. Amazing features to blow your customers away better than anyone else. So it comes down to team.
00:56 – 01:05
Max Altschuler: Have the playbooks changed so much?
01:12 – 01:25
Max Altschuler: Welcome back to another exciting episode of the GTM now podcast with our special edition VC bonus episode. I’m joined by by General Partner of GTM fund, Paul Irving. Paul, how are you doing today?
01:25 – 01:50
Paul Irving: Doing well. Max doing well. Yeah, I’m excited for this episode. Vanessa. It was really interesting conversation. Another, set of compelling partners sort of spinning out from great firms and building an interesting thesis in the venture ecosystem. I it is cool in the sense that founders feel like they have more options than ever for high quality partners, which is which is a good place to be.
01:50 – 02:18
Max Altschuler: Yeah. Vanessa Laco, previously at NEA, spun out with Mercedes band from Lightspeed, started premise VC New Fund. It was a great conversation. I mean, it was it was interesting to hear how anchored they are on technical founders. I think, you know, one of their, I guess, the premise of premise, you know, or the big kind of thesis is that they are anchoring on these technical founders that they met over their, you know, many years doing venture capital.
02:18 – 02:45
Max Altschuler: And, you know, that that that network, especially now in AI more than ever before, is kind of necessary to build behind where you need to have a super technical founder. I think there’s definitely room for the other side of that argument, which is like, well, in the age of AI, do you even need to be that technical?
02:45 – 03:02
Max Altschuler: You know, AI is building more than ever before. Can you hire the right technical people around you? Can you just be a really good recruiter and builder of teams and, like, you’ll get the right people and, they’ll drive the right product. And I think the answer’s kind of TBD. I’m not I’m not necessarily sure that there’s either, like one silver bullet.
03:02 – 03:15
Max Altschuler: One side is completely right. One side is completely wrong. But I did think it was kind of certainly an easy, interesting thesis to, to hold and, narrative to drive and kind of way to invest. Right.
03:15 – 03:43
Paul Irving: Yeah. And I do believe to what to your point, in a few years time, I think both sides of that debate not that you have to pick a side of the debate, but both sides of the debate are going to have plenty of examples of successful companies that have either sort of visionary, non-technical founders that are great at painting the future, great at getting in front of customers, great at recruiting talent, and are able to bring the right technical people in the door as they go.
03:44 – 04:06
Paul Irving: And then to your point and to Vanessa’s. And we hear this quite often, who are the best AI researchers of today who are the youngest, smartest, technical potential founders of tomorrow? What are they thinking about? What are the problems that they’re trying to solve? How can I get to meet them as early as possible? And hopefully, if we get aligned, invest in their company as they grow.
04:06 – 04:34
Paul Irving: You know the to the inc anchoring towards technical founders side of the argument. I think the one part that we are seeing at least today in the market is one of the biggest bottlenecks in building a company is hiring great AI talent because the frontier model companies have incredible comp packages. There is young spinouts from, you know, every great university and research lab at universities across the globe that are getting offered, you know, multimillion dollar packages of fairly liquid equity as well.
04:34 – 05:00
Paul Irving: Just given how, liquid, the private and soon to be public markets are for some of these companies. And if you’re a startup which is raising seed capital, you know, you almost have to have some connectivity to be able to hire your early talent team. Now, you know, we’ve seen this multi-time founders who aren’t necessarily technical. They’ve got a roster of great talent and, cachet that they can lean on to hire that technical team.
05:00 – 05:14
Paul Irving: But, if you look at it through the window of how do you solve for one of the bottlenecks of company building right now, which is great AI, technical talent? There is there is an advantage to having some technical chops, or at least a network to lean on. In the early days.
05:14 – 05:45
Max Altschuler: Yeah. I mean, I think staying on the topic of OpenAI and anthropic and those folks in there and their massive comp packages and, you know, making it really hard to compete with, you know, she did talk a lot about, well, OpenAI won’t kill this. And old moats still existing. You know, I think there are a lot of things that she was pretty accurate on, where, you know, if you still have a data moat, you still have a network moat, you still have a large user base.
05:45 – 06:11
Max Altschuler: Like those things are certainly differentiators. And fortify your company in a kind of a unique way. But, you know, we’re starting to see, what was it? The, CEO of ironclad just took a job at OpenAI, you know, to to start their legal product, like, should Harvey and Laura be worried about that? Like, is there are these model companies going to go after some of this, some of these last mile use cases?
06:11 – 06:36
Max Altschuler: And if so, like, what are the areas in which there are true defense ability for the the folks that are that are already there? I think it’s an interesting conversation. And she she makes some good points. But you know, what are your thoughts on kind of this old moats and, and how these kind of last mile of vertical companies are going to exist in the, you know, open AI anthropic and do that world.
06:36 – 06:55
Paul Irving: Yeah. I thought Vanessa made some really interesting points on that front in the idea of, you know, if you’ve been investing long enough, you remember the early cloud era and the cloud era. There was a lot of questions about, you know, why doesn’t AWS just build it? Why doesn’t Google just build this? And you could make that with, you know, the data products Snowflake and Databricks.
06:55 – 07:30
Paul Irving: You could have made that argument about AWS redshift. Why wouldn’t this just roll up to them. And the answer is this is a big enough market. And if you build a great enough product and are addressing an important enough pain point, like there’s room for you to be able to build a huge business. Now, what’s interesting about the anthropic and OpenAI and the, you know, Gemini, parts of this conversation and the difference made between AI and the cloud era and previous areas before that is they are distinctly investing go to market resources and product resources in attacking some of these early application layers.
07:30 – 07:49
Paul Irving: I mean, you’ve seen anthropic release direct plug ins for legal, for cybersecurity. To your point, you have, you know, people hiring talent to run specific verticals within, you know, what’s an important app layer vertical, which we can tackle right now and do a great job of. And they’re going pretty pointedly at it with talent and resources.
07:49 – 08:09
Paul Irving: I think the historical comparison is instructive in the sense that this would be the first time in history, in technology where there’s this true monolith that covers every single. They cover the infrastructure and the commodity side, which if you go back to cloud, would be the compute. And they also do the application layer, the idea that there’s not going to be some separation there.
08:09 – 08:35
Paul Irving: It’s just from an execution standpoint, an incredibly difficult thing to do. And, you know, we’ve invested in some great vertical AI companies over the years. One of the things that I love to highlight when we talk to investors or operators about them, is the difference between what the venture ecosystem is talking about. And, foundation model companies are talking about today and what the customers of our vertically AI companies are talking about those customers.
08:35 – 08:59
Paul Irving: If you’re running an insurance business or a customs broker or a manufacturer, they’re not waiting on the edge of their seat for what the next anthropic plug in might be in the next model release. They know they need to adopt AI. They want it to work for their business. And if you’re building something that takes that last mile, brings AI, you know, to their business in a really compelling and meaningful way.
08:59 – 09:18
Paul Irving: They’re willing to buy and adopt. And so there’s going to be some verticals like legal, maybe cybersecurity and others, which, you know, the frontier model companies are going to venture deeply into the app layer. There’s just too much surface area, I think for any single company to be able to cover, to the extent that, you know, there’s going to be no value left for the startup ecosystem.
09:18 – 09:25
Max Altschuler: Totally agree. So how does that transition into the article that we just wrote on the distribution error?
09:25 – 09:49
Paul Irving: Yeah. We had a lot of fun putting that together. Simple premise being as it becomes easier and easier and easier to build product to write code as you know, nearly 100% of the code written today is machine written, AI written generated code. The technical moats product, most of yesterday in generations before start to erode to zero.
09:49 – 10:09
Paul Irving: And, you know, distribution becomes the advantage for the iconic companies of tomorrow. And we talk about a bunch of vectors of why that’s the case and how that, you know, we expect that to play out. Vanessa touched on one part of it that I think is worth highlighting, which is the differential alpha, of early adoption of technology.
10:09 – 10:30
Paul Irving: And we mentioned it in the article. But, you know, if you were and you saw this firsthand at outreach, but if you were an early adopter of outreach or sales off, you know, your outbound sales motion was far more efficient than your competitors. If you, adopted that technology earlier than everyone else in your category, you were building a more efficient outbound playbook.
10:30 – 10:57
Paul Irving: You were able to get more customers, do more with less, and grow faster. If you were, you know, bringing on Clay in, you know, maybe the last couple of years ahead of, you know, their more market wide adoption, you were building, again, like data driven outbound playbooks, agent workflows within those. And as a technology becomes wider and wider, in its adoption, the alpha that you are capturing versus the rest of the market starts to lessen.
10:57 – 11:21
Paul Irving: And so we’re seeing the gap between AI native go to market teams and non AI native Google market teams be a huge gap. And if you are you know building point solution specific to your go to market motion scraping data taking, you know customer data and feedback and filtering it into a generic workflows. And on the cutting edge of what’s possible, you know, you are growing faster than your competitors.
11:21 – 11:38
Paul Irving: And if you’re growing faster than your competitors, you’re getting data from those customers. And you just we’re starting to see in the AI era, this momentum and inertia of a snowball rolling down the hill. And if you can get in front of it, the value you’re compounding and the speed in which you can do it is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
11:38 – 11:59
Max Altschuler: Yeah, I agree, and, the response to the article was was it was pretty amazing from the, the VC industry and founders, you know, in our GTM leaders. So, if you want to check that out, it’s pinned to my X account, under Hackett Max, and, yeah, without further delay, let’s get into the episode with Vanessa Lasko from premise VC.
12:00 – 12:21
Max Altschuler: All right. Welcome to another episode of the GTM now podcast. The bonus series where we host VCs and get into the nitty gritty on what’s going on into the VC ecosystem. Today, I’m joined by Vanessa Lasko, founder and GG at premise A fund. She’ll tell you a little bit more about when she’s ready. But exciting stuff happening on your side.
12:21 – 12:22
Max Altschuler: Vanessa.
12:22 – 12:27
Vanessa Larco: Yeah, thanks for having me. There’s been so much going on.
12:27 – 12:39
Max Altschuler: I know it’s, it’s a crazy, exciting time to invest, especially for you. So, your bio investor in companies that OpenAI won’t kill. Tell us more about that.
12:40 – 12:59
Vanessa Larco: Yeah. It’s funny, most questions we get are like, well, isn’t OpenAI going to build? It isn’t on. I don’t get the anthropic, but mostly it’s an opening. I going to build it and kill it. And I think for some things, yes, but for a lot of things, no. And that’s becoming more obvious, I think in the last like two, three months.
12:59 – 13:22
Vanessa Larco: Right. Them deprecating, and yielding that space to others, is now like not everything OpenAI launches hits. I think they also in the last couple of weeks deprecated their check out within ChatGPT when you go to buy something. So they’re all the partnerships that they announced. They’re they’re kind of like, okay, we tried it and check out turns out is really hard and we’re not good at it.
13:22 – 13:36
Vanessa Larco: So we’re going to yield that to others again. So not everything they’ve tackled, they’ve been able to succeed at. So I think that that is less controversial. Take them before. But but I still get that question quite a bit.
13:36 – 14:04
Max Altschuler: And, any previous firm where you at for? You know, quite a while you were involved in Robinhood from C did you know, and quite a few other kind of consumer, companies. So you know, now you’re there in this new fund. What are you focused on then from an investment standpoint? Are you looking for more Robinhood’s then or is it types of companies like the Soros of the world, which are maybe a consumer product but can also be sold to enterprises?
14:04 – 14:25
Vanessa Larco: Honestly. I mean, I would love to find another Robinhood. I don’t think there they will be another Robinhood, at least not in the next decade or two. But I still hunt around in fintech. I think there’s some really cool stuff happening with stablecoin. Would love to find something there. I think consumer is going to do some amazing things this year.
14:25 – 14:47
Vanessa Larco: We keep seeing consumers behaviors changing and that gets pulled into the enterprise. And so we’re seeing amazing companies like Lovable and Gamma where people try it out first for personal use or for like single use cases, and then they bring it into work and share it with their team. So honestly, I’m looking across the board. I would consider myself a generalist.
14:47 – 15:04
Vanessa Larco: I was a generalist at any. I will be a generalist moving forward. There’s too many exciting opportunities to just stay in one very focus vector for me at least. But I think this AI, this world of AI is it feels overly hyped, but I think it’s appropriately hyped.
15:04 – 15:30
Max Altschuler: How are you sizing up these companies? So I’d like to bring you bring up a gamma. You have a lovable. Yeah. You know, in 2023 when a lot of this AI stuff started really picking up speed, ChatGPT etc. the expression I think people used in VC was, oh, it’s just another rapper. And that got, I think a lot of VC is in trouble because of they miss out on things that.
15:30 – 15:34
Max Altschuler: Yeah, okay. So what it’s a rapper. You know kayak was a rapper on a boat.
15:34 – 15:34
Vanessa Larco: Know that was my.
15:34 – 15:47
Max Altschuler: Argument as a company, right. Like so how are you sizing up these companies as you see them now. Yeah. And is there still a stigma around, you know, what you’re seeing as like the rapper?
15:47 – 16:06
Vanessa Larco: There still are some people that will say, like there’s no tech here. And even to me I’m like, well, if you built this in a month, there’s gonna be one that copies you and we’ll build it in a month. So the product is amazing. But what I’m betting on is that you can keep shipping at a very rapid clip.
16:06 – 16:28
Vanessa Larco: Amazing features to blow your customers away better than anyone else. So it comes down to team. The most overused thing in venture capital. Team. Team. Team founder found a founder. It’s true though, I need to believe that you can build and ship better and faster than everyone else who’s going to copy you, because they will copy you. And then I believe that at some point you will be able to build some moats in.
16:28 – 16:48
Vanessa Larco: The moats are kind of the same old, same old, right. Do you have a network effect? Do you have writer your data? Is it integrations mode? Is it a change management like at some point those old modes that are so circa whatever, like they still apply here and they still take a while to build. You just have to stay ahead of the curve until they get built out.
16:48 – 17:17
Vanessa Larco: And that is harder than it’s ever been. But that’s that’s where I spend a lot of time in figuring out, like, do you have the right view edge, perspective capability, which is why we only back technical founding teams. There has to be at least one of the co-founders needs to be highly technical and accomplished, because what we found is those are the people that are staying up to date with the latest AI frameworks, adopting the latest technology as it comes out, and rejiggering their roadmap based on like new things that they can deliver off the technology.
17:18 – 17:38
Vanessa Larco: And we found that teams that don’t have a strong technical co-founder lag on that front. Right. And you can’t afford to lag. You have to ship quickly and better than everyone else. I think that’s the edge that perplexity had on others that 11 labs had, and others. You look at these great companies that are just shipping faster and better than anyone else.
17:38 – 18:02
Max Altschuler: As a generalist, then are you approaching because you’re so founder centric? Are you approaching investing with a prepared mind in certain areas and you’ve underwritten or are you, I guess going into conversations with amazing founders, hoping that they will enlighten you on a space and then you will then go find and diligence that they are either right about that or wrong about that.
18:02 – 18:21
Vanessa Larco: It’s both. Which is why I’m so tired. It’s the there are some areas where I’ll read about something like, oh, I wonder what’s going on here, and then I’ll just burn my evenings and weekends just digging in and trying to understand the what are all the intricacies of that space, and who are the incumbents and how does it work.
18:21 – 18:44
Vanessa Larco: And then, like, man, if someone comes up with this will be great. And then I start hunting around to see like what startups are in and around the space and try to reach out to those founders. I still do quite a bit of that. I love these is building. I think it’s because I’m a nerd. On the flip side, we get to meet incredible people through our networks and some of the event series that we run in zoom, these impressive folks, and they’re like, I think there is an opportunity in this space.
18:44 – 19:01
Vanessa Larco: I’m like, I have no idea how that works, but give me a week and so the nice thing is that when I do diligence, I try to make it collaborative with the founders. And it sounds like these are my questions, or this is like I have very stupid un unprepared mind questions like, teach me, help me figure out.
19:01 – 19:19
Vanessa Larco: And then when I find things, I’m like, look, I read this. How do you think about this? How should I think about these papers that I’ve been reading and so it’s, it’s collaborative. They understand, like, as I build a memo, what I’m working on, why I’m working on it, it’s no surprise to anyone. And then when we get through it, and I’m like, I believe in the space.
19:19 – 19:40
Vanessa Larco: I believe in you. Because I’ve done references and backchannel references. And this is like the 360 view I have on you and on the market. And I think your roadmap is very compelling, whether you change it or keep it or whatever. Like you have one of those interesting takes on what next needs to get built. And I believe that you will continue to have that and make the right decisions for your product.
19:40 – 19:56
Vanessa Larco: And then we invest or like, I don’t know, the references aren’t particularly strong as, as we would need or this roadmap like the trade offs you made. I don’t really understand why you chose this and not that. And so like we don’t get there, but I’m still excited about the space and then I just stay open minded.
19:56 – 20:10
Vanessa Larco: If I meet other great people working on it, then maybe we’ll eventually do an investment in the space. Or maybe it’s just not ready yet. And in a couple of years, it’ll be a much better time to make an investment. So it’s both. It’s both like top down thesis driven and bottoms up founder driven.
20:10 – 20:15
Max Altschuler: How do you meet then? Most of the founders that you start a process on?
20:15 – 20:32
Vanessa Larco: It’s a great question. I’ve been trying to tag this so that I can actually have hard metrics on it. I would say about a third come from other founders that I’ve worked with or that I’m on the board of who are like, this is a founder, I know, or this is someone I’ve an angel invested in that I think is amazing.
20:32 – 21:02
Vanessa Larco: And you should meet them. Those are great because I already have a trusted source, who knows me and knows them, who thinks would be a great match. They’re typically right. And, they help me win the deal, too, so inevitably becomes competitive. That founder can vouch for me and put me over the line. So it’s it’s likely a good match on entry and it’s likely one that we can win because of all the validation that we have around us with the founder.
21:02 – 21:24
Vanessa Larco: Another source is like I mentioned, our event series. So, we run several different communities, one of which is called surreal. It’s application invite only. We get hundreds to thousands of applications every month to attend an event, and we only allow about 60 people in. And these are like round table tech talks. We have like a very short panel.
21:24 – 21:47
Vanessa Larco: And then after that we break out into reassigned seating tables and we continue the debates at those tables. And then afterwards you get invited to our WhatsApp community, where people will share and exchange technical ideas and help each other out, through surreal. We’ve met a lot of amazing people that are like, hey, I’m working at this great AI lab, but I have this idea and I’ve been building this on the weekends, and I would love for you to take a look and let me know what you think.
21:47 – 22:12
Vanessa Larco: We’ve got a lot. I would say it’s not quite a quarter yet, but it’s getting there. And so those are. And then people from that community will also be like, hey, I have a buddy who’s building this. You should meet them. So that comes from there. And then a lot comes from us, like sourcing, reaching out to our friends that are angel investors asking what cool things they’ve seen us putting a lot of content out there.
22:12 – 22:25
Vanessa Larco: People we’ve worked with in the past will then be like, oh, I read what you wrote about the space, and I have a friend who’s building in that space, so it’s always warm intros, or people that we’ve met through our outreach.
22:25 – 22:42
Max Altschuler: Is this, so, you know, you had, extensive career at NEA previously. Mercedes with Lightspeed. So, you know, are what are the I guess what are the key learnings that you brought with you to a new firm between the two of you? Like, I’d love to know, like sit down in your head together at some point to.
22:42 – 22:50
Max Altschuler: Yeah, here’s what we both loved from our previous firms. Here’s some of the things we hated. We’ll never do. Are there things I mean, what are in those do’s and don’ts?
22:51 – 22:51
Vanessa Larco: Yeah.
22:51 – 22:54
Max Altschuler: Even saying I didn’t know or some of the do’s. Yeah.
22:54 – 23:19
Vanessa Larco: Yeah. Well, Mercedes and I met through this, VC program called speakeasy, which is Stanford’s touchy feely class, but for VCs and is really small cohort and groups. So we’re in a cohort of about 12 people who are in venture. And we started that five years ago, and we’re still in it today. And we meet frequently. And Mercedes and I over the years were like, here’s what we love about our firms, but here’s what we’re struggling with.
23:19 – 23:42
Vanessa Larco: And then her and I were like, we’re we like the same things and we’re struggling with the same things. Let’s, let’s, let’s chat about this. So over the years we started just like this is what we’d want to do differently if we had our own fund. And it started as a joke through text message. And then over the years, we had more new ideas of like, this is what we would do, just like White space and Mercedes one day.
23:42 – 24:03
Vanessa Larco: And it was a while ago was like, hey, why don’t we just sit down and actually hash this out like blank canvas? If we could build anything we wanted to build, if we wanted to build the VC firm of the future, what would we want to build and why? And then we did. We sat down multiple weekends and like, puzzle piece things together and you whiteboard and sticky notes, all the things we wanted to do.
24:03 – 24:27
Vanessa Larco: So absolutely, that was it. A huge part of us coming together. What we realized is the advantages from the big funds we got to see so many amazing founders like, I got it, I’d say work closely with the Robin Hood founders, but I got to see plan come in for every single one of their follow on investments. I got to see Mercedes, got to see a firm and snap right.
24:27 – 24:43
Vanessa Larco: All these and I got to see Databricks. So you get to see like all of these companies, not just the ones that you work on, but the ones that come in for follow and investments of the entire portfolio. And then you get to see, like, what does top 1% actually look like? And you hear a lot of ex talk about like the founder traits they look for and they’re like pretty broad.
24:43 – 25:03
Vanessa Larco: And everyone has some flavor of the same. But I think it’s very different if you’ve actually worked with founders like that and you can like it’s much more nuanced in those big like titles. And so what we said is we want to keep the bar really high. We’ve gotten to see what greatness looks like. We want to continue to be back greatness, and we want to keep our bar super high for founders.
25:04 – 25:24
Vanessa Larco: So for that, like, I don’t think there’s a better place than to see the volume and the I would say like the exceptionalism of of the type of founders you get to work with at the late speeds in the any days of the world. I would say the diligence process at late senior is top notch and very similar.
25:24 – 25:30
Vanessa Larco: I thought I’m like, well, I’m going to show you my memo is and she’s like, mine look exactly the same, just a different like font and format.
25:30 – 25:33
Max Altschuler: For us to, to have left, you know, big for.
25:33 – 25:36
Vanessa Larco: Now, it turns out. Yeah.
25:36 – 25:59
Vanessa Larco: The memos are almost identical. Like same content, just different fonts and, like, colors. But very, very, very, very similar. So the way we diligence a deal was the same. We just made sometimes use different words. So we wanted to keep all of that, but we wanted to speed it up. We wanted to condense it where we actually initially were like, do what?
25:59 – 26:25
Vanessa Larco: We both hated writing memos. Like, do we still need a memo? Could we do something different? And we came back to, no, we do need the memo, but it’s going to be for a different purpose. And we’re we’re going to write down, like, the things we need to believe to make the investment. And this is going to be something that like we use for ourselves, it’s not meant to be like for show or to convince 20 other people if this is a good investment, this is us documenting everything we’ve learned throughout the process and how we’ve reached conviction.
26:25 – 26:41
Vanessa Larco: And when you frame it that way and use it as a tool to organize your thoughts, it’s way more fun to build a memo. It looks very similar to the memos we had in our last firms, but we got to the intent in a different way. So there’s quite a lot there.
26:42 – 26:45
Max Altschuler: How do you know for sure your I see in a.
26:45 – 26:47
Vanessa Larco: Can a two person eyes.
26:47 – 26:56
Max Altschuler: You know, versus an NDA or a lightspeed where there’s a lot more folks around the table. You know, where those funds consensus or conviction.
26:57 – 27:27
Vanessa Larco: Yeah, I think both both funds want to be conviction. And they encourage it to be conviction. The problem is when there’s 20 people in the room, as a human, you you seek consensus and venture. You were working with so much imperfect data, and it’s all truly qualitative. Even the quantitative stuff is qualitative. How you interpret it is qualitative that it’s you test your conviction rate and it’s if everyone in the room is like, I don’t know, I want to do it.
27:27 – 27:53
Vanessa Larco: If I were you, it’s very hard to maintain conviction. And if the most senior person in the room who’s been on my list 100 times over again is like, I don’t get it, I wouldn’t do it, you know? So there’s the like that is hard to maintain your conviction through 20 people’s different opinions. And it’s also hard to maintain conviction when you’re like, I may want to make a career out of this, and I may want to stay here for my career.
27:53 – 28:10
Vanessa Larco: And if everyone who’s responsible for my career here is telling me, don’t do it, and I’m going to do it anyway, my career may be very short lived if I do it anyway. You know? And so while every fund I think is consciously trying to figure out how do we stay conviction based, it’s just gets harder the bigger they get.
28:11 – 28:15
Vanessa Larco: And it just eventually becomes, whether they like it or not. Consensus.
28:15 – 28:23
Max Altschuler: You kind of like don’t grow out of that when you spin out to because you have LPs that have mandates that take a look, you know, like if you don’t pick the.
28:23 – 28:26
Vanessa Larco: Are all these aren’t in your but the LPs aren’t in your I see no.
28:26 – 28:29
Max Altschuler: But you also if you picked the wrong companies you know true.
28:30 – 28:31
Vanessa Larco: But that’s post investment.
28:31 – 28:35
Vanessa Larco: So the most of thing is you have conviction. You do the term sheet, you find.
28:35 – 28:38
Vanessa Larco: It, and then a year later they’re like, you should know the deal.
28:38 – 28:41
Vanessa Larco: And you’re like, okay.
28:41 – 29:02
Vanessa Larco: But unfortunately you get to maintain conviction for a very long time before that comes to fruition. But we’re we’re conviction based. We help each other think through the deals, and so we’ll ask each other questions about it. And we’ll ask, how did you get to conviction? And we’ll say, like, I’m worried about XYZ, but you seem to have this, so go for it.
29:02 – 29:40
Vanessa Larco: The way we, ended up here was let’s debate the diligence process at nauseum. Let’s really go through how do we score these sections and how we get to conviction. Let’s like really debate it. And then once we reach consensus on that, on the process, on how we gauge how we rank from like top 1% to meet expectations, to like big questions, then I may not agree with the output, but if I agree with the process you followed in how you graded these things, then like disagreement, right?
29:40 – 29:54
Vanessa Larco: So that’s that’s how we landed on like getting to conviction and being conviction based and not consensus. And I think the biggest question is going to be as we eventually bring on other team members, how do we maintain that? It’s really easy with two people to be conviction based.
29:54 – 30:22
Max Altschuler: How do you maintain that? Also? You know, I think when you hire someone, you you give them the trust, like the hiring process at the time where you build the trust and when you make the hire, they come in with trust. And that trust is theirs to obviously fortify or lose, but they already have that trust. So if you do the hiring process right, and it’s somebody of you, you know, or built the relationship over the appropriate amount of time, once they move into that, I see they shouldn’t feel like, oh, oh.
30:22 – 30:29
Max Altschuler: Like I’m afraid to make a decision here otherwise. Like, what if I’m wrong and then I’m going to get ostracized, right? Like they should come in. Yeah.
30:29 – 30:42
Vanessa Larco: I mean, but my fear is that they’ll come in and be like, well, Vanessa and Mercedes are, like, super tight, and I want to, like, get in and be like in, in the, in group. Right. And so I’m just going to do things that I think they like. And we don’t want her.
30:42 – 30:42
Max Altschuler: Those people don’t.
30:43 – 30:49
Vanessa Larco: You know there’s so hard because if they optimize for being likable then I’m going to like them. Right.
30:49 – 30:53
Max Altschuler: They’re so they’re down there. Yeah yeah yeah.
30:53 – 30:55
Vanessa Larco: Yeah. No no for sure.
30:55 – 31:24
Max Altschuler: So and so you know new fund. Yeah. Means you have to focus on a lot more than what you did at any. Yeah. I guess you kind of get to share the responsibilities across a much bigger group, but. Right. There’s firm building, there’s fundraising, there’s deploying, and then there’s portfolio company support. So how are you thinking about that from going from an NEA to a two person team?
31:24 – 31:44
Vanessa Larco: Yeah. So I was a founder before my background’s in software and I was a computer science undergrad. I was in product engineering my whole career. I, worked at startups. I had my own startup. We raised a little money and sold it. Mercedes also had a founder journey herself. She worked at a lot of startups as a very, very early employee.
31:44 – 32:10
Vanessa Larco: And then, started her own startup. Also, and I think I could never have partnered with someone who didn’t have founder experience because the way we see it is, this is a startup, it’s a startup, the product is a fund. And when you think about it that way, none of this is shocking, right? Like startups have to fundraise, funds have to fundraise.
32:10 – 32:30
Vanessa Larco: There’s different timeline and different like dynamics at the fundraise, but fundraise to fundraise. You start a company and you’re going to have to fundraise. And then whether that’s take a loan from the bank, whether it’s pitch VCs, whether it’s pitch LPs, you have to fundraise most of the time, unless you’re independently wealthy, you can bankroll it yourself. So fundraising is part of starting a company.
32:30 – 32:49
Vanessa Larco: And then investing in deploying. Well, that’s that’s our that’s our product. Right. So it’s no different than building features and shipping features kind of the same thing. And then portfolio support will you once you build and ship and you have customers, you have customer support and customer success. And so like portfolio support is no different than customer success.
32:49 – 32:59
Vanessa Larco: So these things are like very known things that you do as a founder. I always find it funny when VCs are like, oh my God, I’m like, you start a company, what do you say?
32:59 – 33:02
Vanessa Larco: This is like part course, like, this is how it works.
33:02 – 33:20
Vanessa Larco: And so Mercedes and I think about it very much as a startup and we have KPIs and we have R&D. And so like we think of our management pieces, R&D as R&D budget. And so when you structured all like a startup, like a company, then it’s actually really fun. We’ve been trying to like map to LTV very founders.
33:20 – 33:40
Vanessa Larco: It’s been really fun exercise. But some things apply really well. Some other things are take some creativity, but then you start thinking about like, where do we innovate and how do we do things differently, and where do we just follow a best practices playbook, and how do we measure things and know you’re on the right track, and how do we kill things or pivot when they’re not working?
33:40 – 33:46
Vanessa Larco: And it’s been really fun, Max, to be a founder again, like so much fun.
33:46 – 34:03
Max Altschuler: I love when people ask me, like, where do I spend my time? It’s usually helps in the process, you know, how do you spend your time? And I’m like, oh, today will be different than tomorrow. And then the next day and the next day and it comes in seasons and it’s like you’ve got, a great portfolio company that’s like one of your escape velocity companies, and they’re doing a fundraise.
34:03 – 34:20
Max Altschuler: Like sometimes it’s all right this week, all hands on deck with that company. Like, there’s really not a lot else going on. You’ve got another company, you got another week where you have to win this deal. You love this company. It’s competitive like you’re kind of all hands on deck with that. Another week there’s there could be another week where you’re doing audits and whatever else.
34:20 – 34:38
Max Altschuler: Like it’s just so many different things. And I love it too, because, you know, founders through and through entrepreneur mentality. And I’m more of a jack of all trades than anything else. So yeah, it’s a it’s a blast. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But it is it is so much. And then on the product side, you’re right.
34:38 – 35:02
Max Altschuler: Like we we built our own internal GPT called x val. And we’ve looked at every part of our, our funding to like, where can we build technology to build some sort of infrastructure scaffolding that automates most of this away. And, especially with AI now, we’ve been able to to do so much and get so far. So I’d imagine with your product background that’s coming in handy big time, right?
35:02 – 35:23
Vanessa Larco: Yeah. Yeah. We really lucky we welcome to year a couple weeks ago to build software with us. And they are very senior technical talent and they’re taking a bit of a career break and it’s not on their LinkedIn, so nobody would ever know. And we’re just having a lot of fun. Like ideating and shipping and like the best thing is we’re brand new.
35:23 – 35:42
Vanessa Larco: So there’s no like legacy code, there’s no tech, there’s no people, there’s no process debt. It is just blank canvas. We have like a problem statement and success KPIs. And these are like rad. I can work with that. Like I want to pitch you which idea is I want to just work on my own. I don’t want to have a PM.
35:42 – 35:56
Vanessa Larco: I don’t want to have specs like tell me what you’re trying to accomplish. And I’m going to like tell you some of the things we could build. We have a roadmap. We’re like, this is just this is guidance of like what we’d love to have as a toolset. And that’s been really fun. I miss building software so much.
35:56 – 36:05
Vanessa Larco: So I’m finally getting to scratch that itch, which you can’t do it a big platform. You can’t just like whip up a server, then just start stripping, go like that.
36:05 – 36:06
Vanessa Larco: Yeah, that’s like an arc.
36:06 – 36:28
Max Altschuler: We got had the same damn laughing as we had had the same thing happen. We had somebody who just, we met through our networks. Yeah. You know, senior technical talent and said to us like, hey, I’ll build everything that you want me to build internally for you guys at, like, this crazy low flat rate. And the only stipulation is like, I can productize it.
36:28 – 36:29
Vanessa Larco: Yeah, exactly.
36:29 – 36:34
Max Altschuler: And I was like, okay, cool. Yeah. Wants to build something in that space.
36:34 – 36:36
Vanessa Larco: Once you’re in a math, let’s. Yeah.
36:36 – 36:50
Max Altschuler: Don’t use that. You know, as long as our data is our own, like you can use the rest of it. So, it’s been working really well for us. You know, the the fun thing about AI is, like, it used to be a year ago when we built XL was like, the GPT was like the interface, it was the text box.
36:50 – 37:15
Max Altschuler: And now you can do bots in slack and things like that. But then it’s like, okay, we need to run separate servers because you don’t want all of your slack to be ingested. And then this thing is going broke. Anyway, we’re learning a ton. And then it also helps us, obviously. Yes. Companies too. So yes. Interesting on that front, what are so, you know, background in product, we talk about moats.
37:15 – 37:33
Max Altschuler: How are you seeing distribution as a moat in this day and age? We talked about network effects data, etc. but, is that something you’re looking at? You know, in the early stages, when you invest or you’re kind of hoping the founder will kind of figure that out over time? How are you letting them know?
37:33 – 38:00
Vanessa Larco: No, we spend a lot of time on distribution. I think, there’s so much opportunity to have new playbooks. And the truth is, I’m looking at a lot of these, like mid to late stage companies. The old go to market playbook is like, not the thing a lot of people need, especially in dev tools. I would say like the most disruptive go to market is being like the it’s being felt on dev tools.
38:00 – 38:27
Vanessa Larco: And everyone’s like, I have to have a launch video on Twitter and go viral. And like, that’s not the only way, but it is like we’re getting really, competitive. And the previous playbook isn’t working, and it’s reflected in a lot of these companies. When they go to hire, they’re like, I don’t know who to hire because I historically I would just go for a CMO or a VP of marketing at a company that has similar product or similar, ICP as us, and they know what to do.
38:27 – 38:42
Vanessa Larco: But now they don’t know what to do. Most of them like, haven’t adapted and they’re still working out the old playbook, saying someone who knows a new playbook, but who is that person? How do I find them? What is their title? Where do they work? And so a lot of them, like I want it to come from the founder.
38:42 – 39:08
Vanessa Larco: I want the founder to have the curiosity, to be spending the time to figure out by reading stuff on Reddit, by following growth hackers on Twitter, or by like, whatever it is. But as interested as you are in building the technology for your product, someone on the founding team doesn’t have to be the CEO, doesn’t have to be CTO because someone on the founding team needs to be nerding out on like, what it takes to win distribution.
39:08 – 39:31
Vanessa Larco: Because when there’s no playbook is when there’s the opportunity to growth hack and be most impactful. Once there’s a playbook, it means everyone has figured it out and it is harder to growth hack your way there. You’re just going to spend your way there. So you think, now is this exciting moment in time where there’s not a lot of playbooks which means you don’t need a lot of money to be able to break out.
39:31 – 39:35
Vanessa Larco: And the only way that happens is when the founders have an eye for that.
39:35 – 39:58
Max Altschuler: Yeah. The, the thing we’re seeing is a lot of founders hiring failed founders. Yeah. I was like the first GTM hire and saying, I go, you’re the CEO of GTM, basically, like, go, tinker, go figure this out right now. You’ve got cloud code and you’ve got all these other apps at your disposal. You can get, way more done further and faster than ever before.
39:58 – 40:32
Max Altschuler: And there are there are folks to follow in those areas. Obviously, there are certain GTM platforms that are accelerating right now and things that are kind of phasing out, certainly. But, you can get really far with cloud code license and somebody who just has grit, tenacity and yeah, you know, the thinking hat on. So, we’ve been seeing it’s kind of one of the most fun things I think about being in our shoes is, you know, we’ll we’ll bring in somebody, like a Jordan Crawford who’s probably one of the more, I don’t know if he’s Twitter popular.
40:32 – 40:50
Max Altschuler: He’s definitely LinkedIn popular, but he’s the cloud code clay guy, the go to person for us, and we’ll bring him into a portfolio company. He’ll shine a light on some stuff to do, and then that portfolio company will take it to a whole nother level and like, bring it back to us, bring it back to him. And all of a sudden they’ve they’ve taken it and brought it up a level and it’s like, oh wow, I didn’t know you could do that.
40:50 – 41:09
Max Altschuler: And then they were able to take that back to other portfolio companies. So yeah, there’s there’s a lot, a lot of interesting stuff going on distribution. Right now especially like having distribution as a moat in a world where, you know, AI is allowing pretty much everybody to build with similar capabilities at this point. Right?
41:10 – 41:30
Vanessa Larco: Yeah. But I mean, like, honestly, that was said with I’ll never forget, you mentioned this like code wrapper stuff when AWS came out. Everyone’s like, well know anybody can start a company because you just like got an AWS account and your whole infrastructure. So you don’t need to set up a data like center anymore. You don’t have to like buy servers and put them in a closet and set up your own infrastructure.
41:30 – 41:48
Vanessa Larco: Now anyone can just whip up anything in the cloud. These aren’t real companies. These are. And they didn’t call it cloud wrappers at the time, but it was like in essence, the same thing. And, you know, anyone could like, hack their way like the CEO was the thing and nobody really understood it. And how do you indexes stuff and how do you do it.
41:48 – 42:30
Vanessa Larco: And so it there’s so many parallels to historicals here. I think it’s like no different when they, when AWS became popular and anyone can build a cloud based application overnight. Overnight probably like a year. And nobody understood like the playbooks of just, you know, pure outbound was like blown up. Now, you could do Instagram ads and you could do account based marketing and you could do SEO, like there’s all these things, we’re kind of in that era again, it’s like the wild all last one go to market and anyone can spin up anything overnight, just like we were bitching about with AWS.
42:30 – 43:04
Vanessa Larco: And so it’s, I think this is like where great founders will really shine. And then, you know, the thing I think about the most, though, is like, what about all this talent that is excellent talent. And they are experts at the old way of doing things, and we can’t just discard that. So how do we give them space to take all the expertise that they had and all the learnings and apply it with all these new tools and rewrite the playbooks?
43:04 – 43:26
Vanessa Larco: But as I talked to them, a lot of them don’t have time, right? They’re just drinking from a firehose. They’re like implementing this and that. And, talking to these experts and like just patching everything. But they themselves don’t have the space to sit back. And so what I suspect is those who can take a leave of absence are those who can, just like I quit, I’m gonna take a year to just go like Tinker will.
43:26 – 43:42
Vanessa Larco: But what about the ones who can’t? Because they’re like the breadwinners in our family and they just can’t take a year off and not work and tinker. So I think a lot about, like, how do we not just, like, say, well, I’m going to hire the 20 year old who whatever, I can go figure this out. But what about the person who knows?
43:42 – 43:52
Vanessa Larco: Go to market backwards and forwards and all the systems that existed and can tell you what should be carried over and what shouldn’t? How do we give them space and time to go do that?
43:52 – 44:19
Max Altschuler: Yeah. I mean, so it is a question we get often. It’s like, well, you know, are the, have the playbooks changed so much where, you know, there’s an entirely new crop of GTM folks and, you know, there’s there’s a lot of playbooks that are changing rapidly just because the tooling is changing. What’s disposable is changing. But there’s just a lot of strategy and psychology that’s tried and true.
44:19 – 44:43
Max Altschuler: And it’s not going to go anywhere because at the end of the day, the end user and the end buyer is still human. And so those things, you know, still exist. And we have companies come to us and say, hey, I need help building our customer community. You know, we have the person who built the customer community from scratch and at last, in Salesforce gone, gained site some of the best, you know, SAS communities of all time as LPs and find all different people.
44:43 – 45:10
Max Altschuler: But, the psychology that comes into play to build those communities, to get people to move on your behalf, to create evangelists, to run, you know, internal rewards programs, things like that, that does not need a new playbook. Maybe the tooling has changed. Maybe how you fit, how you physically do it has changed. Maybe you don’t do it on Salesforce communities or whatever the old homes were.
45:10 – 45:20
Max Altschuler: Now you do it on circle or something new or something AI enabled, sure. But the psychology, the strategy, all this stuff, how to get people to move on behalf of your brand.
45:20 – 45:21
Vanessa Larco: How do you care?
45:22 – 45:43
Max Altschuler: Yeah, a lot of those things are just psychology. They were here in the, you know, 1905. They’re here in 2005. They’re here in 2026. It’s yeah, those things are it’s just human evolution is how we like to do things is how we feel celebrated all that type of stuff that hasn’t changed. So maybe one day when the buyer is an agent and all of that changes, then we’re in trouble.
45:43 – 46:07
Max Altschuler: But for now and in 2026 and 2027 and probably 2028, if you’re at least mid-market and up customer and and user, for most platforms, it’s still human. And a lot of those things, you know, are still the tried and true method of, of doing it. So those playbooks are super relevant. I do think, you know, everybody needs to get a club code license and get up to speed with AI as fast as possible.
46:07 – 46:18
Max Altschuler: We have our whole team, everyone on the team. Hey, licenses for everyone. So, we’ve got a couple different, you know, YouTube videos and, you know.
46:18 – 46:19
Vanessa Larco: Come back to check those out.
46:19 – 46:28
Max Altschuler: Ready? So, yeah, we’re we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re trying to obviously be as eye forward as, as we can be if we’re investing in this space.
46:28 – 46:37
Vanessa Larco: We have to look at just that. Everyone’s like, oh, the one man billion dollar company. And I’m like, what about the two women top decile fund?
46:37 – 46:38
Vanessa Larco: Like, you know, well, we’ll.
46:38 – 46:56
Vanessa Larco: Have a team. But I think you can we we should hold ourselves the same standard as startups. Like how can we do things really efficiently. How about our go to market. And so we’re doing all the same things and holding ourselves to all the same standards. And I think there’s so much and we we have the benefit of starting something from scratch at this moment in time.
46:56 – 47:01
Vanessa Larco: Yeah, right. Which is really exciting. You just set this up from day one.
47:01 – 47:02
Max Altschuler: Best time to do it.
47:02 – 47:03
Vanessa Larco: Best time.
47:03 – 47:22
Max Altschuler: Well, Vanessa, this is fun. I have one last question for you. So, cookie connoisseur, what’s the number one? That’s the favorite place to get a cookie in the Stanford. And let’s call it City of San Francisco. So everybody who’s listening when they’re in town can go get this chocolate chip cookie or any cookie you’re choosing. I guess.
47:23 – 47:25
Vanessa Larco: I mean, there’s like, there’s so many good ones.
47:25 – 47:30
Max Altschuler: Right? Hit us with, like, just top of the after.
47:30 – 47:50
Vanessa Larco: The coffee shop. I don’t want people to, like, swarm it, though, because it’s the place I work from sometimes. The coffee shop has this chocolate chip hazelnut cookie, and they always warm it up for me. And it is amazing. I love hazelnuts, and, I mean, I love that, my co-founder does not like nuts in her baked goods.
47:50 – 48:00
Vanessa Larco: And so this is like a very controversial take. But Costco, the food line has chocolate chip cookies, and they’re always, like, freshly baked and they’re.
48:00 – 48:05
Vanessa Larco: But there’s so good. You’re very underrated.
48:05 – 48:06
Max Altschuler: It’s sneaky like that.
48:07 – 48:14
Vanessa Larco: If you ever get, like, a slice of pepperoni pizza like Costco, which we do, we take the kids, get a chocolate chip cookie. They’re so.
48:14 – 48:16
Vanessa Larco: So, so sinfully good.
48:16 – 48:19
Max Altschuler: And there you have it. The coffee shop and Costco.
48:20 – 48:24
Vanessa Larco: Like, bougie, hipster, mainstream. Affordable.
48:24 – 48:26
Max Altschuler: That’s perfect. That’s what we needed. That’s what we did.
48:26 – 48:27
Vanessa Larco: There you go.
48:27 – 48:29
Max Altschuler: Awesome. Thank you. Vanessa, that was great.
48:29 – 48:31
Vanessa Larco: Awesome. Thanks, Max.
48:31 – 48:40
Max Altschuler: That was another fantastic episode of the VC series on the GTM now podcast. Head over to Apple, Spotify, or YouTube and give us a like and subscribe and we’ll see you on the next one.
