Jen Richard
Bonfire Ventures
AI Made Everyone a Builder. Jennifer Richard Bets on the Founders Who Can Sell.
AI can help a founder draft outreach, run campaigns and put a working product in front of customers faster than before. Jennifer (Jen) Richard believes those tools have also changed the environment in which every company has to sell.
The same efficiencies are available to competitors pursuing the same buyers. A customer who once received a limited number of uneven pitches can now face a steady stream of polished emails, targeted messages and automated follow-ups. The tools work, but their widespread use creates more noise around the people founders need to reach.
Jen sees the consequences in the seed-stage companies she evaluates at Bonfire Ventures. Founders can produce capable software with less time and fewer resources, which places more weight on what happens after the product exists. Can they identify the right customer, explain why the product deserves attention and turn early interest into revenue?
The founders Jen sees navigating that challenge well often have experience in sales, partnerships or another go-to-market role. They understand that commercialization is more than sending a larger volume of outreach. They build a visible presence, meet customers in person, participate in industry communities and find ways into the market that do not look identical to every competitor’s playbook.
That has changed the evidence Jen looks for at the earliest stage. Technical ability remains essential, but a founder’s understanding of the customer and ability to create demand now reveal more about whether a product can become a company.
Pattern Recognition Without the Formula
Venture capital relies heavily on pattern recognition, but Jen is wary of letting a familiar founder profile do too much of the underwriting. After about eight years in venture capital, including more than five at Bonfire, she has seen seemingly strong signals fail to predict what happens next. A repeat founder may understand hiring, fundraising and the pressures of building a company, but that experience does not guarantee the next idea is right or that the founder understands its customer. Jen treats prior success as one consideration, not a substitute for evaluating the market and the business.
She finds more useful patterns in how a market works and how its customers buy. She studies the type of buyer a company must reach, how that buyer evaluates new technology and whether the founder understands the organization around the purchase. A founder may have a strong technical insight while lacking a clear view of who controls the budget, what makes the customer hesitate or how the product fits into an existing workflow.
Jen learned to look for those details while operating e-commerce businesses before entering venture capital. She worked across logistics, customer support, websites and engineering teams. She also purchased the B2B software required to run those companies, including Shopify, analytics products and customer-service platforms.
That experience gave her a practical view of how software earns a place inside a business. Buyers do not adopt a product simply because the technology is impressive. They have to recognize the problem, justify the expense and believe the product will fit into the way their teams already work.
Jen now looks for founders who understand that decision from the customer’s side. Some have worked inside the industry they are trying to change. Others have personally purchased or used the kind of software they are building. What matters is their ability to anticipate the customer’s questions before the sales process exposes the gaps in their thinking.
Winning the purchase is only the beginning. The stronger businesses also give customers a reason to keep the product in place.
Software That Becomes Part of the Operation
Bonfire has kept its core strategy as its funds have grown. The firm leads seed rounds in B2B software, takes board seats and makes roughly 10 to 12 investments each year. Its latest fund gives the team more capital, but Jen says Bonfire does not plan to increase its annual investment pace.
The firm is still looking for software companies, including some that operate inside industries shaped by physical systems. Jen points to a robotics investment as an example. The company does not manufacture or own the robots. Its software works within an environment where technology, equipment and human labor are already connected.
That setting changes the cost of replacement. A company can remove a lightweight software tool used to manage email without reorganizing an entire facility. Turning off software connected to 200 robots working alongside people in a warehouse creates a far more consequential decision. The product has become part of how the building moves goods and completes its daily work.
For Jen, the example illustrates what meaningful integration can look like in a market crowded with software. A competitor may reproduce an interface or release a similar feature. It is harder to replace a system that has been deployed inside a complicated operation and adapted to the customer’s workflow.
Those conditions also introduce risk. Selling into warehouses, trucking networks and other operational environments can require longer implementation, deeper customer knowledge and more support. Complexity does not automatically make a company defensible. Founders still have to prove that they can deploy the software efficiently and deliver enough value to justify the disruption of adoption.
Bonfire’s interest lies in founders who can manage that complexity without losing the advantages of a software business. The product must solve a difficult problem, but the company also has to find a repeatable way to sell and implement it.
That combination takes time to build, even as the fundraising market pushes young companies to demonstrate momentum earlier.
Momentum Without the Mirage
The expectations facing early-stage companies continue to move. Jen speaks with founders who still use familiar annual recurring revenue benchmarks as a guide, only to learn that downstream investors now expect more traction than they did several months earlier.
The pressure affects more than fundraising. Customers may view a well-capitalized competitor as more likely to remain in the market. Prospective employees may interpret a large round as evidence that the company has already separated from the field. A startup that raises first can acquire the appearance of category leadership before its underlying performance looks dramatically different from that of its peers.
Jen describes this dynamic as king making. A large, multi-stage investor can place significant capital behind one company in a crowded category, giving it more money to hire, develop products and expand sales. The investment also sends a signal that can shape how the rest of the market perceives the company.
That signal can become useful momentum, but it can also create distance between perception and performance. Jen has seen companies appear far ahead of their competitors at an early stage and later struggle to support the position that funding helped establish.
Bonfire’s founders cannot ignore those market forces. Becoming the last company in a category to raise can make future fundraising more difficult and influence how customers judge the business. At the same time, Jen does not want founders to repeat the growth-at-all-costs behavior that damaged companies during the zero-interest-rate period.
The guidance requires constant adjustment. Founders need enough growth to remain credible with downstream investors, but they still have to focus their product, spend deliberately and build customer demand that lasts beyond the next financing. A rising valuation or large round may strengthen the company’s story. It cannot substitute for adoption.
Part of Jen’s role is to help founders understand which kind of momentum they are creating. A distinction that’s rarely obvious from a revenue chart alone.
Where the Signal Still Lives
Some of the clearest information Jen receives never appears in a formal pitch.
Bonfire hosts dinners, visits founders’ offices, meets their teams and participates in industry events. Jen’s strongest opportunities often emerge through a lunch with another investor, an annual meeting or an informal conversation that supplies context no one would include in a cold email.
Her time at Creative Artists Agency taught her how much can be revealed through conversation. That instinct now serves a more rigorous purpose in venture investing: understanding how a founder communicates when the answer is incomplete, the plan changes or the news is difficult to deliver.
AI can help Jen prepare for meetings, draft responses and clear administrative work. It cannot determine whether she wants to spend the next decade working alongside a founder. At the seed stage, that judgment matters because many of the most important signals about both the person and the company are still impossible to verify.
Jen names integrity as the most important founder characteristic because investors, employees and customers must be able to rely on what the founder tells them. That confidence develops across repeated interactions, particularly when circumstances give the founder an incentive to soften or withhold the truth.
On the day of the interview, Jen was heading to another dinner. The conversation would reach only the people seated around the table, without the scale of an automated campaign or the polish of a formal pitch. In a market producing more messages, products and apparent momentum than any investor can evaluate, the room offers something harder to generate: context.
This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We’re proud to have them as our sponsor.
Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.
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0:00 Founders who know how to sell, and founders who have some understanding of go- to-market have such an advantage when it comes to being able to get that first million of revenue, now in a world of AI where barriers to entry for building a great product is so
0:17 low. That's Jen Rishard, partner at Bonfire. She spent years building e-commerce before investing. Here's her take on where the real mode is now. When there's just so many companies being built, when software is just being so democratized,
0:32 we're trying to figure out what are the hard things right now, and I think that being able to build a company that has a hardware element really well is one of the hard things. We are looking for exceptional founders, doing exceptional things, and more
0:50 recently hardware has been part of that equation. Right now we're seeing an all-time high at people building products, and in all time low at people actually being able to commercialize those products. There's just so much noise, like your ICP is getting millions of emails from
1:06 all of your competitors. The founders who are winning right now are the ones who are online more, creating a brand, becoming more visible in person, live at event. Do you believe that AI will ultimately replace humans in their work, or do you think it's going to ultimately be
1:23 additive to humans in their work? That's a good question, I mean. Welcome to VC Untovered, the series where we highlight the next generation of investors who move faster, take bigger risks, and build shoulder to shoulder with founders. I'm your host, Drew Glover, co-founder of Theot Growth, and general partner at
1:42 Theot Ventures. Jennifer Rishard, thank you so much for joining. We've had so many different episodes to date for VC Untovered, and I'm super excited about this one. I was really excited to meet you. I feel like just like a year and a half ago, but ever since then we've co-invested together. We've shared a number of
1:59 different conversations about where we think the VC world is headed, and I'm excited to finally have you on the podcast. To kick things off, can you just tell us a little bit more about you, and also tell us more about bonfire and all the great work you guys are doing? Yeah, so excited to be on
2:14 the podcast today. My background, so I have been in VC for about eight years now and at bonfire for about five and a half of those eight years. Before VC, I started my career actually in entertainment
2:34 at CAA, and so it's been quite a journey from that starting point to now. I was in a department where we represented a lot of entrepreneurs, business people, author, and so that's where I first got exposure into tech. From there, I moved
2:49 into the startup landscape here in L.A. where I'm from, and I always worked in a different e- commerce capacity, so first company was a crowdfunding platform. I ran e-commerce for the merchandise and
3:05 signed items that we were producing to help celebrities raise money for charity . The second company was actually a t-shirt company called Represent. It ended up getting acquired by Custom Inc. But I ran our logistics customer
3:23 support and then also managed a team of engineers who were building out the front end of our website and helping customers just buy more seamlessly. And then the last one was a pure play
3:39 very early 2016 Shopify company called Pop and Suki, pure play D2C, managing everything from our 3PL to support, and of course our Shopify site. So yeah, that's a little
3:54 background about me and L.A. native. I'm here in L.A. and a little bit about Bonfire. So we're a seed firm. We lead seed rounds in B2B software. We are generalists across B2B, so have
4:09 investments in almost every category. We're typically writing these days three to $5 million first check, leading the round, pricing the round, setting up the board, taking a board seat and just playing a really active hands-on role. We're investing out of our fourth fund, which is
4:28 $245 million that we just activated last fall. Awesome. Thank you so much for the background . And before we dive into all things VC and investing, I got to go back to CAA for a second. And only because you kind of fell into my pocket a bit because I'm kind of like
4:43 a nerd when it comes to Michael Obit's stories and like the CAA culture and what they were building. Yeah. I'm so curious. But from that CAA experience has helped you as a VC. Yeah. It's interesting because I've had years to think about this now and it's
5:02 funny because I actually learned about Bonfire from a colleague that I had at CAA Tyler, who's also at Bonfire. And we actually were assistants at the same time back in 2011, I think it was,
5:19 and Austin Clement, who's at Slauson & Co, is also a CAA alum. And so there's several of us here. And that means that there's clearly some ingredients from that experience that helped us get to
5:35 VC and to be successful here. And I think it's a couple of things. It's inherently a people-driven business. Everything there was about your relationships, who you knew in the building, outside the building, and really being able to create that social connectivity.
5:53 I'd say that's one. Another one, it's all about selling. I mean, you eat what you kill there. You have to be able to sell a vision, sell a story, sell the agency, and be able to get people to come
6:08 on this journey with you, which is very similar to what we're doing in VC. And I would say the last piece is that it's just such a hustle culture. You just are working from the moment you wake up to the
6:23 moment you go to sleep. And in order to be able to do that, you have to just really love it. And I think that that also resonates with what we're doing today. Totally. And I could only assume that when you basically come out of college or wherever you were coming out of, you
6:40 walking into the workforce, and that being your baseline work culture kind of sets you up for a lot of success. A hundred percent. Yeah. Super cool. And then you move from CAA into the direct -to-consumer world. And as a customer of direct-to-consumer businesses, as a consumer,
7:01 I feel like the world kind of puts direct-to-consumer on a pedestal because the most exciting brands, like the Nike's of the world, beyond runnings of the world, these brands make you feel something. And so I'm curious with you being on the other side and at the operational side
7:16 of that, were you able to maintain like that kind of love for direct-to-consumer or did it kind of a road? Yeah. Well, I mean, a simple answer to that is I don't do any D2C investing now . And so
7:32 I mean, I think that going back to that world and being able to build a brand and build something iconic and tell a story through a brand is something really, really special and unique. And with that very, very difficult to do, and we're talking back in 2014, 2015,
7:57 2016 back when it was a lot harder to build a brand and to build a website and Shopify was still very new. And now it has just gotten so much more competitive, so much easier. The barriers to entry are pretty
8:13 much non-existent. And so I still have so much love for it as a consumer. And I am a power online shopper. And there's just so many things that I'm looking for from being on the
8:29 other side. But I think as an investor, it is just extremely difficult to have the eye to pick out consumer companies that are going to win. And the ones who have been able to do it are extremely talented.
8:44 I don't think that's my skill set, especially anymore. And so that's why I've decided to stick to my lane in B2B. Yeah, I would argue that a lot of folks in D2C that are really successful is they are extremely talented, but they're also extremely lucky. I
9:02 feel like a lot of the luck factor in D2C, like a lot of times you end up surfing waves that you just magically landed on, where you have a little bit more power over your destiny when it comes to
9:18 call it B2B tech. We can make ourselves in a very strategic way. Yeah, totally agree. You're leaving the D2C space and you're transitioning over to B2B tech within Bonfire. What inspired that transition? Coming out of direct-to-consumer, such a high-
9:38 fast-pace industry, you can probably move to any type of investing you want if you want to. What drives you to Bonfire in their specific thesis around B2B software infrastructure? Yeah, good question. So before Bonfire, I was at two other firms, one of them
9:56 also in LA. It was cross-culture at the time, now called Mac, shout out to Marlon. But we did a lot of consumer investing there. Vitalize the firm, I was at afterwards. We also did
10:11 consumer investing. And so I spent, collectively, I was at those two firms for about two years. So when you take that as a portion of my overall BC career, it was small, but I did get
10:26 some time to actually be able to test out consumer investing. And what's really hard is that the feedback loops are so long to know if it was what I was doing, was any good
10:41 or not. And now that I look back, my consumer investments did not do very well back in those days. And so I wasn't quite making the decision at the time, but looking back, I just
10:56 performed so much better on my B2B investments. And I think part of that is because when I was operating, I was also a consumer of B2B. I was also a buyer of so many different B2B
11:11 technologies. Like I was a buyer of Shopify. I was a buyer of customer service platforms. I was a buyer of analytics platforms. And I had such a strong understanding of the e-commerce
11:26 landscape coming into investing at the VC that I was able to see the world as a consumer, but in a different way. Like I was able to see the B2B world as a consumer of
11:43 those software products in the same way that maybe someone who hasn't had that experience is able to see themselves as the consumer of on-shoes, for instance. And so I didn't quite see
11:59 them so differently. The only difference was when I was investing in a consumer product , I'd get some cool products that I'd be able to wear or so to friends and actually be able to see them out in the wild in a more experiential way. But when I made the decision to come to
12:20 bonfire, it was more than just thesis, although that was of course a big reason. I think my move to bonfire was partially that they valued the investments I'd made already and my
12:36 experience in e-commerce and able to take command of a category. It was of course the people that I was working with and just alignment around not only professional focus, but values. It was back in
12:53 2020 that I came to bonfire. And so there was just a lot going on that was happening at that time that I needed to have comfort around the people I was working with. And that all came to fruition. And then
13:09 also that there was just a lot for me to be able to learn. I mean, I had really been focused on e-commerce since I had started in VC and coming to bonfire, we have a really vast portfolio at this point. And I've gone on to expand pretty dramatically beyond e-commerce,
13:29 but it was also just that ability to learn. And I think that's what makes me to be also really interesting to me is that I'm learning so much about industries I had never even thought of before being a VC. And it's that ability to constantly expand yourself that I find super exciting.
13:49 Yeah, no, I love that. And I always say this. And sometimes I'll go like speak it some class at UC Berkeley. Kids will be like, how did you learn VC? And we've talked
14:04 about this before, but obviously pattern recognition is incredibly important. But I think what's most important about pattern recognition is to understand the patterns that you're looking for . And these reps around understanding different business models, number one, and then on top of
14:21 that, all the different tweaks you can do to a business model that make it a nuanced type of business. And so how are you utilizing pattern recognition to be able to underwrite a founder better, to be able to be like, okay, this business model is super interesting, or even
14:39 being able to say, okay, I love the founder. I don't love the business model, but I believe that they can build a billion dollar business because you don't always get all three. There's typically one that's like less exciting, but there's some combination because you've seen so much where
14:54 you're like, they got two of the three. And I believe that we should be leaning in here. Yeah. And this is something that we are constantly having discussions about internally is the idea
15:09 of a rubric and making sure that companies, you know, check certain boxes as a baseline, and then, you know, other pieces may be more subjective when we evaluate. I think that pattern matching is real and really important. And I also think that this business is
15:29 just not formulaic. And if it was, we would all be super successful. And so there, it's tough. I mean, okay, I'll give an example. So repeat founders is something that is really valuable in this
15:44 industry, someone who has demonstrated that they can sell a business and be successful. And we've invested in repeat founders that have had very suboptimal outcomes. We invest as seed investors in
16:01 a lot of first-time founders. And, you know, like having startup experience is really important. And 50% of the time, that ends up, you know, helping a founder build a really great business and
16:16 half the time it doesn't matter. And so I think that pattern matching for me has been more helpful categorically. So understanding like certain markets and business types that work or don't work
16:33 or just have a very difficult buyer type, I think another one is like founder understanding of what they're of their customers and who they're selling into is always something that I'm looking for
16:48 because we see all the time founders who, you know, stumble upon a great business idea but don't have this inherent understanding or empathy for the customer. And that ends up being a huge
17:03 problem. And then I would say the last one is especially now. I mean, I wouldn't say this was the case five years ago, but founders who know how to sell and founders who have some understanding of go to market
17:18 because now in a world of AI where barriers entry for building a great product is so low. Like looking at the founders in our portfolio, the ones who came from a sales background came from
17:33 partnerships came from some type of go to market. Leadership role just have such an advantage when it comes to being able to get that first million of revenue, drive the strategy of the company, drive
17:48 monetization, commercialization. And so those are the things that I've seen more recently. It really matter. I think it's such an important call out here. And we know you're seeing in all the headlines,
18:03 you're seeing in all the LinkedIn posts. And I'm seeing a lot of the data. I'm seeing card sharing this data and a number of other like large VCs. But right now we're seeing an all-time high at people building products and an all-time low at people actually being able to commercialize those products. And all-time low at people actually being able to sell their
18:21 products and get customers. And one thing AI has solved is being able to build faster. One thing AI will never be able to solve is being able to help sell your product faster. They might make it operation
18:36 ally easier to set up a Facebook campaign or operationally easier for you to be able to sell something, but they cannot do the hand-to-hand call. But especially, especially in the B2B space. And so let's talk a little bit about that founder persona that you're underwriting around. Can they
18:54 actually bring a product to market and scale it? Yeah. Well, to the point you just made, I would actually say that AI's ability to better offer personalized to run a Facebook campaign to draft
19:09 your outreach to to run email campaigns, etc. I actually think that makes it more difficult to sell these days because there's just so much noise. Like your ICP is getting millions of emails
19:24 from all of your competitors. And it's very difficult as a customer to drown out the noise. And so the founders who are winning right now are the ones who are able to be more creative. You know, they're the ones who are online more, creating a brand, becoming more visible.
19:43 They're the ones who are in-person, live at events. They're the ones who are finding ways to get in front of customers that aren't just the basic LinkedIn messages, emails, etc. I 100% agree. And
19:59 obviously, if you can sell your products, especially if it's like an enterprise product, if it's a B2B product, anything in the thousands of dollars, let's just call it that. Their ability to be able to sell their product is also a direct correlation of them being able to fundraise. And I think the other
20:14 thing that has significantly changed, at least for me, I'll speak for myself, is what I used to think of how quickly can they get to $2 million in revenue? Now, I'm instantly being like, can they get to $10 million in revenue in 18 months? Because I also think another one of the big notes right now is speed. And capital is actually becoming a moat. It always
20:34 kind of has been, but it hasn't been used in the way it's been used today, where I'm seeing larger VCs, kind of king make companies. They believe are dealing with a massive clip. And so the person with the most money and the person that can sell the best are going to be the most
20:51 successful. And momentum and speed are the thing that get VCs and other people with capital really excited. And so for me, equal parts of them being able to sell their product, also being
21:07 able to fundraise becomes really, really important. And so I'm curious as an early stage investor , very much like myself, how are you guys thinking about, like, talking about that with founders of like the momentum that you need to hit now in the market that we're in? Yeah, this is something
21:23 that we talk about a lot. And I think this king making concept that you just touched on is really important because it sends so many signals. And a lot of times we'll see, you know, these multi
21:38 stage firms, king making companies that are at a million in ARR. And you know, our relatively the same level of traction as many of their competitors, but now we're just perceived as so much bigger than they actually are. And in the long term, we'll see, I don't actually think that's a good thing for
21:57 those companies. And we've already seen many kind of flame out. But I think that it's it is an interesting internal discussion that we have with our founders. And a lot of them, you know, what we 're seeing
22:13 and pattern matching to go back to that concept, as we see, there's so much different than what founders are seeing and kind of talking about amongst themselves. And a lot of them are still stuck on the 3x, you know, ARR year over year mark is kind of the north star
22:30 for being able to fundraise. And in a lot of cases, that's just no longer good enough. And so, yeah, I mean, it's so hard. It's like you don't want to, you don't want to be the last one in your
22:46 category of competitors raising money. You want to raise the most, you want your customers to perceive you as the company that's the furthest along in your category. On top of that, though, you still
23:01 want to be disciplined and focused in terms of both product and how you're spending money. The bar changes every six months, and we're still trying to figure out how to best guide our companies without pushing growth at all costs, which is something we saw
23:17 go terribly wrong in the ZERP era. And so, yeah, it's a really interesting question because at the end of the day, we want to support founders who are building sustainable long-term category
23:32 defining companies. And we don't want to get too caught up in the hype cycles that we're in every two to three years, but at the same time, being able to raise downstream funding is super important. And right now, the bar is five X year over year
23:48 and three to five million at Series A and we're trying to also make sure that our companies are prepared and able to raise those really big rounds that will help them with that go-to-market motion. - Totally. And the other thing that we're talking around
24:06 is just like the idea of timing, not just for their business in the market, but also timing for the momentum of the scale of their business. And so, right, like, hey, we might be at three and a half and we need to be at five of revenue, but we just close to massive enterprise partners.
24:23 You know, and that is a story that should be told. And it aligns with like the billion, the multi-billion dollar story that we have. Like, should we be preempting this round? Because the rest of our pipeline might be, you know, 12 months out and this is an opportunity.
24:40 And this might be a little bit controversial, but I think right now, you know, for, if we love it or hate it, like, what SpaceX is doing on their roadshow to going public? Those are the types of stories that I want my early stage founders saying.
24:55 Like, right now Elon Musk is saying, hey, not only are we gonna build spaceships to go to Mars and we're gonna populate Mars with a million people. And that's the only way I get paid my bonus. But he is also saying, hey, you know, we're actually going to try to take on the airports
25:10 and we're gonna try to make it so people can go from San Francisco to Europe in 30 minutes instead of 13 hours. - Whether or not you agree with it is totally separate, but founders that have those really big visions and really big dreams and actually have a roadmap
25:27 and some idea of how to get to them are the ones who are going to win. I mean, you have to be able to think bigger these days, especially. - That's right. - The story is incredibly important and right. Like, sometimes you believe it or you don't, but one thing everyone has to realize is we're power law investors
25:43 and for everything that we invest in, we're trying to return the fund. And, you know, $240 million fund, I have a $40 million fund. Also understanding what that means for different investors. You know, when Sequoia raised $11 billion in their last fund, like they want one company to potentially return that, right?
26:00 And so, you know, these are, this is the context that a lot of folks need, but that's really exciting. You guys have just completed your newest fund. Like, what has changed with your thesis for this new fund? - Yeah. So the exciting part is absolutely nothing.
26:18 We have the same exact thesis as we did before. We're leading seed rounds in B2B software and we are just doing it with more money. We're making the same number of investments per year,
26:33 which is 10 to 12. So that means our investment period is probably going to extend by a year. But we are really disciplined as investors and our strategy has worked really well for us to date.
26:48 And so we don't want to change it. We're really just making more bets with this new fund. And with that, like, we have expanded a little bit to more categories. We're making a couple of unannounced bets
27:05 and deeper tech companies, some more hardware-heavy companies and expanding our aperture a little bit. But really, it's exactly the same as we've always been doing. - Very cool.
27:20 I want to touch on this hardware piece. You don't need to tell me what the company is, but right now I feel like hardware is kind of being treated as a mote where for a while, it was just kind of treated like shit. - Yeah. - And now it's kind of back in Vogue here and we're seeing companies like Woot,
27:36 which we'll go back. Like distribution is definitely a mote. Data is definitely a mote in MBs. And a lot of times I'm seeing hardware being used as this kind of Trojan horse to be data collector. - Yeah. - And so I'm sure it's how you guys are looking at that.
27:52 'Cause me as a FinTech company, as a B2B company, like for every piece of hardware like that, a lot of times it's a consumer heavy product, but there are some B2B opportunities, but how are you approaching that space? - Yeah. So we recently invested in a robotics company
28:07 and so there's a hardware element there, but they don't own the hardware. They're not creating the robot. And so I think what we've historically struggled with when it comes to hardware is just the balance sheet risk.
28:26 - Yeah. - Of owning hardware, creating hardware. And we are now trying to explore ways where yes, I do agree that it creates a bit of a mote, not just from a data collection perspective,
28:42 which that's absolutely piece of it, but it's a lot more difficult for a warehouse to turn off 200 robots that are working alongside humans than it is to turn off a software system
29:01 that's helping them answer emails, for instance. And so right now, again, when there's just so many companies being built when software is just being so democratized, we're trying to figure out what are the hard things right now.
29:18 And I think that being able to build a company that has a hardware element really well is one of the hard things. And that's what we're taking a bet on. Another one is a trucking company. And so I mean, we are looking for exceptional founders,
29:36 doing exceptional things. And more recently, hardware has been part of that equation. - Yeah. Well, it sounds like exceptional founders doing exceptional things in spaces
29:51 that are really hard to replicate. - Yeah. - And so I got obviously, trucking is kind of like an unsexy space. It's just not a lot of people flock to unless they come from that space. I think the humanoid robot space is really interesting. I saw Elon talk about how he thought the optimist
30:06 or his humanoid robot was going to be the best product he's ever built. But he also said, the reason why it's so hard to launch these things is because for a whoop band, creating this, I could hit up a manufacturer and they get to me a thousand samples tomorrow.
30:23 The humanoid robot, there's not the infrastructure to build those yet. And so it does become a moat because although it's a hardware product, it's a hardware product that's ever been built before. So the infrastructure across the entire globe doesn't exist yet. So if you break into that, it becomes like a really exciting space
30:38 and it makes hardware a moat. - Yeah, I will say though, we have not invested in humanoid robots. I actually think that the tech is not there for those to be fully functional. But yes, I think in general,
30:55 the robotic space is just one that is really having a moment. And as we're also looking at our geopolitical standing and looking at competing with other markets like China and seeing the level of automation they have
31:11 and how they're able to be so protective in their economy versus our manufacturing and warehousing which is stuck in the 1950s, I think that it becomes more and more important to invest in these technologies
31:27 for our own global standing. - Yeah, I'm curious from my thesis perspective, do you believe that AI will ultimately replace humans in their work or do you think it's going to ultimately
31:43 be additive to humans in their work? But are you betting on a future where AI is doing the work for all of us and like jobs are truly going to be obsolete? - Yeah, that's a good question.
31:59 And one that I just don't think that we have enough information to fully answer. I mean, if you look at the internet, for instance, an email, I mean, email definitely took a big hit
32:14 on the postage system and actual mail, physical mail, but it didn't make it completely obsolete. And now actually direct mail is one of the levers
32:29 that has become particularly effective in a world where there's so much email slop, you know? And so I think that for certain industries and for certain job types, like for instance,
32:45 kids who are coming out of college right now, I am very worried about them because I think that the entry level job is going to be pretty obsolete. I know a lot of VC firms, including us
33:00 who had intern programs in the past are no longer running those intern programs because AI is doing that work. I think certain jobs like executive assistants and things like that are going to be less and less needed.
33:18 And so I do think that it is going to take a hit to the economy, but what I also hope is that AI augments every individual worker to the point where, you know,
33:34 people don't have to do what I did at CAA, to get there at 7 a.m. and work until midnight every day. But actually we can have our AI twin working with us in the background so that we can be more productive
33:51 with our time and create a lot more output and maybe have more balance in our day. And so I'm looking at it in the future and just based on how I use it today as more of a positive and a way that will help us be more effective
34:06 at the workforce versus wiping everyone out. But we'll see. - Totally, totally. And we all know what it's like when people get more efficient we're just like, cool, be more efficient now. - Yeah, right, right. And here's more for you to do.
34:21 - Yeah, great. Your output's 10x. Let's see if it can be 20. - Yeah. - No, but I really like that insight. And, you know, as we wrap up here, there's a big part of this VC space that is incredibly human, right? It's building the relationship, being an extension of their team.
34:37 It's being able to provide services that, you know, they require that involves us to do a number of different things that is very humanistic. From your perspective, specifically in the VC space, like what can AI take over for us and what are the things that are just kind of our moat
34:54 that makes it so we should always exist? - Yeah. I mean, I think that the in-person piece of this job is really what moves the needle. It's really the moat.
35:09 So, you know, tonight I'm going to a dinner with people and getting that face-to-face interaction time is just completely irreplaceable. And, you know, as a firm, we do a lot of events.
35:27 We have dinners, we spend time with our founders in person. We go to their offices, we meet their teams. And, you know, deal flow from this job or how we source new opportunities. I can send emails to people and I can automate that,
35:44 but when I really get the highest value opportunities, it's from having these, you know, like a lunch catch-up or it's from going to someone's AGM or it's, you know, like running into someone at an event
36:00 and having this water cooler conversation about what we're looking at. And so, ironically, I think that VC is one of the jobs that will be the most difficult to replicate. I think there's certain lower level things like scheduling
36:16 and, you know, like responding to emails that will be easy to have an AI assistant help us with, but it's really the human connection piece of who do you want to work with, who do you want to collaborate with more,
36:33 who do founders want to be married to for the next 10 years and sell a piece of their baby to? That, like, you just can't replicate with technology and it's the in-person connection building that really sets us apart.
36:49 - Yeah, 100% agree, 100% agree. And to your point, I still see it today, it's like these in-person moments, it's the difference between being able to win a deal that where we invest in a founder or not is the one where we can help a founder
37:05 close a seven-figure deal or not, but it's all these things that go beyond just the investment but making sure we're actually helping scale that investment up to be the return that we want for all parties included. - Yeah. - So, really good insight. So, to round this out, I always end it
37:21 with just like a speed round of questions where you just answer like super fast, super fast. The first one being is what is your number one AI hack that you use on a daily basis? - Ooh, that's a good one. I would say that I recently started using town
37:40 and it seems like a lot of people recently started using it, but it has just made my life so much easier. There's a couple of things. There's an email prep thing where you can listen to it on your commute, it responds to your email.
37:56 So, yeah, town, that's my number one. - All right, good. For everyone, town is, it's an AI assistant and it's making some waves right now. Love that, love that. If you had to go be the CEO of a direct-to-consumer brand right now,
38:13 what consumer brand would you be the CEO of? - You know, I'm really into golf lately and I think there's a lot of really great golf brands that I love and that I really feel like I could speak to their audience,
38:29 particularly for women golfers. So, I would say it's either McCade or Malbon Golf. - I mean, if you didn't say Malbon, I was gonna be, I don't know if McCade, is McCade female specific or is it fun? - Yeah, it is. - Yeah, okay, cool, love that.
38:45 Yeah, it's a, the transformation I'm seeing in golf right now from an apparel and a culture standpoint is like one of the most exciting direct-to-consumer spaces I've seen in a long time. And specifically for women, it's very much early days still. - It's very much early days
39:00 and that's why there's so much opportunity. So, Malbon, call me, I'm just. - Yeah, here we go, cool. What is one wellness hack that you can't live without? - Oh, that is a really good one.
39:15 I, so this relates to the previous question, but I get all of my cardio from playing sports. And so, I play golf like twice a week. I play tennis three times a week.
39:30 And I cannot get myself to do cardio unless there's some competitive aspect of it. And so, the motivation that's driven by playing sports is my number one. - Love, I think that's a traditional hack.
39:45 - Yeah. - Just play sports. - Yeah. - Play sports for cardio. - Yes, and you can do it as an adult too, by the way. - Yeah, and then the last one, what is like the single most important characteristic that a founder needs to have to be successful? - Integrity is just knowing that A,
40:03 when you tell me something or you tell your customers something or you tell your employees something that they trust you and that you're transparent with the people around you. I think it really just comes down to a lover for trust
40:22 and knowing that we're in this together and when you tell me something or tell someone else something that we believe you. - Love, Jennifer Richard, thank you so much for joining VC Uncovered. This has been awesome. That was so fun.
40:38 - Thank you so much and I will see you soon, no doubt. - For sure, awesome. Have a good one and thanks for having me. - This season is supported by Silicon Valley Bank. For decades, Silicon Valley Bank has been a true partner to the innovation economy, helping both founders and funders grow.
40:55 Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank, member FDIC. Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and not investment, financial, or legal advice. The Views Express are those of the speakers
41:10 and do not necessarily reflect the position of Silicon Valley Bank. (upbeat music)
Transcript generated automatically; it may contain errors.
Originally published on VC Uncovered · By Drew Glover