Plural Partner, Taavet Hinrikus: Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds

Do not be that asshole. (whoosh) There are plenty of stories out there of respectable VCs not picking up the phone during the bad times. (whoosh) We are a commoditized, uh, product, Harry. VCs are a commodity. You can press 'em down. Fundamentally, the idea of collecting a 2, 2 and a half percent management fee does not really make sense. It does not align us with the outcomes. If we can't imagine 100X, we should not be entertaining this idea of this deal. (upbeat music)

Ready to go? (clicking) Taavo, dude, I'm so excited for this. I've wanted to make this one happen for years, so thank you so much for joining me.

Finally, I'm so glad to be here.

Well, dude, the pleasure is all mine. Now, I want to start before Plural. You were a prolific angel. Can you just start on the investing career there, how it went, whether you liked it, and the transition to Plural?

So I made my first angel investment probably about 20 years ago, and I think, you know, through the years of building, building Wise and still working at Skype, I was like, I met other people who were building businesses. I was excited about what they were doing. I wanted to be part of the journey and wrote the small an- angel ticket. I went into overdrive once I stopped running Wise, doing 30, 40, 50 deals a year. That was fun, you know, but I think it was... It started feeling to me a little bit Wall Street-esque, high-speed deployment. I think it's been... it was a great portfolio strategy, I think the portfolio has done really well, but it felt it wasn't, it wasn't very kind of mission-aligned. I thought there is something more that can be done, and that's kind of was the beginning of thinking, "Hey, we should start Plural. We should really think about getting founders who have scar tissue from building companies to become investors."

What was the single best investment from that period?

So one of the things I, I missed out on investing in Bolt's seed round. I was too busy building, uh, building Wise, but then, a couple years later, I was really impressed with Marcus, and I spent a bunch of time, and I spent a lot of my limited liquidity buying up secondaries in, in Bolt in, like, 2017.

Love that. I mean, Marcus is fantastic, and what a great story. Um, I just want to start, then, with a core question, which is, you said there about it felt a little bit like Wall Street. That kind of hit when you said it, because it made me think of Doug Leone. He said on the show to me that venture has turned from a boutique cottage industry into a commoditized, um, high-volume industry. Do you agree with that transition from boutique community to high-volume commoditized industry?

I think a lot of that rings a bell, but I think we need to unpack that a little bit more. I think, you know, it's very different if you're talking about deploying big checks in mid or late stage. It's very different if you're doing high-speed investing in early stage, kind of what I did as an angel. It's very different to what we do at Plural, which is backing the most ambitious founders, and sometimes there's no one else who wants to back them. I think we need to unpack this into different parts of the venture ecosystem, and different parts, I think, are going through different journeys.