Peter Wagner: 27 Years of Investing Lessons of Picking Founders, Price Discipline & Reserve | E1123

The very best founders that I work with, the most talented, most capable, most sought after, are also the ones where, you know, we have the highest bandwidth engagement. You need to have just some glaring deficiency in, in the current, (laughs) in the current approaches. And so you almost need to find, you know, founders that are, like, just pissed off.

Peter, this is such a joy to do. I've heard so many great things from many different members on your team and founders that you've worked with. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm a, I'm a big fan of your work, big fan of the show. It's, uh, it's great to be here.

That's very, very kind of you. I would love to start with a little bit of scene setting, though. Uh, you joined venture, um, a w- a while (laughs) ago, in July '96. Um, how did you get the job at Accel? Can you just take me to that and how you got into venture there?

It was kind of an accident. I was trying to get a job in a startup and I inadvertently became a venture capitalist. Um, but I, I was a product manager at a company called Silicon Graphics, which was a high-flyer in the early '90s. We were doing 3D graphics and digital media. And, uh, I'd been there about four years (clears throat) and it- you know, the reason I'd gone there was to try and get the base of experience that could make me, you know, somewhat valuable (laughs) in a startup. So I was starting to talk to some startup opportunities, and got to know a few of the venture backers in the course of that.

Mm-hmm.

And it turned out that none of those startups were quite right for me. But, uh, some of the venture people said, you know, "Hey, may- maybe you might wanna come and, and work with us for a while." And I, I thought that might be a decent, uh, position to, you know, identify a better startup opportunity. So, uh, so I ended up joining Accel. Um, I took a pay cut (laughs) to do it, uh, and I thought of it as like ... And, and I wasn't making a lot of money at SGI, so that, that kind of tells you how, how the industry worked then. But, um, I thought I might be there for, like, 18 months and, you know, it's been a little longer than that. (laughs)

At what point did you realize it was what you wanted to do?

Pretty quickly, actually. I was pretty lucky too, Harry. Like, if you remember, you know, those days, you know, joining in '96 and, and working in the late '90s, I mean, the internet boom was on, you know, the Netscape IPO had happened. Uh, and, uh, a lot of things, you know, were happening that n- no one had really seen (laughs) before. And so it was, it was really fertile ground. It was really fun. Um, you know, I got very lucky with, you know, a number of my early investments.