Seed Investing at Scale | David Tisch, Managing Partner at BoxGroup | Ep. 10

We don't want to be your best investor, we want to be your favorite investor. And favorite investor means you like us because we talk to you like humans, and we don't mislead you. We ideally underpromise and overdeliver, so we would like to help. We just don't wanna, like, proclaim we're gonna make your company great. [upbeat music]

I'm really excited to be sitting down today with David Tisch of BoxGroup. David, thank you for making the time to do this with me.

Jack, I'm thrilled to be here.

The thing I want to start with is that BoxGroup has sort of, like, defied a certain conventional wisdom, which is that VC funds, the general life cycle is you kind of start small, you're collaborative, you do seed, and then the way that you scale is you do bigger checks, you own more, higher concentration, you go later stage, and that's the typical model. In most cases, that's right, um, that's the arc that most have followed. But you haven't, and you've been really successful basically scaling up this thing that everybody thinks you can't scale up. And so I want to start with the way that you think about your model, how it works, the way you invest in companies, and just, like, the shape of BoxGroup.

Yeah. I, I think first off, like, the, the word venture capital captures so many different types of businesses. So to me, there's, like, three stages of VC: there's seed, there's A and a little bit of series B, and then there's B and later. And B and later is a finance job, for the most part, that involves needing to win, but it is just plowing capital into things that are working and helping them scale. There is more of a financial orientation to the work that gets done there, and the people that do that work have a different lens inter- in terms of what they're looking for. So I don't believe I work in the same industry as most of those people.

Mm-hmm.

I think at series A and B, there's still an art to it. The art is getting in front of companies, convincing the company to pick you, and helping form the, the shape of whatever that, uh, narrative is going forward to get them to that, uh, capital point.

There's, like, this quip that, like, everybody in venture who invests a stage later than me is like a spreadsheet jockey, and everybody who invests earlier than me is, like, throwing darts. It's like that.

I'm a dart thrower.

You're a dart thrower.

I think that at seed, it's messy, and I think you have to appreciate how messy your job is. And I think to your, to your question, most people don't want to stay in that mess. That's not the passion. That's not the easiest place to play, right? It is easier to have a concentrated portfolio in the sense of if you're gonna do two to three deals a year, you get to have a different filter for how you go about your job. I don't think it's easy in the sense of winning great deals, but I think it's an easier model to marry yourself to for a career. It's a, a bit more stable. I think seed is just a mess, and I think it's a happy mess for me. I love doing this. This is a place that we, like, happily live at forever. Uh, and we're not going to evolve. We're not going to change.