From BoxGroup to Benchmark and Back | Greg Rosen, Partner at BoxGroup | Ep. 22

you are better off just focusing on the thing that you are outlier in. And like, I think the biggest thing is just figuring out what that is.

Which of the archetypes you are, and then-

Which of the archetypes. Like, if, if you have, like, hyper-networker, philosopher, uh, and specialist, like, there's probably more, but, like, of those three-

Yeah

... like, which one are you?

Yeah.

Where do you have an advantage? And then just focus all your energy and effort on being amazing there.

[music] All right, Greg, I am very happy to be here with you, and I'm gonna give a little disclaimer that I cajoled you into doing this, and you normally wouldn't, but, uh, you're one of my best friends, and so you're doing this favor for coming on.

[chuckles]

So thanks for doing this. Is this, like, your first podcast?

This is my first podcast. I heard this is like a small boutique. No one really knows about it, right?

It's a small little thing, and you agreed to do it once, and then you're, you're never-

Never again.

Never again.

Yeah. Don't invite me back.

Okay, so I wanna start with one of the things that you've taught me a lot about, which is the idea of collaborative venture. What's interesting about it to me is it used to be the case in venture that s- funds were smaller and collaborative was, like, the nature of how the whole world worked, and funds would, like, sort of, like, team up and, like, do rounds together. And then at some point in the last ten, 15 years, I think it swung to a place where funds got huge, people got sharp elbows, people wanted lots of ownership and whatever, and so a lot of that went away. Um, and so in some sense, that declined. But Box is, like, bigger than ever, doing more than ever. And so I wanted to just start by hearing your overall view on this, like, collaborative venture model.

Yeah, collaborative venture is hard, um, and almost by definition, it has to be anti-scale in certain dimensions, right? And so for us, like, if we started leading seed rounds or Series-A rounds, and, and certainly beyond that, we would lose our collaborative Switzerland nature.

Yep.

So instead, what we said is, "Okay, that is an easy way to scale capital, is start leading rounds, writing larger and larger checks." Um, and that's what others have done and why it's, like, hard to stay collaborative.

That's, like, usually what happens, right?

That's usually what happens, right? Everyone starts a new fund and, uh, or new firm, and they say: "We're gonna be super collaborative, we're gonna work together," and then all of a sudden, they start leading one, two, three deals, and the second that happens, it's this binary moment, right?

You either make it or you don't?

Ro- because if you're, if you're col... If we're collaborative, right, we're BoxGroup, and then let's say we make 80 investments a year, and let's say we only lead two or three seeds of that. Now, when I'm sharing a deal with you or anyone else in the market, you're gonna be thinking in the back of your mind, "Is this fully being shared, all the deals, or is it the one or two deals that they're leading and actually most excited about I'm not getting shared, I'm not seeing?" And so it's this binary moment that, like, the second you start leading those rounds, you just can't be Switzerland. And for us, we have been, you know, since the beginning of BoxGroup, f- you know, 15-plus years ago to now, it is like we are not doing that. We are Switzerland, and, and, and that's, I think, what's enabled us to, like-