Clint Korver, co-founder and managing director of Ulu Ventures, talks about managing uncertainties in venture capital investments. He describes his Vulcan mind-meld market mapping session with examples of both successful and failed startups.
Clint Korver, co-founder and managing director of Ulu Ventures, talks about managing uncertainties in venture capital investments. He describes his Vulcan mind-meld market mapping session with examples of both successful and failed startups.
Clint Korver: [00:00:00] basically don't tell us about, I mean, gardener numbers mean nothing to us. You tell us about a customer and and so forth and so on. And so this is part of, we want to sort of be as transparent as that. Well, when the, on the market side, for example, we have this thing called a market mapping session, the three hour session, it's like the Vulcan mind meld with the entrepreneurs where we do this bottoms up market analysis.
if you go to our website, you can find videos of how we do this. And so, so this is how we like to understand a company's business model, their market, and the risks associated with that.
Gopi Rangan: You are listening to the shore shot, entrepreneur,
the podcast for founders with ambitious ideas, venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision. Clint Grover is the co-founder and managing director of Ulu ventures. Silicon [00:01:00] Valley seed stage venture capital firm.
He combines data and intuition to minimize cognitive biases, reduce risk, and produce better, more consistent returns through his startup investments. Over the past 11 years, Clint and his partner, Miriam have invested in over 140 startups, including sofa, Palentier groups, blue river technology. Homelite better up figure and many more.
He's also an author of a book on ethical. Decision-making entitled ethics for the real world. In this book, he talks about his core value. No deception. We're going to talk about that in the episode today. Clint. Welcome to the short shot entrepreneur
Clint Korver: Gopi. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.
Gopi Rangan: Tell me about yourself,
Clint Korver: Clint. Sure. So I guess my entrepreneurial career started in and through school. I grew up in a small town in Iowa and every spring I'd sell seeds to my community. After [00:02:00] a couple of steps, along the way, I came out to Silicon Valley. I had Silicon Valley entrepreneurship technology square in my sites.
I came out to Stanford. I did a PhD in decision making under uncertainty. So, so then in the engineering school, And think of it as you don't have hardcore analytics, but AI machine learning, big data, that kind of thing. But just because you get the right answer out of the data, it doesn't mean anybody cares.
So the other half was sociology. Psychology. How do you connect insights from data to actual better business decisions? Then after Stanford, I started for Silicon Valley companies, all of which uses kind of decision analytic technology to help organizations make better decisions. And then started early ventures about 12 years ago.
And we brought that this decision-making, if you will infrastructure into how we run Uber ventures,
Gopi Rangan: when did you start all the
Clint Korver: ventures? Oh, we started in 2008. Actually my partner Miriam was an early employee at Google. And so that was our fund one, if you will. And, it's interesting. When we started at Hulu, I went around to some folks that are new in the [00:03:00] venture community.
So some people that had funded my prior companies, as some folks that I knew from school, that sort of thing who were friends of mine. And I said, well, we've, we've done very well at Google and we're going to start making investments in startup companies. How do you do it? If we want to be careful with our money, And it was a very unsatisfying set of conversations.
So they all said some version of, Oh, well, you need, tenacious entrepreneurs and big markets and differentiated technology. Okay. That sounds good. but I've got 10 companies that all look like that. How do you pick? And they all said some version of, well, you just have to have the magic.
Like really we've known each other for how long, and this is the best you've got for me. He's like, well, I say, well, I've kind of got this, I've got this analytic process thing, right. Quantify risk and that sort of thing. And I'm thinking of using that. And there were literally up to a person where like, Oh, Clint, Clint, Clint, you just don't get it.
Now we have some analysts run around that. Look at market size numbers once in a while, but nobody pays any attention to them. That's not really the way venture is done. Where are they going to be geniuses or idiots by the time we're done with this thing.
Gopi Rangan: Well, this is fascinating. I'm curious, like, is there someone that inspired you [00:04:00] to go down this path of thinking you have a very different style of, looking at
Clint Korver: the world?
So the, the person that got me on this decision-making path was Ron Howard. He was my thesis advisor at Stanford, and he was one of the inventors of this field called decision analysis. And, and he's kind of got an interesting history. There were actually out of world war II. There were a bunch of folks at MIT and some folks where he got his PhD and he was teaching.
They were trying to figure out how do we apply analytics to better business decisions? And sort of systems thinking came out of that and optimization theory and a lot of these sorts of things and what Ron noticed when he was working with clients and so forth. These are like CEOs of companies and whatnot is, at the end of the day analytics on things that were deterministic, just didn't help very much because what kept the CEOs up at night and, people in the military and that sort of thing, was it the uncertainty like, okay, what, what are these folks that we're going to fight and what are they going to do?
Or what's my competitor going to do, or what's going to happen to the market. And so it was really, and by the way, most of kind of analytic theories like optimization a lot of computer science and so forth. There's really not [00:05:00] designed to handle uncertainty. So he and I, and some other folks invented this field of decision analysis, which is how do we put structure around uncertainty and be able to make decisions in a robust way in the face of uncertainty.
So he was my thesis advisor at Stanford and, and this thinking is now a best practice in places like pharma, R and D. So all the major oil or pharma companies use this to manage their R and D portfolios. Same with oil and gas, all the big oil and gas companies. This is best practice in that industry. But it's sort of interesting.
It really hasn't moved beyond those two industries all that much. So I think we're the first people to bring it into venture capital
Gopi Rangan: venture capital has been the same for decades. Nothing really has changed in venture capital and it's not easy to make changes in how venture capital investors make decisions.
Like how do you use decision analysis in venture capital?
Clint Korver: Well, I guess, the first thing to think about is what, what makes decision-making hard in venture capital? And what, what are you trying to overcome here? And I'd say there's a couple of things that make it hard. So first it's uncertainty.
most [00:06:00] people don't appreciate, like just how uncertain venture is. So Cambridge associates, which tracks a lot of venture capital, data, they track the top a hundred deals every year, which represent essentially all the profit in the venture industry. This is out of 4,000 venture investments on average that are made every year.
So, to summarize it two and a half percent of venture investments have great returns. Everything else is financially uninteresting. So the whole game in venture is how do I find one of those two and a half percent kinds of investments? So that's like, I mean, and there's, there's very few industries that have that level of failure if you will.
So that's one thing that makes it challenging. Second thing that makes it challenging. there's a lot of folks in venture capital that think they're pretty smart. And as soon as you think you're smart, you're not very open to feedback and how you might be doing things, sort of like ineffectively.
So that ego actually in venture is one of the things that slows things down. the third thing is just lack of data. There's very little data on. Companies and successes and these sorts of things, and even your own experience. [00:07:00] So like a big venture firm venture partner will make one or two investments a year and it takes eight to 15 years to figure out if those investments are successful.
And so that feedback loop and that data in terms of you do something and is it successful? Was it not successful? There's just a huge length of time in there and as sparse data. So it's a very difficult learning environment and it makes it very difficult to do things differently.
Gopi Rangan: Well, I've, I've seen your models and I've actually used them.
And I'm a big fan of, your style of decision analysis and using that in venture capital. And my takeaway was that, venture capital investors. When they do due diligence and they look for answers in different places and they're often not optimized for where they should be looking, how they should be spending their time on due diligence.
And what I learned from the lessons that you've shared with me on decision analysis, that it, it helps you narrow down so that you can accept a few risks. And some of the risks that you want to go to the second and third level of detail, that's where you spend your time on due diligence and the rest of the risks.
You just can't do anything about it, or [00:08:00] it's not worth investigating further. So you optimize your limited time available on where you do due diligence. often VCs don't do that. they do due diligence on things that makes them feel happy, but it may not be the right way to make investment decisions.
This is all great. But I'm curious from an entrepreneur's perspective, what's different for them. What do they need to do to approach you compared to maybe when they talk to other VCs?
Clint Korver: Yeah, well, so, so we try to be very transparent about it to talk to us if you will. So if you go to the ULI ventures website, you'll see, we put a rubric up there on essentially how we make those initial filtering decisions.
So just to give you a sense of my world. So 3000 companies hit our radar screen in each year. Now, this could be the a hundred companies that are Y Combinator demo day, is inbound deals where, we've got no references. And it's also the folks where we've got relationships in that. Sorry.
So it's a, it's a pretty huge universe. And the first decision we make is which of these companies do we do a first meeting with? And we do that about 300 times a year. We'll [00:09:00] do a one hour first meeting. And then we do about 62nd meetings, if you will. And then we do about 30 sort of deep dives where we do our full on diligence process and we ended up making about 20 minutes assessment decisions.
So, so that's our funnel. And so, if you're an entrepreneur trying to talk to us at the very front of the funnel, the best way to talk to us is to go to our rubric on our webpage. And you'll hear the things we look for. Yeah. So first of all, we got like the Ulu fit. So we tend to do we're enterprise.
It focused. So we don't do as much in consumer. We don't do as much in life sciences. So I mean, there's, hopefully people will sort of self filter on this. We're also seed-stage. So if you've got a hundred million dollars in revenue, you're not going to be a good candidate for us. By the way. So our, our ideal candidate has maybe a couple of customers, so you've got some early market validation, but it doesn't have to be much more than that.
But we do like to see, a couple of customers, even if they're proof of concepts and then there's, a few other factors and so forth. But I mean, our goal is to make this as efficient, a process as possible for, the entrepreneurs and for us. [00:10:00] So that's why we, we hope entrepreneurs will both sell filter.
So come to us when it's a good fit for us. also when they're talking to us, talk to us in a language that works for us, Yeah. So talk about, the big idea, for example, and your competitive differentiation. We've got ways that we like people to talk to us about that. this is all in our rubric.
Gopi Rangan: So what's the outcome of this? How does this have an impact on your investments? Are you able to form stronger convictions on companies before anybody else does? Or are you able to get to more diverse entrepreneurs? What's the outcome of all the work that you put together?
Clint Korver: Yeah. So one of the goals here is to essentially we want to look at every possible entrepreneur as opposed to like the pattern matching.
So pattern matching is a very common approach in venture capital. And the problem with pattern matching is pattern matching is basically the same thing as being the poster child for cognitive bias. Right. So, so the pattern in venture for a while used to be a white male who drops out of the computer science department at Harvard or Stanford.
Right? So that's the pattern they're looking for. And it just [00:11:00] excludes like so many people. And in fact, we have equity. Diversity is an investment thesis for us. our notion is that basically talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not. the industry systematically overlooks, diverse entrepreneurs.
I mean, the, the numbers on these things are actually pretty much staggering. So if you look at like 2% of VCs are black or Hispanic, and 1% of VC dollars goes to black and Hispanic founders. And by the way, it's not any much better for women. It's like 3% of all venture capital dollars go to all women teams.
And if you look at teams with at least one female founder, so this can be five people. There's one female founder, 15% of VC dollars go to teams with a female founder. if you just sort of step back from that, there's, it's very difficult to find an industry that is, this is skewed towards white males.
And from our point of view, it's, it's like, okay, well, if the industry is systematically overlooking women and diverse founders, we should be able to generate superior returns by systematically looking for them. And so like when put out a [00:12:00] rubric and we have our, our analytic framework, our key goal there is we want to evaluate everybody using the same yardstick.
Yeah, there's there's are some studies out there that show that venture capitalists tend to ask men about upside potential. They tend to ask women about downside risk mitigation, by the way, this is true. If you're a male VC or a woman VC, you asked these, you have the same inherent bias, and we would argue the questions you ask are reflection of the criteria you're using to make decisions.
So the problem with that, we think a lot of VCs, if you don't write down your criteria, you can have different criteria for different kinds of entrepreneurs. And it's both, it makes it difficult for types of entrepreneurs, but more importantly, well, I think just as importantly, you're missing really great opportunities.
we think we're specifically designed to go find those kinds of entrepreneurial opportunities with minority and women entrepreneurs. The, the
Gopi Rangan: biases that you mentioned, the kind of questions people ask. I can relate to that. I would admit that I have my own style and I'm sure there are some flavors of themes that come out in my questions.
On [00:13:00] one side, I see that asking objective questions and removing these biases are great. But I also wonder, like, can you really make it so much, like a formula that you just plug in numbers and you get the answers and you take the human element out of investment decisions.
Clint Korver: Oh, there's, there's no way to take the human element out of it.
And in fact, when I think about decision analysis and my definition of decision analysis is a high-quality conversation leading to clarity of action. So it's all about the conversation, but the challenge of having a conversation without actually having structure to it is very difficult to identify your cognitive biases.
And it's very difficult to identify where you're not thinking clearly about something. So that's the reason we have exactly the same criteria. We have exactly the same questions we apply to all entrepreneurs. So we want to make sure that we're not, it's like, Oh, you're a woman entrepreneur. We're going to be more focused on your downside.
how you manage the downside, which it distorts, how you think about something. So we think actually the very simplest thing you can do to start to manage cognitive bias is to be very transparent about [00:14:00] your decision criteria and apply the same criteria to all your investment decisions.
Gopi Rangan: So you're consistent with your process.
So you don't use different questions for different groups of people. That way you can be fair to the entrepreneurs.
Clint Korver: Yeah. We're transparent, upfront, right? So we tell the entrepreneurs, this is how we make decisions. All right. So, so for example, like one key factor for us is like, we want to invest in companies that have really big market opportunities.
And we would like people to explain market opportunities to us from a bottoms up point of view, which is, Tell me about your ideal customer and what you're going to get paid from that ideal customer, your business model. now count how many other customers are like that. So very much bottoms up as opposed to, Gartner says, this is a $10 billion market.
So we like bottoms up market analysis and we like it to be a big number. if you're talking to us, basically, don't tell us about, I mean, Gartner numbers mean nothing to us. You tell us about a customer and and so forth and so on. And so this is all part of, we want to sort of be as.
Transparent is that a pot on the market side? For example, we have this thing called a market mapping session. The [00:15:00] three hour session is like the Vulcan mind meld with the entrepreneurs where we do this bottoms up market analysis. And if you go to our website, you can find videos of how we do this and so forth.
And so, I mean, so this is how we like to understand a company's business model, their market, and the risks associated with that.
Gopi Rangan: I've been through a couple of those market mapping sessions and they are deeply insightful. entrepreneurs go away learning a lot .
Clint Korver: actually one of our hopes here is that our diligence process is actually value adding to the entrepreneur and, and that, this is one of the ways that we compete. So if there's a, an entrepreneur we're trying to invest in and there's other VC is trying to invest at the same time, we'll often ask like, well, well, what was your experience like going through the diligence process?
Well, that's probably what your experience is going to be like after the diligence process is done. And so we think, That experience you have with us as we're going through diligence should give you an insight into how we like to work with entrepreneurs and how we can add value.
Gopi Rangan: Can you pick example of a startup that, maybe one or two examples and you can, can you show us like how you go through the process?
Clint Korver: [00:16:00] Sure. So, one company I like to talk about is crux. So crux was started by Tom Chavez. He was a, actually a PhD student with, with me over at Stanford. So I've known him for a long time. And Tom has a really interesting story. So he's his grandfather was an undocumented worker from Mexico. He grew up as a very poor family in New Mexico, but he had five siblings.
They all went to Harvard. So super bright, super accomplished family. And he was kind of hardcore data analytics guy. And he, when he started, he started a couple of companies or you started a company before crux sold it to Microsoft at Microsoft. He was working in their advertising area and he saw this idea, which is basically.
Even at Microsoft, Microsoft had a hard time competing with Google and Facebook because they just didn't have enough data around their customers to do effective, like, ad marketing, that sort of thing. And so he started a company called crux to basically do two things. The first was basically manage the regulatory requirements around managing customer data.
So they would sign up to like, the wall street journal, the New York times it would be e-commerce sites. So people [00:17:00] that had a lot of customer data, but they didn't have the scale of a Google or Facebook. So that was their first business. And then the second business is once they have enough data of the customers, we can aggregate, in a, in a very, regulatory compliant way.
All this customer data across all of our customers. And now we can do very effective, personalized marketing and be more effective with our ad. And so we can be sort of other folks out there can compete more effectively with the Googles and Facebooks. So Tom went through this process with us. And was there an interest in, we went through the analysis.
We're like he had two business models. The first business model was charged on a per customer basis for managing the customer data and the regulatory requirements. And that was an interesting business, but the real magic happened when they got to critical mass on the customer data and they could do more effective ad targeting.
And it was interesting. So the crux just sold by the way, to Salesforce for a billion dollars. So it was a, it was a big success for us. And I was talking to Tom afterwards and he was like you said, he pulled out that analysis that we did at the very beginning. And he said, basically nailed exactly where the value wasn't the business, which is [00:18:00] not regulatory piece.
But it was the critical mass of the data and being able to do more ad targeting. So that was called, a success story on multiple levels for us. It
Gopi Rangan: came through in the three hour Vulcan mind meld market mapping session.
Clint Korver: Yeah. And what was interesting about that too, is, so Tom had a term sheet from Excel at the time to lead a seed round and he ended up instead going with Ulu and a few other folks for a couple of reasons.
So one was because he wanted our, if you will. Help on the whole decision analysis, understanding the markets, figuring out how to set the company up for success, but it was also on the diversity side. So, I mean, so Tom wanted to basically, have other folks associated with his company that were like-minded in the sense where diversity was important.
And by the way, Xcel came in later and led the series a and so forth. So they were, important partners down the road. But, but we think this diversity as a focus in the company actually is a win for many folks.
Gopi Rangan: Can you comment on the current portfolio and how diverse it is? What kind of entrepreneurs do you have?[00:19:00]
Clint Korver: Yeah, so, so we track diversity in a number of dimensions. So we look at, for example, if you look at women's CEOs, for example, so in the industry right now, venture funded companies with a woman, CEO is about 5% for Ulu fund to our most recent fund we're at 28%. So we're five times the industry average on women CEOs.
If you look at underrepresented minorities, so black and Hispanic CEOs, the industry is less than 1% of us venture funded companies have an underrepresented minority as CEO and we're at 10%. So we're 10 times the industry average. Well,
Gopi Rangan: these are amazing statistics. I hope this continues in the future and there are more opportunities for brilliant entrepreneurs to work with.
Brilliant PCs and more interestingly, I want, I hope that other VCs also learn from this experience. There's a lot of insights here that could be useful for the whole venture capital industry. And I hope through this podcast, we can get the voice heard by many people. I'm curious to ask you about another topic, which is a little [00:20:00] controversial.
You talk about reserves. When you make an investment. Initially you use many on many VCs, usually reserve either the same amount or sometimes even double the amount for future investments. And you have a different take on that. And it's a, it's a quite a controversial take.
Clint Korver: Yeah. So, so this is one of the more controversial aspects, especially when we talk to like, LPs the people that invest in VCs.
So that the typical story is if I'm a venture capitalist, Typical VC here in Silicon Valley, I'm going to invest a dollar in every dollar invest in company I'm going to reserve or hold it in the side, like one, two or $3 for follow on investments. And we would argue, so it would just put like, sort of like the investor head on for a moment, the story for LPs and how we generate returns.
It's like all of those reserve dollars we would argue are now constrained in terms of the investments they might make and constrained. And investments usually means poor risk return. The other thing, these reserve dollars are investing in later stage rounds of companies. And by definition are getting later stage risk return.
If you look at [00:21:00] early stage risk return, early stage returns over 40 years in venture, capital's about 22% IRR. Late-stage returns are about 12% IRR. So all of those reserved dollars we would argue is going to give you less IRR, more constrained decisions. And, basically it's gonna hurt your returns.
So the way Ulu takes it looks at it is we've got this analytic process for every time we write a check, we're looking for a 10 X probability weighted multiple uninvested capital. So a lot of VC say, if I put a dollar in, I want $10 back, I want a 10 X, multiple. And through our process of evaluating the uncertainties and so forth, we put a probability of waiting around that now, because we've got this structure that we applied to.
Every time we write a check, we effectively don't have reserves. And we say every dollar in our fund is going to go to the very best opportunity in a risk weighted return point of view. Oh, by the way, that might be a follow on round. So pro-rata is important to us. We like to do follow on rounds, but if a follow on round comes to us, it has to pencil out or we don't invest.
Now let's look at it from the [00:22:00] entrepreneur's point of view. Some entrepreneurs are a little worried about this initially. And so we say, well, let's walk through three scenarios. So first the success scenario. So, we invest in your seed. You do great Sequoia wants to lead. You're a, by the way, the success scenario, oftentimes the price is bid up pretty dramatically and we find just historically prices go up a lot faster than risk comes down.
So in the success scenario, we're probably not following on. But that's good for everybody. Sequoia doesn't want to share their aide with anybody or Greylock or benchmark or Andreessen that they want all of that for themselves. So they're actually more than happy for us not to do our prorata and you're in great hands.
So there's no downside to anybody for us not doing our pro rata there. If we look at the failure scenario, well, even those with big reserve funds are not going to invest in you. If things are not going well and you're not getting customers and that sort of thing. And we're probably having the conversation where it's like, well, it'd be better to spend your time somewhere else.
Now the really interesting scenario though, is in the middle scenario, and this is happening more and more in the seed stage, where do a seed round company does a reasonably well say get to a million in revenue. You're [00:23:00] an ARR if you're a SAS company, but anymore the series ABC, you'd like to see 2 million in ARR.
So you're, so you're doing well, but not well enough to get to that next round. So then there's now this post to seed, which is a very common step in the capital formation process. And we do a lot of posts because essentially we say, well, we've seen you take risk off the table. So that's improving our, our analytics and Oh, by the way, the big guys have not come in and bid your price up yet.
So it's a reasonable kind of step up from a price point of view. There's a lot of risk taken off the table. So we're much more likely to do a post seed round and Oh, by the way, we are happy to lead to post seed rounds. So a lot of VCs, especially ones with reserves, they're concerned about rightfully so.
It's like, well, we don't want to like put it in and money at the wrong valuation. And we don't want to set the valuation because we want the market to do that. So a lot of VCs won't want to lead that next round, especially seed round seed companies. Whereas we're happy to lead that post seed round. And so, net, net, we think this works out well for entrepreneurs and it works out well for our LPs [00:24:00]
Gopi Rangan: yep.
Post seed or seed plus pre those rounds are a little difficult because. The insiders are the only ones that really have the conviction and they've seen the story and they are the ones that are in best position to make the decision to invest. But it's really hard for an outsider when the metrics are not fully there for a real air round, it becomes difficult for the entrepreneur.
Now they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard
Clint Korver: place, and there's a hand full of seed funds that are focused on this post seed. I think it's a really, it's a, it's a great place. I mean, the market really needs more post seed funds.
Gopi Rangan: You, you talked about a success story with crooks. Now, are there some examples that you can share with us where things didn't really go well and how you deal with it?
Clint Korver: Yeah. so, so I've got this company and I was like, I think the entrepreneur would be okay. We put out a company called Sartre entrepreneur out of the Stanford business school or applying analytics to marketing. This is for small and medium sized companies.
And it's the entrepreneur had spent a [00:25:00] couple of years being the head of revenue at an e-commerce company. So, I mean, they had deep domain expertise and they partnered up with somebody at a Google who was working on essentially kind of natural language search. And so their product was going to be no, I'm running an e-commerce company.
I want to figure out, well, how did my promotion go on Monday? And so you're gonna ask the computer's like, well, how'd my promotion go on Monday. And it would interpret that and give you back results. So as opposed to doing SQL queries and all this complicated stuff, so very clever idea, deep domain expertise, great technical support.
And we led the seed. They got a couple of customers. They had some revenue, but they just couldn't get that much momentum. So then they pivoted over into insurance and it turns out there's insurance data that gets passed back between brokers and insurance companies and a lot of problems with all that.
And so it was a very similar domain and they also, they got a couple of customers. They paid them a little bit, but they just couldn't quite break out. So I sat down with the entrepreneur and I said, Hey, look, I mean, but at this time we'd put like [00:26:00] $600,000 in they'd had maybe a hundred or 200,000 from someplace else.
And so, so we were the biggest investor and I was meeting with the entrepreneur on a regular basis. And after about a year and a half of that, I just sat down and I said, Hey, look, you're super talented guy. And is this really the best use of your time? from our point of view, you gave it a good shot.
I mean, you took a couple of swings at it, by the way, he was taking like, partial salary and all this. I mean, he was doing lots of things to make the money last. And, and we sat down and said, Hey, look, I don't see a path to success here. And so from our point of view, if you want to wrap this up right now and go do something else, we're totally fine.
By the way, if, if for your own reasons, do you want to keep going with this? we're, we're okay with that too, but I'm not going to be spending a ton of time with you cause I just don't see a path to success. And, and it was a huge relief to the entrepreneur. I mean, really, really, if the entrepreneur hadn't raised capital, they probably would've packed it up a few months before this.
And they were keep going because they had, they felt a sense of obligation to us as an investors. And so this all comes from a kind of our process where our focus on what can move the needle, what makes the most difference. And as soon [00:27:00] as this seems like a company just can't get there. We have called this tough conversation with the entrepreneur.
And like I said said, a lot of times it's like the relief conversation from the entrepreneur because we're big boys and girls, right? I mean, so we're gonna make a bunch of investments. They're going to be a bunch of zeros at the end of the day. And, we can handle that. And, it's more difficult from the entrepreneur's point of view because you only have one shot at it.
But then it's like, you're watching your one shot and your time from my point of view should be spent on, the highest value added activities. And as soon as the startup is not that, then they shouldn't be doing it.
Gopi Rangan: I've heard you say, and I do the same that I tell entrepreneurs. Now, if you think that, It's time to pull the plug.
It's better to do it. And it's okay to lose one X on the returns versus spending time where if it's possible to generate 10 X returns, that's a lot more worthy of your time. And as an investment, I want to switch to another topic. I want to ask you about, community activities that you're involved in, which non-profit organization are you passionate about
Clint Korver: and why?[00:28:00]
Grinnell college would be that for me. So this was my undergraduate institution. It's a small liberal arts school in Iowa. And what I find inspiring about it, it's a great academic institution, but as, as a real commitment to social justice, And this is true. So this was know Cornell was started like in the 1840s and it was part of the underground railroad.
So this is social justice was really baked into it from the very beginning. And it's also has, like, if you look at, colleges that support. Underprivileged students. They've got, they're like second in the nation to, on Pell grant eligible students. So these are like, this is a measure of the wealth of the students that come in.
And they're also one of the few colleges out there. That's need-blind admissions and meet full demonstrated need. And so they go into places where, kids don't think there's any way that they could afford college and say, Hey, look, if you can handle the academics, we're going to make it work for you.
I was a trustee there for 16 years and I was the board chair for four. Well, it's
Gopi Rangan: great to see that you have an active [00:29:00] role to play with your Alma mater. And I know that you're involved with many other organizations as well, but thank you so much for sharing a lot of your stories. I really liked the phrase that you mentioned talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not. So we need to be fair to people so that they have the same opportunities as everybody else. And venture capital has historically been an industry that favors white male in a very, very lopsided way.
You have methods that hopefully will correct that. My
Clint Korver: partner, Miriam Rivera is really an inspiration for me on this too. And she's not only my partner at hula ventures, but she's also my wife. And I mean, I think she's like the kind of person we're hoping to support in our, in our company. Like her parents were migrant farm workers.
She grew up in Chicago, single mother, eighth grade education. And she was a first in her family to go to school. And she ended up getting four degrees from Stanford. She was an early employee at Google. One of their first internally promoted vice presidents helped them grow from 85 million to 10 billion and then was on the Stanford board of trustees.
So I mean, her distance traveled is just an [00:30:00] incredible inspiration for me and in my mind, and she helps, she really brings a sense of empathy and heart to venture. That, when we talk about our diversity investment thesis and removing cognitive biases and so forth, actually one of the best ways to do that is to have a diverse point of view on the team, helping you make the decisions.
Gopi Rangan: Yeah. I've heard her stories on how in her household, when she was a child. Yeah. Money was managed or not well managed. And that had an impact on everybody's life. This is a, it's a very powerful story. I'm so glad that I have you and Miriam in my inner circle. So I'm looking forward to collaborating with you more and doing more deals together.
Yes.
Clint Korver: Well, I appreciate being on your show. Guppy. Thank you for the time.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you very much, Clint. Thank you for listening to the shore shot entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real life stories about early believers, supporting ambitious entrepreneurs. Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review.
Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look [00:31:00] forward to catching you at the next episode.