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.
Don't tell us about Gartner numbers. They mean nothing to us. Tell us about a customer and so forth and so on. And so this is all part of, we want to sort of be as transparent as possible. It's like when on the market side, for example, we have this thing called a market mapping session. It's a 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 forth. So this is how we like to understand a company's business model, their market, and the risks associated with that.
[00:00:28] Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur,- a 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 Korver is the co founder and managing director of Ulu Ventures. Silicon 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 SoFi, Palantir, Krux, Blue River Technology, HomeLight, BetterUp, Figure, and many more. He is 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 Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
[00:01:44] Clint Korver: Gopi, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.
[00:01:47] Gopi Rangan: Tell me about yourself, Clint.
[00:01:49] Clint Korver: Sure. So I guess my entrepreneurial career started in elementary school. I grew up in a small town in Iowa and every spring I'd sell seeds to my community.
After 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, uh, did a PhD in decision making under uncertainty. So this was in the engineering school and think of it as half 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 four Silicon Valley companies, all of which uses kind of decision analytic technology to help organizations make better decisions.
And then started Ulu Ventures about 12 years ago. And we brought that decision making infrastructure into how we run Ulu Ventures.
[00:02:45] Gopi Rangan: When did you start Ulu Ventures?
[00:02:47] Clint Korver: Uh, we started in 2008 actually. My partner, Miriam, was an early employee at Google, and so that was our fund one. And it's interesting, we started at ulu.
I went around to some folks that I knew in the venture community, so some people that had funded my prior companies, some folks that I knew from school, that sort of thing. These were friends of mine. And I said, "well, we've done very well at Google and we're gonna start making investments in startup companies.
How do you do it? 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." We were like, "really, we've known each other for how long, and this is the best you've got for me?" It's like, well, I say, well, I've kind of got this, I've got this analytic process thing where I quantify risk and that sort of thing.
And I'm thinking of using that. And they were literally up to a person. We're 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.
[00:03:49] Gopi Rangan: Yes.
[00:03:49] Clint Korver: We're either going to be geniuses or idiots by the time we're done with this thing.
[00:03:53] Gopi Rangan: This is fascinating. I'm curious, like, is there someone that inspired you to go down this path of thinking? You have a very different style of looking at the world.
[00:04:03] Clint Korver: 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 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 and 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 the uncertainty. Like, "okay, what are these folks that we're going to fight going to do? What's my competitor going to do? Or what's going to happen to the market?"
And by the way, most of kind of analytic theories, like optimization, a lot of computer science and so forth, is really not designed to handle uncertainty. So he 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, my thesis advisor at Stanford, and this thinking is now best practice in places like pharma R&D. So all the major pharma companies use this to manage their R&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.
[00:05:29] 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?
[00:05:42] Clint Korver: Well, I guess the first thing to think about is like, what makes decision making hard in venture capital? What are we trying to like overcome here? And I'd say there's a couple of things that make it hard. So first it's uncertainty.
Most 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 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, 2.5 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 2.5 percent kinds of investments? 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 on 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. So like a big venture firm, venture partner will make one or two investments a year and it takes 8 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 or is it not successful? There's just a huge length of time in there and a sparse data. So it's a very difficult learning environment and it makes it very difficult to do things differently.
[00:07:13] Gopi Rangan: 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 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?
[00:08:15] Clint Korver: Yeah, well, so we try to be very transparent about how to talk to us, if you will. So if you go to the Ulu Ventures website, you'll see, we've put a rubric up there on essentially how we make those initial filtering decisions. So just to give you a sense of my world, 3000 companies hit our radar screen each year, you know, this could be the a hundred companies at a Y Combinator demo day, or it's inbound deals where we've got no references.
And it's also the folks where we've got relationships and that sort of thing. So I'd say 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 do a one hour first meeting. And then we do about 60 second meetings, if you will.
And then we do about 30 sort of deep dives where we do our full on diligence process. And we end up making about 20 investment decisions. 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. So first of all, we've got like the Ulu fit. So we're enterprise IT focused. So we don't do as much in consumer. We don't do as much in life sciences. 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, our ideal candidate has maybe a couple of customers. So, they'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 our goal is to make this as efficient a process as possible for the entrepreneurs and for us.
So that's why we, hope entrepreneurs will both self 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. 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.
[00:10:03] Gopi Rangan: . 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?
[00:10:19] Clint Korver: Yeah, so one of the goals here is 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. 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,
[00:10:42] Gopi Rangan: right?
[00:10:44] Clint Korver: So that's the pattern they're looking for. And it just excludes like so many people. And in fact, we have actually diversity as 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 numbers on these things are actually pretty much staggering.
So if you look at like 2 percent of VCs are black or Hispanic, and 1 percent of VC dollars goes to black and Hispanic founders. And by the way, it's not even, it's not much better for women. It's like 3 percent 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, you know, five people is one female founder, 15 percent of VC dollars go to teams with a female founder. If you just sort of step back from that, it's very difficult to find an industry that is this skewed towards white males. And from our point of view, 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 we put out a rubric and we have our analytic framework, our key goal there is we want to evaluate everybody using the same yardstick. There's 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 women VC. You have the same inherent bias. And we would argue the questions you ask are a reflection of the criteria you're using to make decisions. So the problem with it, 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 just as importantly, you're missing really great opportunities. We think we're specifically designed to go find those kinds of opportunities with minority and women entrepreneurs.
[00:12:33] Gopi Rangan: The 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 one side, I see that asking objective questions and removing these biases are great, but I also wonder, 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?
[00:12:57] Clint Korver: Oh, there's, there's no way to take the human element out of it. And in fact, 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 it's 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 that the very simplest thing you can do to start to manage cognitive bias is to be very transparent about your decision criteria and apply the same criteria to all your investment decisions.
[00:13:47] 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.
[00:13:55] Clint Korver: Yeah. And we're transparent up front, right? So we tell the entrepreneurs, this is how we make decisions. So for example, like one key factor for us is, we want to invest in companies that have really big market opportunities, and we 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 analyses and we like it to be a big number. If you're talking to us, basically don't tell us about Gartner numbers mean nothing to us, you know, tell us about a customer and so forth and so on.
And so this is all, you know, part of, we want to sort of be as transparent as possible. It's like when 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.
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.
[00:14:57] Gopi Rangan: I've been through a couple of those market mapping sessions and they are deeply insightful.
Entrepreneurs go away learning a lot. Actually.
[00:15:04] Clint Korver: One of our hopes here is that our diligence process is actually value adding to the entrepreneur. And so, this is one of the ways that we compete. So if there's an entrepreneur we're trying to invest in and there's other VCs trying to invest at the same time, we'll often ask " 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.
[00:15:32] Gopi Rangan: Can you pick an example of a startup that maybe one or two examples and can you show us like how you go through the process?
[00:15:38] Clint Korver: Sure. So one company I like to talk about is Krux. So Krux was started by Tom Chavez. He was actually a PhD student with me over at Stanford. So I've known him for a long time. And Tom has a really interesting story. 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. Super bright, super accomplished family. And he was a hardcore data analytics guy. He started a company before Krux, sold it to Microsoft. At Microsoft he was working in their advertising area. And he saw this idea, which is basically, 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 Krux 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 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 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 ads. And so other folks out there can compete more effectively, like with the Googles and Facebooks. So Tom went through this process with us, and it was very interesting.
We went through the analysis. He had two business models. The first business model was charged on a per customer basis for manage 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 Krux just sold by the way to Salesforce for a billion dollars. It was a big success for us. And I was talking to Tom afterwards and he's like, he said, he pulled out that analysis that we did at the very beginning. And he said, basically nailed exactly where the value was in the business, which is not regulatory piece, but it was the critical mass of the data and being able to do more ad targeting.
So that was a success story on multiple levels for us.
[00:17:40] Gopi Rangan: It came through in the three hour Vulcan mind meld market mapping session.
[00:17:46] Clint Korver: Yeah, and what was interesting about that too is, so Tom had a term sheet from Excel at the time to lead his 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 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 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, Accel came in later and led the Series A and so forth. So they were important partners down the road, but we think this diversity as a focus in the company actually is a win for many folks.
[00:18:24] Gopi Rangan: Can you comment on the current portfolio and how diverse it is? What kind of entrepreneurs do you have?
[00:18:30] Clint Korver: Yeah. So we track diversity in a number of dimensions. If you look at women CEOs, for example, in the industry right now, venture funded companies with a woman CEO is about 5%. For ULU Fund 2, 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 percent of U. S. venture funded companies have an underrepresented minority as CEO, and we're at 10%. So we're 10 times the industry average.
[00:19:02] Gopi Rangan: These are amazing statistics. I hope this continues in the future.
There are more opportunities for brilliant entrepreneurs to work with brilliant VCs. And more interestingly, 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 controversial. You talk about reserves. When you make an investment initially, 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.
It's a quite a controversial take.
[00:19:40] Clint Korver: Yeah. So this is one of the more controversial aspects, especially when we talk to like LPs, the people that invest in VCs. The typical story is if I'm a venture capitalist, typical VC here in Silicon Valley, for every dollar invest in company, I'm going to reserve or hold in the side, like one, two or 3 dollars for follow on investments. And we would argue, it's like all of those reserve dollars are now constrained in terms of the investments they might make and constrained in 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 early stage risk return, early stage returns over 40 years in venture capital is about 22 percent IRR late stage returns are about 12 percent IRR.
So all of those reserve dollars, we would argue is going to give you less IRR, more constrained decisions, and basically it's going to hurt your returns. So the way Ulu looks at is we've got this analytic process for every time we write a check, we're looking for a 10X probability weighted multiple on invested capital.
So a lot of VCs say, if I put a dollar in, I want 10 back, I want a 10x multiple. And through our process of evaluating the uncertainties and so forth, we put a probability weighting around that. Now, because we've got this structure that we apply 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 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 your 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 A with anybody or Greylock or Benchmark or Andreessen. They want all of that for themselves. So they're actually more than happy for us not to do our pro rata.
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 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 $1 million in revenue, you're an ARR if you're a SaaS company, but anymore, the series A VC would like to see $2 million in ARR.
So you're doing well, but not well enough to get to that next round. So then there's now this post seed, which is a very common step in the capital formation process. And we do a lot of post seeds because essentially we say, well, we've seen you take risk off the table. So that's improving 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. It'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, they're like, "well, we don't want to like put in 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 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.
[00:23:16] Gopi Rangan: Yeah. Post seed or seed plus, pre A, 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. It's really hard for an outsider when the metrics are not fully there for a real A round. It becomes difficult for the entrepreneur. They're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
[00:23:42] Clint Korver: Yeah, and there's a handful of seed funds that are focused on this post seed. I think it's a really great place. I mean, the market really needs more post seed funds.
[00:23:52] Gopi Rangan: You talked about a success story with Krux.
Now, are there some examples that you can share with us where things didn't really go well and how you deal with it?
[00:24:00] Clint Korver: So I've got this company and I think the entrepreneur would be okay when we put it out. It's a company called Soro. It's a entrepreneur out of the Stanford Business School applying analytics to marketing.
This is for small and medium sized companies. And the entrepreneur had spent a couple of years being the head of revenue at a e commerce company. So, I mean, they had deep domain expertise and they partnered up with somebody out of Google who was working on essentially kind of natural language search.
And so their product was going to be, you know, "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, " how did 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 gets passed back between brokers and insurance companies and a lot of problems with all that. And so it was a very similar domain.
They got a couple of customers, they paid them a little bit, but you know, they just couldn't quite break out. So I sat down with the entrepreneur and at this time we'd put like $600, 000 in, they'd had maybe a hundred or 200, 000 from someplace else. 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 a super talented guy. 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 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, you want to keep going with this, we're okay with that too, but I'm not going to be spending a ton of time with you because I just don't see a path to success."
It was a huge relief to the entrepreneur. I mean, if the entrepreneur hadn't raised capital, they probably would have packed it up a few months before this. And they kept going because they had, they felt a sense of obligation to us as 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 as it seems like a company just can't get there, we have called this tough conversation with the entrepreneur. And like I said, a lot of times it's like the relief conversation from the entrepreneur, because we're big boys and girls. I mean, so we're going to 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 want your one shot and your time, from my point of view, should be spent on the highest value added activities.
And as soon as a startup is not that, then they shouldn't be doing it.
[00:26:40] Gopi Rangan: I've heard you say this and I do the same that I tell entrepreneurs, if you think that it's time to pull the plug, it's better to do it. And it's okay to lose 1x on the returns versus spending time where if it's possible to generate 10x 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 nonprofit organization are you passionate about and why?
[00:27:10] Clint Korver: 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 it has a real commitment to social justice.
Grinnell was started like in the 1840s and it was part of the underground railroad. Social justice was really baked into it from the very beginning. And it also has like, if you look at the colleges that support underprivileged students, they're like second in the nation on Pell Grant eligible students.
So 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 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.
[00:28:03] Gopi Rangan: It's great to see that you have an active 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. 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.
[00:28:34] Clint Korver: My partner, Miriam Rivera, is really an inspiration for me on this too.
And she's not only my partner at Ulu Ventures, but she's also my wife. She's like the kind of person we're hoping to support in our company. Like her parents were migrant farm workers. She grew up in Chicago with a single mother who had eighth grade education. And she was the 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 she was on the Stanford board of trustees. So, I mean, her distance traveled is just an incredible inspiration for me.
She really brings a sense of empathy and heart to venture that when we talk about a 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.
[00:29:21] Gopi Rangan: Yeah, I've heard her stories on how in her household when she was a child money was managed or not well managed and that had an impact on everybody's life. 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.
[00:29:38] Clint Korver: Yes. Well, I appreciate being on your show, Gopi. Thank you for the time.
[00:29:42] Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure 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.
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