Lorenzo Thione, Managing Director at Gaingels, shares his journey from Italy to the U.S. and the pivotal life event inspiring his advocacy for inclusive venture capital representation. He delves into Gaingels' investment philosophy, emphasizing its focus on supporting diverse founders and investors. Lorenzo also offers insights for today's founders, spotlighting game-changing technologies like artificial intelligence.
Lorenzo Thione, Managing Director at Gaingels, shares his journey from Italy to the U.S. and the pivotal life event inspiring his advocacy for inclusive venture capital representation. He delves into Gaingels' investment philosophy, emphasizing its focus on supporting diverse founders and investors. Lorenzo also offers insights for today's founders, spotlighting game-changing technologies like artificial intelligence.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
[3:50] Underrepresented communities of founders and investors significantly influence the growth of the venture capital ecosystem
[9:26] How Gaingels provides universal access to the wealth creation potential of venture capital
[16:59] Cloud technology revolutionized starting companies in the last decade, while artificial intelligence is the current game changer
[24:09] Principles behind Gaingels investment approach
[28:53] Why founders should establish relationships with investors before pitching
The non-profit organization that Lorenzo is passionate about: StartOut
About Lorenzo Thione
Lorenzo Thione is a Managing Director at Gaingels. He is a serial entrepreneur and investor, known for his diverse contributions at the intersection of technology, art, commerce, and social impact. A Tony Award-winning Broadway producer for "Hadestown" and co-creator/producer of the George Takei musical "Allegiance," he also directed/produced its record-breaking 2016 film. Lorenzo co-founded Social Edge and previously co-founded Powerset (acquired by Microsoft in 2008) and Artify. A prominent LGBT advocate, he co-founded and is board chair emeritus of StartOut, a leading non-profit fostering LGBT entrepreneurship. Lorenzo is an active investor, board member, and advisor to numerous startups.
About Gaingels
Gaingels is a Vermont-based LGBTQIA+/Allies private investment syndicate, dedicated to fostering diversity and inclusion within the venture capital ecosystem. With over 2000 individual members, including accredited investors, Gaingels actively supports innovation economy companies committed to building diverse and inclusive leadership. Their unique approach involves members contributing beyond financial investment, providing introductions, advice, and connections to portfolio companies. Some of the companies it has backed include: Shimmer, Leap AI, Base Operations, Overplay, Abbey Cross, Zette, Magma, Cambium, kinship among others.
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How do you make the entire venture capital ecosystem one where more people have more opportunities and more access to be represented, visible, to have agency in how businesses are created, in how businesses are governed, and in ultimately have a seat at the table when it comes to reaping the benefits of this wealth creation engine - meaning that they also stand on the side of the investors?
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. Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. My guest today is Lorenzo Thione. He is a managing director at Gaingels.
We're going to talk to him about his investment philosophies. Gaingels is a venture capital firm that aims to influence social change through venture investing. What does that mean? What kind of startups does he like to invest in? How does he choose these companies and what kind of founders appeal to him and why does he say no sometimes or maybe often? We're going to talk to him about all of these things.
Lorenzo, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
Lorenzo Thione: Hi Gopi. Thanks for having me.
Gopi Rangan: Let's start with you. Tell us about yourself. You grew up in Italy and in the middle of college you moved to the U. S. How did that happen?
Lorenzo Thione: Yeah, I grew up in Milan, which I think to a lot of people sounds like super fabulous, but I think there's probably some kind of innate desire or drive that some people have about leaving whatever town that it is that they grew up in it.
It doesn't matter. Like it can be someone else's dream hometown and you'll just want to get the hell out. And you know, it was not that there was any particular reason. It's just that everything that I was looking up to (this was like the late nineties) in terms of doing professionally and otherwise just really seemed to revolve around the United States.
And I grew up with a healthy dose of fascination for the U.S. entrepreneurial system and definitely was entrenched in technology from an early age, self taught coder and so on. So in '99, I got this scholarship for one out of a few U. S. universities to do what was supposed to be a year of like exchange study.
And amongst the universities that were available, I actually chose the University of Texas at Austin, which is a great school. And if you had asked me at the time, probably I would on a conscious level have responded, "yeah, I'm coming back in a year." But clearly people around me knew me better than I knew myself, and knew me well enough to say, "you're not coming back."
And within a year, in fact, I had made plans to enroll into their graduate program and to then start working under a professor there. That's part of the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and then sort of went on with my master's degree and graduated from UT Austin, and then from there, I moved to the West Coast.
First, uh, yeah, I was research scientist at Xerox part for a couple of years before starting my own business.
Gopi Rangan: I see that you embraced change very early and you were looking for greener pastures and you came to the US, you became a research scientist and eventually you had a stint with entrepreneurship and eventually you became a venture capital investor.
Yeah. Why is venture capital investing? Interesting to you.
Lorenzo Thione: I think what happened and it's probably a path that's come into many other entrepreneurs-turned-investors is there is an enormous amount of terms of art and knowledge that revolves around private investing and venture investing, angel investing that I It was not in my mind at the time vocabulary. You know, I was very much in the technology side of things. I was doing artificial intelligence at a time when you really shouldn't be telling people that you were doing artificial intelligence because it was a bad word.
But we were building a lot of the components and systems that Trying to solve a lot of the problems that we either now give for granted or are seeing the light of day just kind of with the modern AI revolution of the last, you know, two to five years. And first I started learning about this aspect while raising money for my company.
So I started this AI powered web search company called Powerset back in 2003. Alongside two co founders, one of which was very experienced in the world of VC. He had been an entrepreneur in residence at a VC fund. And I entered that experience a lot like I entered the experience of moving to a different country, which is like, "well, what's the worst that can happen? I'm going to learn a whole lot of things. If it goes well, great. If it doesn't, I will just have a bigger bag of tools that I can apply to my next thing. And so I kind of dove into head first and learned a whole lot about the process of raising money from sitting across from venture capitalists, right?
What does it mean to create a pitch deck and pitch it; demos and answering questions and sort of the right positioning and understanding what it is that people are looking for; building a report with investors that goes beyond the transactional nature of one meeting, one pitch, one term sheet.
And by the time we sold the business, I had had the experience of being on the board of a company alongside venture capitalists and had seen what it meant to manage a venture investment from the side of the board seat. And by the time we sold the business to Microsoft in 2008 and then integrated it into what would become Bing, I knew that there was a lot I could give to other entrepreneurs as a mentor, as an advisor that I had learned and did a number of different things that kind of went in the direction of doing or helping me do so. And one of which was to become a very active angel investor, sort of newfound means investing and this knowledge had accumulated as well as the connections and the links to so many founders and entrepreneurs within the ecosystem.
I started making investments. I invested in many of the companies that my own team at my company would then go on and start, which was a great way of both. Actually, great investment strategy because they all, you know, mostly did really great as well as a great way to return some of what I had gotten in terms of experience, in terms of knowledge and mentorship and support from the people that had helped me when I had gotten my start.
And then the second thing I did was very actively involved in the ecosystem building or the community building within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. I co-founded an organization called StartOut. When I had moved to Austin, one of the changes that had come actually in close succession to the attack on the twin towers after September 11 is I kind of found within myself to come out.
I had not been out until that time. You know, it was something that was both kind of catalyzed by being in a new environment, but also I think that there was a certain amount of self reflection introspection that comes when faced with gigantic events, like September 11th, that let you ponder your mortality and what you value in life and authenticity.
And so I did, I came out, which obviously was not something I regretted in any way, but it allowed me - when the time came after the acquisition - to basically think about how that experience and the experience of having started a company and having managed a company and having interacted with investors. Now, remember, this is 2008. It was the year that California actually passed Prop 8, which was a constitutional ban on same sex marriage. So the tides had not yet quite turned to the extent that It may have seemed apparent in the late teens, right? 2017, 18 with Obergefell and everything else. And we created this organization to support the education, mentorship, connection to others, and sort of, uh, overall ability to build businesses for LGBTQ entrepreneurs within the high growth startup ecosystem. And people ask, "well, why do the gays need an organization on their own?" At the time, there was very little that was even kind of really looked at or known around the proportions and the percentages of funding and support that LGBTQ entrepreneurs would receive. There was some data that started to kind of be talked about around the funding percentages. For women entrepreneurs and for other entrepreneurs of color, um, we actually created StartOut on the footprint of another affinity entrepreneurial organization that is dedicated to Indian entrepreneurs are called TiE. TiE actually stands for the, The Indus Entrepreneur.
We thought it was a great example of effectively a community supporting each other when they felt like the support from outside of that community was, if not absent, it was coming up short to what would have provided the best opportunities for the brightest and the most promising entrepreneurs within those groups.
And so we started StartOut in that way. And I'm very proud 13 of 14 years later, it's a vibrant, healthy, great organization that has helped thousands of people; has more than 35, 000 members nationwide, has an incubator and accelerator now that supports and helps companies go from idea stage to funding.
I think they're in their ninth cohort; have helped companies reach a billion dollar valuation. So it's just a great source of pride. And I mentioned it primarily because it creates some of the interpretation specifics of Gangels as an organization. In fact, Gangels was started by my two co founding members, Paul and David in 2013.
At the time, David and I had actually been serving on the board of StartOut and had met Paul through the StartOut community and David and Paul really started talking to me about how they wanted to create an angel group or a small investment fund or something that would allow money coming from the community to be invested in LGBTQ entrepreneurs.
Something that, you know, start out as a nonprofit really wasn't set up or allowed to do. And I was doing a bunch of other things. I had started another tech company and was working, writing, and producing what would then become a Broadway show, Broadway Musical in 2015. So there's that side to my life as well.
So I felt like pretty busy. And I said, "look, this is a great idea. I will invest alongside with you. But this is not something I can go and spend my time doing." And I think largely even they ran the group as a bit of a hobby side project for a number of years for a whole host of reasons, including the relatively small size and the relatively narrow focus that it had when investing in LGBT founders exclusively.
In reality, It took a few years and the ability for us all to feel more available with our time and our resources to understand what was the very reason behind an organization like StartOut or like Gaingels and what was ultimately the goal. The goal was to take stock of some problems, some shortcomings that existed and exist in the ecosystem that drives capital to ideas and generates a lot of wealth doing so, but realizing that there were shortcomings in how that capital was allocated in who had access in what were the modalities through which people did gain access to investors and mentorship and education and knowledge and knowledge and just overall kind of other people who could support them and help them in their quest of building really big generational businesses.
And those problems did not affect only one group of underrepresented entrepreneurs or people. There were a lot of ways in which you could look and you can look at the venture capital ecosystem and say, "look, so much of it is driven by pretty entrenched social circles and networks that even when they don't come from a sort of an overt and conscious bias against any one group, perpetuate the inequities that exist and the imbalances that exist and the kind of relative difference between how much more difficult it is for a female entrepreneur to raise capital, everything else being the same, than a male counterpart. And this holds true in different ways for every underrepresented group. So we, made a big change and decided that what we would stand for wasn't an investor that would qualify our ability to invest in a given company based on the identity of the entrepreneur. That's certainly a piece of a larger equation, but the idea is how do you make the entire venture capital ecosystem one where more people have more opportunities and more access to be represented, visible to have agency in how businesses are created, in how businesses are governed, and in ultimately have a seat at the table when it comes to reaping the benefits of this wealth creation engine? Meaning that they also stand on the side of the investors. So Gaingles today is one of the most active largest community of investors that are dedicated to invest actively in the venture capital space and doing so in a way that provides more opportunities for people of color, LGBTQ, minorities, female founders, everyone to be participatory in this ecosystem.
What we do is we help the companies we invest in now just with the capital and all the other ways in which investors help companies, but also with recruiting, helping them bring on leaders and members of their companies that maybe come from underrepresented pipelines of talent that they don't have access to.
We support them in building more diverse boards, which doesn't mean quotas or providing any special consideration for people based on any other kind of characteristic. Just making sure that companies have the ability to reach further out than their immediate circle, which largely probably will look and feel like the people that they already have on the board and make sure that they get to see some incredibly highly qualified candidates that fare from other underrepresented backgrounds.
And finally we help all of those companies with capital that is being Brought in and checks that are being written by investors that traditionally have never had access to these kinds of opportunities. And we're talking about some of the best deals in the venture backed economy. We are very fortunate to have invested with pretty much a who's who of large venture capital firms, and they allow us and we are invited regularly into these deals because they understand the value that we bring to the companies and the portfolio. And the ecosystem is greater than even just the dollars that we sign a check for.
Gopi Rangan: You've given a very comprehensive answer.
We could just stop here, but I'm very curious to dig deeper on some of the topics you mentioned. It's great to see that you've taken a community approach. Building communities creates strong bonds with people. So the impact of the work that you do multiplies over the years. TiE is a good example of that. In the 90s and even in the early 2000s, Indian techies were largely in professional services, like second class citizens in the tech world.
And over the past couple of decades, that has transformed. Now there are leaders, there are large company CEOs, many, many founders in the Indian ecosystem. And thanks to organizations like TiE. I hope to see the same change happen within the communities that you're actively involved in. Capital formation is such an important part of that ecosystem.
So I wanted to ask you a question about how things are different now compared to when you were an entrepreneur. You were a researcher, you were an entrepreneur, and then you've become investor. How is the world different today? What are some things that are easier for founders? And what are some things that are difficult for founders today?
Lorenzo Thione: Yeah, I mean, There's a million different ways of answering those questions and there are things that are different and there are things that are the same and there are things that are harder and there are things that are easier. Right? So, generally speaking, any answer I'm going to give you is going to be incomplete and a generalization, but I would say starting companies is broadly easier today.
The key of why it is easier lies in a bunch of different things. One is just simply culture. The culture has created an environment in which more people have access to the information, the education, the schools, the programs, the networks that will position them to start companies and start businesses.
The second is we have had largely two generations of venture-backed successes (businesses) that have minted the next generation of entrepreneurs. Right? In 1980, 1990, there just weren't any companies that we're falling into the mold of this venture-backed economy that would provide the talent that would then go start a company.
But then every person that worked at Google in the early 2000s or Uber in the early 2000 teens went off to either be an investor or start a company. So there's that kind of like pipeline, right? The second is the advent of major transformative technologies that lower the bar. And that bar typically is talent and capital.
Obviously, talent also requires capital, but it is an additional bottleneck in order to start a company. Products and proof of concepts and entire businesses could be created by smaller teams with less CAPEX investment. I remember when I started my first company, we were building an internet based service technology.
And the first thing that we needed to do was to go out and raise 10 plus million dollars to pay for a whole bunch of machines to actually buy and put into a data center and build our own data center and have our own data center ops and kind of build all of that infrastructure just to be able to deliver a service to the first user, right?
We were so hungry for computational power that we were the first non customer of EC2 (Amazon Web Service EC2). We were approached by Amazon at a time when we also had basis as investment arm as one of our investors.
So they were aware of what we were doing and they basically reached out and saying, "well, we're thinking about this thing. Like we've built this entire infrastructure for ourselves, but we have a whole lot of machinery that is not being utilized except at Christmas or at Thanksgiving, and we're thinking about renting it out and letting other people run their own processes on it.
We're calling this elastic compute cloud." And yeah, we were the very first one. We kind of built some of the infrastructure that became standard Apache, uh, open source stuff that would run on these machines. And, but this is to say the advent of the cloud created a massive.
Massive reduction in the CAPEX cost that people needed in order to start companies and people could start companies in their spare time by themselves. And now we're seeing it again right? We're seeing it again with AI. the The amount of speed up and cost lowering that AI is bringing in will make it even so that starting companies is even easier.
What has not changed almost at all in the last 20 years, it's gotten easier to start companies, but it hasn't nor should it have gotten any easier to succeed with a company. Building something that other people want and care about enough to give you money for it. Remember, that's the key, right? That's you're building something that creates value to someone who is going to be willing to part with their hard earned cash in order for you to give it to them. That is the key of what a business does, and that hasn't gotten any easier. To some extent, there have been changes that, at least locally, have made it significantly harder. So, for example, if you think about how much easier it was to run an advertising based business, or even an e-commerce business in the 2014, 15, 16 timeframe, and then 2017, 18 brought enormous onslaught of like the profitability of media companies and businesses that were trying to make money off of advertising for a number of reasons tied to social media platforms and the changes that they unilaterally made.
And then again, we saw this just a couple of years ago. With Apple privacy changes and now Google's privacy changes coming up, it's made a nightmare for so many entrepreneurs that were relying on the ability to track and target cheaply users that would become their own customers.
And that has made it harder. So fundamentally, the bar is lower to get started, but it's a jungle out there and it's really hard to kind of stand out with any kind of product. And that's the job of the investor to find out who is most well positioned for a number of objective or subjective reasons to be the one that actually makes it through the crowd and succeeds at building a large enough business to be interesting for venture investors. That's a big thing. I don't know if we want to talk about it, but it's like not every business needs a venture capital investor and taking on venture capital money makes means a very specific contract around what kind of business you are committing to building.
And if that contract gets violated or gets broken, it just creates completely misaligned incentives and typically it's a recipe for death for the company.
Gopi Rangan: It's a different world now. It's a lot easier to start companies. It's a lot easier to access resources like the cloud services. It's a lot easier to convince early employees to join startups and it was only for the renegades and the rebels.
And now it's become a lot more acceptable to pursue an entrepreneurship as a career choice. So a lot of these things are positive. The competition in the market, the problems that are waiting to be solved and the number of people trying to solve the same problems that has not changed. And that will always be a difficult problem to solve.
Indeed. And like you said, venture capital is not the ideal path for every company. And sometimes it's the wrong thing to do. If founders raise venture capital funding, they might regret doing that and they might decide to change path. And that will be very difficult. And that will create a lot of friction between the investors and the founders. Hopefully founders make the right decision by learning more about what is venture capital.
Let's talk about Gaingels. At what stage do you invest? Can you give an example of one or two companies? I know you and I have co invested in TaskHuman. I introduced the founders to you. What is a sweet spot for Gaingels?
What's the typical check size? What's the stage of a company that's ideal for you?
Lorenzo Thione: So the first thing that is different about Gaingels as a venture investor, and certainly one that is as active and at scale as we are, is that we really don't act as a lead investor ever. So we're not really kind of making the first move when it comes to putting money into a company that allows us to do quite a few different things, but it also filters the type of companies that we can invest in because we have to wait for a lead investor or other venture capital investors to basically make the first move. We believe we are best serving our mission when we invest in a lot of businesses and the best way to have a high throughput is to kind of create some kind of proxy function that allows us to make sure that at least some of the filtering is not completely on us, but it's also leveraging the expertise, the network and the filtering.
Sort of function of other investors. It also allows us to be collaborative and not competitive, meaning other VC will not see us as a competitor - it's either their money or our money - but rather it's a plus end and that helps everybody within our ecosystem. It pushes our mission where it needs to be.
We're also not a fund, at least not broadly speaking. We are a community of investors, which means that we act as a syndicate often investing once the round is done and allowing each one of our investor member to decide whether or not they want to invest in a specific deal or not. And that's also something that has changed a lot. It did not exist in 2008. When I got started, it started on a little bit with angel list in the early days, 2011, 2012. And now syndication, just broadly speaking, has allowed a lot of retail angel investors to access later stage investments. But all of those things being said, we are incredibly generalist.
We invest in companies at all stages of growth from pre seed to pre IPO. We have investment in every single sector. There are places and areas in which we like to invest more primarily because given that we are investing alongside or by virtue of our community's decisions of where they want to invest, there is a certain amount of going with the time, right?
There is a certain amount of what is hot or what was hot then and what is hot now. So there's a lot more interest right now in AI, as you can imagine, and a lot less interest in crypto than there was a couple of years ago, as you can imagine. But, you know, we do a ton of things in the B2B SaaS enterprise, biotech, healthcare. We do a ton in even space and transportation, deep tech, just broadly speaking, and fintech. So no specific area. And then we have designed different methods. We call them channels, but different methods either to syndicate or to invest from small pools of committed capital, small funds, and so on in companies depending on how big the check needs to be or where they are in their life cycle.
So I, for example, manage two of our funds at Gaingels. One is our spark fund, which is our earliest stage pipeline scout fund. It invests in a lot of companies every year with checks that are typically $50000 kind of one size fits all. So you can see them almost like angel checks, right? But they come with the benefits of joining the portfolio of Gaingles, 2500+ companies. All the benefits that come from interacting across that set of entrepreneurs and founders and. Benefits of the portfolio services we provide. And then I manage a second fund, which given my background, I decided to raise earlier last year (2023), I guess, which is our first AI focused fund and I invest in companies still precede and seed with some series A investment with checks that are larger from a hundred thousand up to a million dollars are a sweet spot there.
Gopi Rangan: I see that you have a very broad mandate and the community kind of makes decision based on all these individual members. How many investments do you typically do in one year?
Lorenzo Thione: has changed with the market. 2021 was just like bonkers. 2022 was pretty high still, and then things started to go down from there.
I would say we'll probably invest in three to five companies a month, maybe more depending on the month right now.
Gopi Rangan: Okay. What's your advice to founders before they come to meet you? Besides the typical, you know, keep your slide decks ready and due diligence process and data and all that stuff, analysis and market research and all that.
What are some one or two things that are critical that would be useful for the founders to know before they come to meet you?
Lorenzo Thione: Well, one is, I think it really helps when founders have built a relationship and a rapport with an investor, even prior to pitching, you know, just kind of like meet investors, keep them involved with your progress. Talk to them about a business that you're doing, but you're not actually raising money. Sometimes that's actually really an interesting tack. And you know, if the business is interesting, which by the way, dovetails with the second recommendation, which is to do your own research, right?
And what I mean by that is the spray and pray approach. Talk to as many investors, get as many nos as you can, and you'll get some yeses while in my work to get you to where you need to be. It's highly inefficient as it should be apparent, potentially will burn you out, will reduce your ability to raise more capital in the future.
If you've got a whole lot of people that have already said no to you for this business, and it just doesn't create the right alignment between you and your investors. What you want to do is you want to be incredibly strategic and really understand. That the person that you're speaking to that is making a decision, whether it's a more traditional fund where you're talking directly to the person who can write the check, or you're talking to an associate before you talk to the partnership, or when it comes to us, someone who is the gatekeeper to a community that then eventually might be the one that invests. You want to know what it is that they are interested in based on what they've invested in, based on what companies they've been on the board of, based on whatever is available out there in terms of the things that they are knowledgeable about or interested in. Going in with that knowledge allows you to build a relationship with that person and have them interested in your business even before you're actually trying to raise money. And if it's a great business and they're genuinely interested, chances are they'll come asking you when it is that you might be willing to take money from them rather than the other way around. I see this all the time. Our best founders always come back saying we've been preempted with a round by this investor that, you know, I had a relationship with and they've been close and they've known all of our traction and they've seen the progress that we've made.
They just sent us a term sheet and the value of like not having to spend three or four or five months fundraising as an activity shouldn't be discounted. And so a lot of founders would be like, "well, we'll go with it." So that is the key set of advices I would give.
Gopi Rangan: Can you give an example of one of your recent investments? How did you meet the founder? Why did you get excited about the company?
Lorenzo Thione: Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of investments that I'm excited about. I think it always feels a little bit like being asked which one of your children is your favorite. So it's, uh, it always puts you on the spot a little bit. But I can tell you, like, we just made an investment in a company called Kinship, and maybe I just, I'm going with this example cause it's the most recent. So it's fresh in my mind. We were introduced to the team by one of our fellow VC partners. This happens all the time especially when funds have like specific stage mandates and maybe a company is just a little too early, but they love the team. They'll be like, "Hey, might be interested in speaking to this team."
What they were building was just very spot on target, a match for the investment thesis for our AI fund. So we met with them and, ultimately I think, especially when you're investing so early, this was like super early, right? First round, you kind of have to overweight the elements around the team and the founders rather than be too kind of focused on the product and certainly not its traction at this stage.
But I think I and the rest of my team had all sorts of questions and I wouldn't say reticence or doubts, but like questions that were tied to, how did you get to this market segment? How did you decide to do this? You know, how big can this be? And it really ultimately what those questions highlighted for me wasn't the answers themselves, which were relevant, but not really critical to making a decision, but rather elevated the sort of strategy and the thinking behind how to reach those decisions. And that's what you want to find out. You want to find out that the people that you're investing in are positioned and set up and think through things in a way that allows them to react to information from the market, from their users, that their data driven and they're making decisions that are grounded in the realities of the business and that they are aligned with you with wanting to build a business that's big enough for all of you to be a happy participant in. And this is a stellar team that came from a background that I'm pretty familiar with.
As I said, building an AI-powered tool that focuses on an early segment of young parents and the challenges that they have in setting sleeping schedules for their children, but that kind of extends in its vision much beyond it. Um, what kinship really has as a vision is the idea of being able to build kind of digital sibling, you know, an older brother or sister that is basically there to impart their experience, their knowledge, their wisdom to you and help you out throughout your life.
Whether it be something like. Setting up a sleep schedule for your children or something around advice around your career or your relationship or whatnot. And I think that that the market space for that is certainly very big and, you know, very crowded as well. So there's a whole bunch of people out there solving adjacent problems or orthogonal problems.
So it was important for me to really understand how the team thought through the questions and the process and kind of be like, well, If this turns out to be not the right thing to do, they'll still be able to figure out how to move forward next. And they have the right type of grit and resilience that, you know, I think Sam Altman said once like the most unexpected sort of correlate to success, um, ability that correlates with success is kind of just your stubbornness, your grit, your resilience, your idea, you're not going to let go. Even when it looks like everyone else has abandoned the ship and you're still on, you're just not going to accept that it's going to sink. You're going to find a way to turn it around. And that kind of madness, I guess, is what ultimately correlates with success.
Gopi Rangan: We're coming towards the end of our conversation, and I want to ask you one last question about community involvement. Is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about? Which one?
Lorenzo Thione: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've answered in before. I'm a big supporter, financially and with my time of StartOut and the work that StartOut does. Startout.org is the website. It is an incredible organization that supports thousands of entrepreneurs that don't have the access and the knowledge and the prerequisites to basically succeed where other entrepreneurs, their mainstream counterparts do. And I'm really a big fan of what that team is continuing to do.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you for your dedication to help build these communities and thanks a lot for spending time with me today, sharing your experiences, starting with coming out and how that happened and how the other events that were around that time that shaped the way your career evolved over time and how Gaingles is actively supporting founders, what kind of investments you make and your preferences for the type of investments that you'd like to choose, your advice to founders so before they come to meet a venture capital investor like you, they could be better prepared. Thanks a lot for sharing all those experiences and specific examples.
I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
Lorenzo Thione: Wonderful. Thank you for having me.
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. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next episode.