Matt Harris, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, talks of how he wanted to become a big fish in a small pond when he started investing in fintech. How has that turned out for him two decades later? Matt elaborates his practical approach when evaluating new investments, and gives tips for managing a startup’s expenses to ensure sustainability.
Matt Harris, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, talks of how he wanted to become a big fish in a small pond when he started investing in fintech. How has that turned out for him two decades later? Matt elaborates his practical approach when evaluating new investments, and gives tips for managing a startup’s expenses to ensure sustainability.
In this episode, you'll learn:
[3:36] Great investors are optimistic and empathetic when listening to founders’ stories.
[6:35] Pros and cons of investing across stages in a single sector
[25:41] Why should founders be careful about what P&L components to beef up?
[29:51] Decentralization is taking over centralized systems, and it’s not just in financial services.
Non-profit organization that Matt is passionate about: Endeavor
Matt Harris is a Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, and he focuses on investments in financial technology and services. Matt sees a huge amount of revenue, profit and market cap shifting from regulated financial institutions to entrepreneur-led insurgents, across payments, lending, capital markets, real estate and insurance. He has invested in companies like acorns, BlockFi, defi solutions, Digital Currency Group, Corvus, FINIX, hi Marley, Justworks, Passport, roofstock, and many others.
Fun fact: Matt is obsessed with military history. Someday he'll write a book connecting the strategy and tactics of insurgency with what he has learned about entrepreneurship.
Bain Capital Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in seed to growth-stage startups that use tech to disrupt existing markets or create entirely new ones. BCV leverages the global platform of Bain Capital to help founders access networks, partners and customers that are pivotal on the path to scale. Companies in BCV’s portfolio include Archive, soona, Topography Health, Clockwise, Arc Technologies, Ankorstore, Cogsy, acorns, Clari, Vesta, BlockFi, defi solutions, Digital Currency Group, Corvus, FINIX, hi Marley, Justworks, Passport, and roofstock.
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Matt Harris: I thought the way he handled my questions about competition, I mean, entrepreneurs hate being asked about competition. And the better they are, the more they hate it because it's totally irrelevant. His calm, thoughtful manner, non-defensive in the face of two, very, very much more buzzy competitors was exactly the right tone.
He wasn't "we're going to crush them". It wasn't "they're terrible". It was, "here's what they do, here's what we do, and here's how it's different."
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 here with Matt Harris. Matt is based in New York City and he's a partner at Bain Capital Ventures. Matt is one of the earliest investors in fintech. He started investing almost two decades ago in fintech. He has invested in companies like acorns, BlockFi, defi solutions, Digital Currency Group, Corvus, FINIX, hi Marley, Passport, roofstock, and many others. We're going to talk to Matt to learn about his process, what he looks for in startups, what questions he asks, and what gets him excited.
Matt, welcome to The Sure Shot entrepreneur.
Matt Harris: So glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Gopi Rangan: Matt, tell me about yourself starting with your childhood. You grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. Right?
Matt Harris: Yeah. Newton is a small city outside of Boston. My parents moved there just as I was born. They were both professors at Harvard and it's a nice commuter town into Cambridge and into Boston. They were both physicians, professors at the medical school.
Gopi Rangan: How did that childhood life shape your thinking? Growing up in an academic household?
Matt Harris: It certainly was an academic house. The power of ideas has always been very influential on me. They impressed upon me more by example than by lecturing. There were actually very understated, but just watching them navigate their careers, it was obvious that the pursuit of wealth wasn't what drove them and was not in their minds the noblest pursuit. Rather, being a physician is ultimately a life of service. An academic physician is that service combined with a pursuit of discovery as a scientist and it was good. It was really a great couple role models for me and for my brother. He went into journalism and I went into business and they were fine with that. They didn't necessarily lean on us to pursue the same career, but I think both of us have carried with us this sense of service. And in my case, I would say I'm an investor, and producing great returns is the job. The way to do that is not to think about money all the time; it is to think about ideas, think about how you can serve founders, and that will result in great returns.
Gopi Rangan: I can relate to your experience. My father is a professor. My uncle was a professor and I grew up in a very academic household. You couldn't see the walls. You could only see books. The sense of intellectual curiosity that was instilled very early in life has stayed with me even now. That's the approach I take with business and when I make investments. That curiosity to learn is what drives me. I can see how venture capital can perfectly feed that desire.
Matt Harris: It's an amazing luxury. Your day is filled with meetings with founders. They come to you and present the very best idea they've ever had and the thing that they're killing themselves to move forward. We get to listen and see if there's an intersection point between how we see the world and how they see the world. Anytime I get tired or feel overwhelmed, it's pretty easy just to remind myself that this is like the ultimate luxury.
Gopi Rangan: What do you like about venture capital? I see that the interaction with the founders is very exciting, but what about the work and the industry attracts you?
Matt Harris: As I've gotten further along in my career, it's been about ideas, almost like a scholarship of sorts. The moments that excite me are often moments when I've been able to put together a set of disparate threads of things that are going on in financial services and FinTech, maybe write it down, maybe just to give a talk about it and see that it helps people to articulate things they've been thinking. It helps to organize. Not that I'm inventing anything, I'm just describing things that are going on, but if I can do that well and it allows people to see clearly what's possible, it's incredibly meaningful to be able to do that. It's certainly not every day or even every year that you get to do that. But those are real milestone events for me, at least in my career. Relatedly, on my metaphoric gravestone, whenever I leave this business, I want it to say, "He was my first call". I obviously don't like getting bad news. That's not fun. But there's an incredible satisfaction when a founder calls me and explains that something bad has happened, and I know that she was motivated to call me because she knew that I would take it well, and I would be immediately there to help and constructive and thinking about how to solve the problem. There are a lot of investors, frankly, who think about blame. How could this have happened?... and other things that are not going to move the ball forward.
Finally, and much more recently here, it's been helping junior people and mid-level people and up and coming partners at my firm, Bain Capital Ventures, be as good at this job as they can be; ultimately, better than I've ever been. That's a new chapter for me really, but it's incredibly satisfying.
Gopi Rangan: You've touched on many interesting things already. You talked about optimism, the optimism with which you engage with founders, hear their stories, try to see where the future could be. And you talked about empathy both at good times and during bad times.
Founders go through high highs and low lows. It's great to have that friend and thought partner who they trust. I'm definitely interested in talking about the coaching you provide to the next generation of investors around you. Let's talk about the first part. What kind of founders, what kind of startups do you like to invest in? What are the sweet spots for you sector-wise, geography-wise, and the personality of founders?
Matt Harris: Well, I've been a little bit of a one-trick pony here for the last couple of decades. I started my career at Bain Capital as a generalist focused on private equity in my mid-twenties. When I started my own firm in 2000, I decided I really needed more of a specialty and decided it was going to be financial services and the intersection of financial services and technology and entrepreneurship. So that's really all I've done.
Gopi Rangan: How did that happen? Why did you decide financial services?
Matt Harris: I wish I could say it was more of a premonition that it was going to be a big deal than in fact it was. I was concerned about my ability to be competitive as a generalist. Back then 20 years ago, most VCs were generalists. They either did it or healthcare. Those were like the two choices. So in practice, it meant that differentiation was really hard. You had the brand of your platform and you had your own personal salesmanship.
I don't know. Maybe it was some aspects of self-doubt, but I didn't want a fair fight. I didn't want to be just pitching against other VCs based on personal qualities. I wanted to know more than the next guy or girl about something. That led me to down a specialization path, for sure. There are a lot of ways to specialize in this business. You could theoretically specialize by stage or by geography or by business model. But, to me, the most obvious, given that I had my pick, was by industry. I more or less picked the biggest industry by a percent of global GDP, and also, to my mind, a very complex industry with lots of different facets... because I needed something that was going to keep me busy and interested for decades and also a space where there was enough to learn that I could stay ahead even as others competed. So financial services ticked all those boxes, but what it wasn't, and I want to be careful to note this, it wasn't a prediction that FinTech was going to be huge. It's definitely wasn't that. I thought of a small pond, forever, but one where I could be a big fish. And so I was surprised as anyone else when Jack Dorsey started Square and people started caring about payments and then lending and wealth and insurance, et cetera. It was a good six or seven years after I started focusing on the space. There were plenty of lean years in there as well.
Gopi Rangan: Yeah. As a new VC, we all look for a niche area where we can differentiate ourselves. In your time, when you started in the VC industry, FinTech was a really, really differentiated, unique niche. And now 'everything is FinTech' and those kinds of themes are more popular to hear, but it was not. You took a really bold view to separate yourself from the rest of the crowd.
So FinTech has been your main focus from an industry sector perspective stage-wise. What is the best time for you to meet a startup? How early is too early and how late is too late?
Matt Harris: Well, we have the luxury as a firm of being extremely rangy in what we do. You're aware of some of the pre-seed investments I've made where it's really just a founder and we write a million-dollar check or less. Honestly, those are some of my favorites. Also, we can make up to a hundred million dollar investments and I've done those as well. So as a person at Bain Capital Ventures, I probably have the widest aperture of what interests me. Part of that is tied to having a relatively narrow aperture in terms of sector. If I'm going to be just FinTech, which is what I am, then behooves me to be relatively broad in terms of stage. And so I've availed myself of that full range. I can't say I prefer one or the other. In instances where it has been a pre-seed investment, Corvus is one that you and I both know well. It was really just a founder who had an idea. He put in a million of his own money. I put in a million from Bain Capital Ventures BCV and we started working together to make it more than just an idea.
The same happened with a company called Digital Currency Group (DCG) with a founder named Barry Silbert, a million dollars from us and let's go figure out if we can build a crypto business together nine years ago. And I did my third of those just in 2021 and a pharmacy-focused payments company.
Founders like that don't come around that frequently with big enough markets and interesting enough ideas and the right kind of founder. But when they do, nothing makes me happier than being that first money in. Generally, as I look at the deals that I've done at Bain Capital Ventures, the most common entry point has been growth. It's roughly 60% of what I've done has been the $25 to $50 million later-stage check, and then followed quickly thereafter by $8 to $10 million a check, which is my second most common. But, really what I look for is a certain theme that I'm interested in, and look to find founders who are also interested in those themes and we can advance each other's thinking.
Gopi Rangan: Can I challenge that a little bit? When you are so broad in the stages, it's difficult for founders to know what you stand for and where they can get help from you. The way a VC can help a founder at the earliest stages, like a pre-seed and seed stage, and the way VCs can find such entrepreneurs is very different compared to the A stage compared to the growth stage. Also, how you help a founder and how you show up at a board meeting at the B stage or pre-IPO stage is very different compared to the pre-seed stage. How do founders interpret that, and how can they make sure that you can be a good partner at all stages?
Matt Harris: Yeah, I thank you for the challenge. This is hard stuff. As a VC, you've got to make some choices about what you're going to narrow in on and what you're going to be expansive about. For me, the choice was to narrow in on FinTech and be expansive about stage. And it does cause problems. Every week, I'll have a founder reach out to me and it's one version or another of the same talk track, which is, "Hey, I know my company is too early for you. But I'm starting an embedded financial services company and I loved your article and I want to talk to you about it, just get your advice. Or I'm working in decentralization as it relates to insurance. And I heard you talk about that and again, the nowhere too early for you, Matt, but can we meet?" And so, even though I'm 10 years into this Bain Capital Ventures journey, I somehow have failed to spread the message that there's nothing too early for me or for us.
My perspective is as long as they're reaching out, it's fine. The whole game from my perspective is basically an outbound marketing motion. I try to publish and speak and put ideas out into the world. If I'm doing it right, then the founders come to me. And maybe as per those examples, they're confused about whether I can invest at that moment or not. But as I said, as long as they find their way to me, I can usually correct any misapprehensions they have.
I think that answers half the question, but there's another half that I do worry about. I now work with founders like this most recent million-dollar pre-seed. He made his first hire. And I'm also on three public company boards, going to four soon. Those are very different jobs in case anyone's confused about that. They're very different jobs. Convincing a founder that I'm the right person for both of those jobs and convincing myself, frankly, that any one person can be optimized for those very different jobs, I think is a trick. When I do canvas both systematically and in an ad hoc way, the founders I work with about how well I'm doing, I get the sense that nobody wants to fire me but, um, if I'm honest, I think I was probably better at the pre-seed job 15 years ago. There's a certain energy level, a certain willingness to endure yield loss. If that term makes it, he said, well, you just want to sit with a founder and a whiteboard for four hours, having bad ideas for three and a half of those hours, that may be more of a young person's game. The way I interact with pre-seed founders is probably more efficient now than maybe is optimal because of some of the demands on my time and energy. But I hope it's good enough.
Gopi Rangan: Your comment about the phrase on your grave ' you are my first phone call' is a lot more easily achieved when you invest in the pre-seed and seed stages. By the time a startup gets to the Series B stage, they're all brilliant entrepreneurs. Their questions are about, do I chop my left arm or right arm? Those are really challenging questions. I would say if entrepreneurs aren't able to solve problems, no one is going to be able to help them easily to solve that problem. It's going to be one of the hardest challenging problems in the world. And at that stage, being that first phone call to add value to an entrepreneur is far more challenging than at the pre-seed stage when it's mostly about survival, type A mistakes, how to avoid them, being a thought partner. Supporting a founder at the pre-seed and seed stages is much more fun. I can see why you prefer that and you are great at it according to your own words.
Matt Harris: Well, I'd like to think so. The other thing that we also bear in mind here is that it really is a team sport. Some of my best memories were and continue to be collaborations with other venture investors at those early stages. Right now, I'm working with a venture investor named Jesse Beyroutey from IA Ventures, who's just amazing. We're doing a pre-seed together. His creativity, his approach, and his EQ...I love to watch him work. I think he's enjoying the collaboration as well. Earlier in my career, probably my favorite early board was with an investor in a Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital founder. Again, with his creativity, inventiveness, ability to think around corners, we just did wonderful work together. So, the more and more venture firms are taking entire rounds is the physics of our business and something is lost in that what we used to have, these partnerships with each other to help founders in a very complimentary way. Recently, Brad Feld and I had a six-year run together partnering on a board and it was magic. I hope to keep being able to do that with VCs, from other firms, with whom they bring different things to the table than I do. Those collaborations are truly meaningful.
Gopi Rangan: Yeah. VC is a very weird business. It's a lone wolf world. Each VC forms opinions about something with very little information and predicts the future along with the founders and at that same stage works with other VCs who are incredibly smart and collaborative. It's not something that you commonly find in the rest of the business world. People are very independent in their thinking, but at the same time, love collaborating with other peers in the industry.
I want to ask you about the first and the second meeting with the founders. It's where the magic starts to happen. What is your advice to founders? How can they prepare to make that meeting effective?
Matt Harris: My personal style is I really want to get into the truth of the matter. I prefer a candid style. The trick of it is I also need to understand that you can sell. I need to evaluate your salesmanship, your persuasion, and your intensity without feeling like you're selling me for the entire meeting.
Gopi Rangan: How do you do that?
Matt Harris: Let me choose Isaac Oates, the Founder & CEO at Justworks. I like him as an example because he's not the prototypical Silicon Valley founder. He was in the army, was an engineer at Amazon, founded a company that was sold to Etsy and ended up running a business unit at Etsy, and then founded a company called Justworks, which is at this point a large company. We led an early round and I've been on the board. Isaac is a really understated guy. He is confident. He is intense but comes across as very calm and frankly understated. they have a hundred thousand dollars of revenue, so they're in business. In the meeting, he's explaining to me what a PEO is and why somebody would choose it. And like every other VC at that point, I'm like "How does it compare to Gusto? How does it compare to Zenefits?" Those were the Gusto still is Zenefits was an extraordinarily buzzy company, six, seven years ago when I was making this investment. And I thought the way he handled my questions about the competition, which is best in class... I mean, entrepreneurs hate being asked about competition. And the better they are, the more they hate it because it's totally irrelevant. There are 16 million potential businesses that could use Justworks. The fact that Zenefits is going to get theirs and Gusto is going to get theirs is irrelevant to how many customers Justworks is going to get, or has gotten. They just never see each other in what is a vast, horizontal multifaceted market by geography, by industry, by company size, et cetera.
He was not at all frustrated, just patiently explaining the differences, creating a framework for me then to come to the conclusion like, oh wait, this is a dumb question. The point isn't Justworks versus Gusto. The point is Justworks versus ADP and paychecks. And his calm, thoughtful, non-defensive manner in the face of two much more buzzy competitors than Justworks at that point was exactly the right tone. He wasn't, "we're going to crush them". It wasn't "they're terrible". It was just, "here's what they do. I'm not a customer there. So I can't say whether they do it well and what they don't or whether they don't do it well, here's what we do. And here's how it's different. Here's the segment that we've proven deeply loves what we do. And here's our best guess as to the size of our segment. I haven't done the sizing work on their segment, but here's how I would think about it." Just calm, analytical, and thoughtful.
You want to see energy for sure. You don't want someone to be blasé, frantic. Seeing somebody's emotions being too close to the surface is exciting, but ultimately it doesn't wear well over the long haul of entrepreneurship.
Gopi Rangan: Oh, this is great. You're giving us an authentic example of how you interacted with a founder. I really liked the description you gave that you asked the question and the founder responded almost like a professor trying to educate you, teach you on the industry. At the end of it, you realize that, oh, I can see why this is obvious. That education is the sales process. It is not only about showing up and dazzling the audience in a salesroom. It's about engaging with investors in a meaningful way. That comes through in the first one or two weeks.
Matt Harris: Yes, that's right. When I think about our investment committees, it's a highly artificial environment. A founder has an hour to present to four or five people, some of whom she hasn't met yet. We're very aware that it's artificial and so we do our best to not have that be like some sort of high stakes meeting where everything relies on a short window of time for us to make our evaluation. Nonetheless, it's an important meeting. When I think about the ones that go well, one of the most common comments about the founder is, "Wow, she really knows her business." There's a thing really profound in that... because there's a lot of founders who, truth be told, they're really just working on one facet of a problem and they haven't thought deeply. They haven't talked to enough customers, partners, and vendors to deeply understand their own field of endeavor because it's labor-intensive. Maybe not everybody's kettle of fish, but it is so critical in terms of decision-making to deeply understand your business. It's very much worth all the time founders can invest in that.
Gopi Rangan: Yeah. That is a special quality indeed. Working on a contrarian problem where the rest of the world hasn't really caught up and yet has an enormous amount of depth and understanding is a special combination indeed. I have heard you say in the past that you're not valuation-sensitive. You don't make decisions based on valuation, and you are more interested in being a part of a company. If it's a great company, run by great founders, it's a privilege to be a part of that journey. How far can an entrepreneur push you before you say, well, this is too expensive?
Matt Harris: I've been pushed pretty far. I've had conversations with founders about how high is too high, just from a company-building perspective. The public stock markets had a rough stretch here in the past month and FinTech in particular. Maybe some of the valuation craziness will plateau or temper conceivably. Certainly, we're not counting on that, but it is a good reminder that it's not the case from a founder's best interest to just get the highest price you can get.
I've had very useful and deeply trust-building conversations with founders about what's the right number. Where I find that it is very constructive from trust-building on my part to come to the founder and say, "I'm not price-sensitive. I want to back you. It is a massive priority for me to be an investor in your startup. So let's take that high-stakes negotiating off the table. I want this, I think I can help. And I just want to be in business with you for the next 10 years." That said the right response to that or the one that makes me happiest and the one that validates my strong, positive feelings about the founders, is where they say, "okay, well, let's figure out what market is. Let's figure out a number where I can make you and all my other investors a lot of money from that starting point and where when I need to raise my next round, I can do so at a healthy step, and yet where I manage dilution because I'm dilution sensitive and I want to get a good result for my existing investors, et cetera."
If we can then sit down and triangulate together and find the right number, we've started our relationship on the absolute best footing imaginable. So, yes, is the number always going to be higher than I would like for sure. And it's not always going to be lower than they would like. There are some founders who still will just push you to your limit. But I haven't had one try to push me past my limit when I set the context in that way. In this market, that's become my go-to move.
Gopi Rangan: So, you have a very practical approach. You try to find that common ground, where you can stay together and work together with the founders, once you decide that this is the kind of team that you'd like to collaborate with.
I've heard you speak about a few other things in the most recent webinar with FD partners. You talked about how founders need to be more disciplined about managing their spending, especially GNA. When you raise more money, not every part of the P&L statement needs to beef up by 10%, 20%. You need to be thoughtful about spending money.
At the same time, there are a few other macro things that are happening, especially in the past couple of years with inflation, valuation going up, and labor inflation as well. Startups are finding it more and more difficult to hire good talent. In today's world, what is your advice to founders? How can they prepare to build a successful company?
Matt Harris: Well, here I think the vice has to be nuanced by stage. Inevitably at the...
Gopi Rangan: Let's pick seed stage, pre-seed stage, maybe series A stage.
Matt Harris: Yeah. So I think those companies generally don't have a path to profitability or breakeven. So, the job there is to manage, in a sense, from fundraising to fundraising. It can obviously dominate the founder mindset more than it ought to this notion of spending time with VCs and thinking about their next round, et cetera, et cetera. And so I want to be careful not to create the impression that the founder's main job is raising money, but the point is rather that the cadence of the company needs to have some relationship to how much you've raised when you're going to run out, create a cushion between that and when you need to then go start in earnest raising your next round of capital. What do you have to have proven by then to have that be a successful up round, plenty of demand, terms you want, the partner you want, et cetera? Back solving for that as you think about evaluation and size of a round is really important. And then also as you think about spending.
We're in a bit of a weird time right now, the market has fallen apart for FinTech companies. It's down 40-50% and in some cases 70% for some of the comps of the seed and Series A FinTech companies. I generally recommend that you ignore that. The market could go right back up. There are many instances in the past 20 years where you've had these downdrafts and then it's recovered, most recently with COVID. Not only did it recover, it went on to hit new highs. And by the way, when the market goes down like this, there are always reasons you could point to why this time it's going to stay down. Right now, there are obvious ones around macroeconomic factors, but even when there are good reasons for it to stay down, it doesn't mean it's going to, there's still a tremendous glut of capital in the world.
So my job isn't to make predictions, but really to counsel founders not to overreact to this. Pushing to get your company profitable, doing layoffs, assuming there's no more capital available for you so you need to cultivate potential strategic acquirers. Now is not the time to contemplate any of those things. This is a five-week-long selloff. We should all be in wait-and-see mode and run our business. Now, regardless of the market selloff, I did find that these components of the P&L analysis was producing some kind of troubling results. For me, G&A is the one that's most generally abused, where founders feel like they need to act and look like a big company now because they've raised a bunch of money and they need to staff up these various functions and everyone needs an assistant and the office needs to be fancy and everyone needs it's a very high-quality vest and a Yeti cup. Next thing you know, that G&A line is growing fast or as fast or faster than revenue. Much of that is not only unnecessary but actually sends the wrong message to your team about what kind of company you want to build. I think that P&L and the different behaviors and the different input of each of the different lines is something that even non-financial or accounting-oriented founders should deeply.
Gopi Rangan: Wise words indeed based on years of experience. You've been through a few downturns yourself. Thank you very much for sharing that. You're a FinTech investor and I have to ask you about Web3. You are one of the early investors in Digital Currency Group, BlockFi, and defi solutions. You've been looking at this space for a long time. What does Web3 mean to you?
Matt Harris: It means decentralization. This is most easily seen in defi solutions, a component of Web3 which is basically replicating financial functions like payments, lending, and insurance in protocols that in effect, operate by themselves without a central counterparty. So you and I can transfer value using algorithmic stable coins where otherwise we would have to use Venmo managed by PayPal or Visa Direct managed by visa and other centralized services.
So this is a really brand new human activity- decentralized finance in the first instance. It's fascinating and it's grown quickly and it's early and it's cloogy and it's risky. And there are real drawbacks to it because centralization definitely has its benefits. It does feel like the future to me and people have been extrapolating from the early progress of decentralized finance to thinking about decentralized media. Will the next Twitter be decentralized, where you get rewarded with tokens that represent ownership in the protocol, as you add value to the network? And that token or that reward system is one of the components of de-centralization that people find extremely charming and can help with the zero to one chicken and the egg problem of getting networks up and running. But it is not the entirety of it. I know though that it's certainly the flashy part of it.
Founders are working on decentralized file storage and decentralized media and decentralized just about everything. My view is that this is like a 30-year project. I think the case for decentralization is very strong in financial services and they're all finding other pockets where it's equally strong over time. Decentralization will inexorably take share from central. Systems, but there are going to be fits and starts. There's going to be regulation. There's going to be innumerable breaches and frauds and rug poles, and all of these things. But just because something's hard, doesn't mean it's not inevitable and decentralization I view as inevitable. Count me as a Web3 believer.
Gopi Rangan: Fascinating, indeed. I'm excited. I look forward to the future where the crypto world will take us. Let's see where we go with crypto.
We're coming to the end of our conversation. I have two questions for you. We talked about coaching the next generation of venture capital investors early on in our conversation.
What is your vision for the industry? What would you like to change about the venture capital industry?
Matt Harris: I'll start by acknowledging the efforts of many in the industry towards diversity in terms of gender and underrepresented minorities. But the progress has been incremental at best and the statistics are still abysmal. I am in the category of believing that it really matters that founders who walk into a room and don't see anyone that looks like themselves are starting with a meaningful obstacle.
Until we've rectified the percentages to looking something closer to the population and until we've increased the odds that a founder's going to be able to look around the room and see someone that looks like her, shame on us!
...because we're not going to be serving founders the best we can, and inevitably we're going to be not serving the very best founders. So, I like the energy that's around this issue now, and we have made progress, but we have a long way to go.
Gopi Rangan: I'm glad that you highlighted that topic. I want to switch to the last question and ask you about community involvement. Is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about?
Matt Harris: Yes, I'm on the global board of something called Endeavor. Endeavor got started about 20 years ago in Latin America, and now works in 40 different countries. It is a support network and now a funding network for entrepreneurs in emerging economies, which was a vast divide 20 years ago. They've been a big part of bringing up the level of entrepreneurship in Latin America, increasingly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Southern Europe. That board is an absolute labor of love for me. The founder, Linda Rottenberg is tremendous, my board colleagues are inspiring and the work we do of making entrepreneurs in Indonesia feel connected in the same way that an entrepreneur in Mountain View feels surrounded by resources and context and sophisticated peers. It's a little bit similar in certain ways to my day job, but being able to do it and provide these resources to countries that in generations past had no hope of accessing them is just incredibly rewarding.
Gopi Rangan: When you finish your intense venture capital job, you switch to another intense activity serving the world. Matt, thank you so much for sharing insightful examples, lots of stories, and real-life anecdotes based on your experiences. I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
Matt Harris: I'm really proud to be on this podcast. And 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.