On this episode of Origins, we sit down with Beezer Clarkson of Sapphire Partners to discuss the current state of the VC and LP markets, given recent dislocations. We cover what Beezer is seeing on the ground, where we might be in the current cycle / downturn, how VCs can respond both strategically and tactically, as well as her outlook for what's to come.

Beezer leads Sapphire Partners‘ investments in venture funds domestically and internationally. Prior to joining Sapphire in 2012, Beezer managed the day-to-day operations of the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Global Network, which then had $7 billion under management across 16 venture funds worldwide. In 2016, Beezer led the launch of OpenLP, an effort to help foster greater understanding in the entrepreneur-to-LP tech ecosystem.

Origins - Episode 72 - Venture market deep dive with Beezer Clarkson

M83's 'Do It, Try It' remixed by The Blaze.

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Do It, Try It (The Blaze Remix)

Eva Ho is a General Partner and co-founder of Fika Ventures, a new $40M seed fund based in LA. She's also an EIR of the City of Los Angeles and a board member of the California Community Foundation. She was previously a co-founder of Susa Ventures, and before that an operator and early employee at Factual and Applied Semantics, and a co-founder of Navigating Cancer.

Origins - A podcast about Limited Partners, created by Notation Capital

Origins - Episode 15 - Notation Capital And Eva Ho, Fika Ventures

Winter Mead is a Vice President at Sapphire Ventures, where he focuses on Sapphire's fund investments in the United States and internationally. Before joining Sapphire Ventures in 2014, he worked at Hall Capital Partners. Prior to Hall, Winter founded Mead and Mead, an international food distribution and logistics business. He also spent a number of years working for several early-stage technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

In this episode, we discuss why Winter joined Sapphire Ventures in the early days to help build out their fund investing business, building a track record as a young LP in the industry, and how Sapphire approaches working with VC fund managers in a way that looks and feels different than most LPs in the market today.

Origins - Episode 16 - Notation Capital And Winter Mead, Sapphire Ventures

Bradley Tusk started Tusk Ventures to help startups work with governments at scale. To date, this unique venture capital firm has worked with companies like Uber, Fanduel, Handy, Eaze, and others to help them navigate regulatory challenges. Tusk Ventures grew out of Tusk Strategies, which Bradley started in 2010 to help major institutions run multi-jurisdictional campaigns to shape their public reputation, overcome regulatory hurdles, and proactively engage governments to solve problems and seize opportunities. 

Previously, Bradley served as the campaign manager for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s successful re-election bid in 2009, and before that he served as the Deputy Governor of the State of Illinois from 2003-2006.

Origins - Episode 17 - Notation Capital And Bradley Tusk, Tusk Ventures

David Frankel is a managing partner and co-founder of Founder Collective, which launched in 2011 with a simple mission: To be the most aligned fund for founders at the seed stage. In the years since, they’ve become one of the most respected and highest performing venture firms in the industry.

Before starting Founder Collective, David spent most of his life as an entrepreneur, co-founding Internet Solutions, the first ISP in Africa, at the ripe old age of 23. When Internet Solutions was acquired by Dimension Data, he served as a key executive and on the board through its successful listing on the London Stock Exchange and up until it was ultimately acquired by NTT Japan for $3.2B.

In this episode, we discuss David’s early beginnings as an entrepreneur when he was a teenager, his decision to go back to business school after selling Dimension Data, challenging times raising Founder Collective’s first fund with Eric Paley, and FC’s contrarian approach to many widely held beliefs in the venture industry today.

Origins - Episode 19 - Notation Capital And David Frankel, Founder Collective

On this first episode of Origins Season 3, we sit down with Michael Larsen, a managing director at Cambridge Associates. Michael has been with CA for ten years, where he works with endowments, foundations and other large institutional investors on their private investment programs, particularly focused on venture capital exposure. He spends his time meeting with managers, sourcing new ideas, and implementing VC programs for his clients’ portfolios.

Cambridge Associates has come up several times on Origins in the past, so in this conversation with Mike we dig into exactly what it is that CA does — and how they advise their clients to invest in VC and PE. We discuss the difference between CA’s discretionary and non-discretionary activities, how they approach building venture portfolios from scratch, how Mike evaluates VC managers, as well as how he thinks about the future of the asset class.

This is one of the more technical VC conversations we’ve had to date. Mike is a wealth of venture knowledge, and provides real tactical information for managers that are considering ways to work with Cambridge Associates.

Origins - Episode 20 - Notation Capital And Michael Larsen, Cambridge Associates

In this episode, we sit down with Andy Weissman, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Previous to USV, Andy was a co-founder of betaworks, and earlier in his career an executive at AOL. Andy’s one of the most thoughtful and admired VCs in the industry, and this was plain and simple one of the best episodes we’ve ever recorded.

We cover a lot in this episode — including Andy’s experience working in the early days at AOL and how that informed the creation of betaworks. We discuss what it was like joining Fred, Brad, and Albert as the fourth partner at USV, and subsequently becoming a managing partner at the firm a few years later.

What we found most interesting about the conversation was Andy’s description of his perpetual search for the “New New Thing,” a term made popular by the Michael Lewis book under the same name. Given the incredibly competitive venture landscape today, Andy argues it’s no longer enough to be looking to invest in the latest hot trend, but to do venture the right way, one most look further out on the horizon to find the thing no one else is yet looking for. This is maybe the most challenging part of doing VC well, but also the most fun and rewarding. Andy provides some hints at a roadmap, so we hope you’ll listen and find it useful.

Origins - Episode 21 - Notation Capital And Andy Weissman, Union Square Ventures

On this special episode of Origins, Beezer Clarkson and Nicholas Chirls co-host Margo Doyle, the Chief Investment Officer for S-Cubed Capital, a Silicon Valley-based single-family office. Margo most recently served as Managing Director with Cambridge Associates, and currently leverages a twenty-year career touching all aspects of early and growth stage companies.

In this discussion, we dig into what it means to build out an institutional strategy at a single-family office, how Margo thinks about their allocation to venture, and just how important it is for S-Cubed (and for all LPs) to clearly tell a differentiated story in order to get access to the best VC fund managers in the industry.

Origins - Episode 22 - Beezer Clarkson hosts Margo Doyle, S-Cubed Capital

On this episode of Origins, we sit down with Soleio Cuervo and Adam Michela, the founding partners at Combine, a brand new design and venture firm. Combine is different than many of the other new venture firms we’ve profiled on the show, and Soleio and Adam are also unlike many of the founding partners we’ve interviewed to date. How exactly?

Well, for starters, they’ve both spent most of their careers as designers, playing meaningful roles in the product and organizational design of some of the most iconic startups in the past decade — Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, among others. 

During the past couple years as angel investors, Soleio and Adam both noticed how critical it was to recruit top designers and embed design culture into the organization of early-stage, fast-growing startups. But they also noticed how difficult this was to execute in practice, and how few investors in SV could bring this expertise to the table.

So Combine is a natural evolution of a mutual recognition of both these challenges, and they do this by combining capital and design advisory into an institutional early-stage venture capital firm. In this episode, we cover a lot — their backgrounds as designers in SV, the challenges of scaling design organizations, getting Combine off the ground together over the past year, the unusual structure of the firm, and what they hope to achieve with Combine in the future. We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did :-)

Origins - Episode 23 - Notation hosts Soleio Cuervo + Adam Michela, Combine

On this episode of Origins, we sit down with Bruce Ou, a Managing Partner at Grove Street Advisors. GSA is a unique type of investment firm in that they build customized private equity fund portfolios to address each of their LP clients’ individual investment needs. Their sole business is to manage discretionary separate accounts, investing in lower middle-market buyout, growth equity and venture capital.

Bruce is a member of the firm’s Investment Committee, and leads investments across all segments of private equity and venture funds. Bruce also co-leads GSA’s strategy and portfolio development in China and is actively involved in the firm’s secondary fund investing activities.

In this episode, we dig into all areas of the GSA business as well as Bruce’s background as an LP, and particularly his work across the globe and in China. His insight into the Chinese technology industry is a fascinating look into the second largest venture market in the world behind the U.S., and a good reminder that innovation today is found everywhere.

Origins - Episode 72 - Venture market deep dive with Beezer Clarkson

Notation Capital

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