Talking to Myself
Celebrating 5
Birthdays and anniversaries seem arbitrarily special to many, but I like to give these dates extra weight. Nostalgia or celebratory ritual? Unclear. What was clear though, when I hit my 5-year milestone at Hummingbird this summer, was that it felt important and I wanted to write about it. I’ve been thinking about this piece for months, with the grandiose ambition of summarising everything I’d learned in the first half decade of my career. I wanted my writing to be universal and intimate, my audience to find meaning. Instead, as I sit in yet another coffee shop with yet another cup of tea, I choose simplicity and decide to share some of the pillars that I hope will guide me — and hopefully others! — ahead of this next chapter.
Document
I have a terrible memory. As tiresome as it is for my friends, who kindly keep reminding me of entire holidays, fights and other important life events (thanks!), it is even more frustrating for me. I know that I won’t remember most situations I experience and I walk around with a camera everywhere to capture the world permanently. But it’s only recently that I started capturing what happens within – my thoughts, opinions, lessons learned. For many years, I didn’t have a documenting practice which has made composing this piece a lot more difficult than it would have been otherwise: there is no record of what has ever been on my mind. I’m currently experimenting with various ways of keeping track of that and I’ve been sending a weekly newsletter to one person, Freddie1, for about 6 months now.
It’s a format that works for me and that I feel excited to get to most Sunday evenings. It has 7 sections including temperature check, projects, across the finish line (achievements and completions), notes to self and screenshots (bits and pieces from the internet). It forces me to continuously reflect and chronicle my thoughts throughout the week in order to have something to write about on the weekend. This is writing for me: to learn, think better and document what matters.
Action
“You know, I learned to take pictures over the years – basically, just by taking them.”
— Ferdinando Scianna in this article
Sunday evening in lockdown. Cup of tea for me, glass of wine for my partner, we get cosy on the sofa and open Masterclass. I fantasise about the invaluable advice we’re about to collect from two artists at the top of their game as we pick Annie Leibovitz and Margaret Atwood. My notebook is open, my pen ready to collect their secret essence and unique tricks. I press play and then… nothing. The videos are warm and engaging, but one after the other, the advice is consistent — there are no tricks. The secret is to just do it. Want to be a photographer? Take photographs, every day. Whatever works for Leibovitz won’t work for an emerging artist. It is probable though that just doing it is enough to get luck on your side. We often say that venture investing is an apprenticeship: we can (and should) study the masters and stand on their shoulders, but without action – it isn’t worth much. This is one of the gifts I’ve received at Hummingbird from day one, when I joined as a clueless graduate: the autonomy to just “do”, the leeway to develop my own style and conviction and get investing. It is a scary place to just do and it’s often more comfortable to outsource the action to someone we perceive as “the real deal”, who “knows what they’re doing”. But I’ve learned that no one really knows what they’re doing, some are just better at keeping on doing, and that’s the only sure way to reach the top of the game.
Resonance
Long gone are my engineering years, but I distinctly remember learning about the concept of resonance in physics class:
a vibration of very large amplitude in a system caused by stimulus of the same (or nearly the same) frequency as the natural frequency of the systemWe all intuitively have a feeling for this phenomenon as we sometimes read an opinion that really resonates with us. The nature of the content, or its intrinsic frequency, matches our own frequency in that moment and it generates a signal of abnormally high amplitude: a thought, an emotion, an “aha” moment. In my work, I get to meet a lot of people on a daily basis – founders, team members, portfolio companies, potential hires, etc. – and I believe it is my responsibility to optimise for resonance. I aspire to calibrate myself to the perfect frequency for each meeting so that the outcome reaches its maximal amplitude. Practically, optimising for resonance means two things:
Having the right level of energy in every interaction
Some people are methodical – they throw an anchor into the future and work linearly towards it – while others operate intuitively. I’m the second type: I end up in the right place at the right time when I’m in my flow. This means that I have the important responsibility to look after myself, or I might stop trusting my inner compass and drift away from my life. Practically, this translates into having the right level of energy in every interaction: being present, focused, inspired, and able to have a rich conversation. Getting there is a balancing exercise. I go out there to explore topics, places, people — but there is no value in exploring if I don’t take a step back to reflect. I get busy and increase my “serendipity surface area”, but there is no value being in meetings constantly if I don’t take action. Zooming out to zoom back in.Having the right level of context in every interaction
As a generalist investor who works globally, I get to interact with different people working on distinct problems daily. It’s impossible to be an expert in everything, but I can prepare and educate myself enough to understand the language of an entrepreneur and increase our chances of resonance. This happens organically when investing in the same area multiple times as I become more and more fluent in vertical languages which are space-specific (say biotech, robotics, LATAM). But there are horizontal languages that are important as well and that we learn continuously: the language of talent and team building, of fundraising, of rollercoasters, etc. Having the right level of context in every interaction means knowing just enough of a language to be able to have an intelligible conversation with an entrepreneur dedicating their life to mastering it.
Mirrors
Impostor syndrome, “that uncomfortable feeling you experience when you think you're unqualified and incompetent”. This definition sounds awfully familiar — I question my credibility as an investor daily. I’ve never been a founder myself, what do I know about building? How could I ever advise someone in the founder shoes? I tell myself stories to keep myself here and one that works well is to see my job as a carrier of mirrors. When you hold a mirror in front of people, your own experience doesn’t matter as much. What matters most is how you hold it: with empathy, courage, honesty, and care. There are two mirrors I especially like to hold in front of the founders I work with, and anyone else I care about.
The first one elevates. It’s my version of what Tyler Cowen talks about frequently, and eloquently put here:
“At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.”
— Tyler Cowen
Being the first person to believe and invest in a team is special and often creates a privileged relationship. Through the act of investing, we already communicate that we believe the founders to be exceptional, and provide them with resources to start thinking bigger. This is the reflection the founders should see in the mirror: that we see what they could be in 5, 10 years — and that this version of them is elevated and has accomplished their wildest dreams.
The second mirror tells the truth. As I hold it, my goal is to help people take a good look at themselves and really see. Intellectual honesty with oneself is hard — all of us have a tendency to lie to ourselves about certain things, big or small. If I work with a company that is facing a challenging decision, my opinion on it or my ambition for them has little importance. What really matters is their own ambition, and I find that helping the founders see themselves fully and face the difficult truths is a great tool to help them achieve their own ambitions.
Relevance
November 2021, peak bull market, I'm on a transatlantic flight in search of answers. My job isn’t very fun these days: funding rounds happen so quickly that we don’t have time to build relationships with entrepreneurs, term sheets are sent within hours after a first founder meeting, valuations are so high that they threaten our business model. I come to the conclusion that venture capital might be dead. Clearly, when founders are given a choice, they pick a rapid process and low dilution over a true partnership. I don’t want us to kid ourselves — why try to sell a product that we believe in but that founders don’t want? That's why I'm on this flight. I decide to interrogate a few friends2 that have been in the business for a while longer than me. What followed is a series of interactions where I received different opinions and advice (mostly that I should stop worrying, and that things would eventually calm down) - but what stuck with me is the new way I started thinking about my work. Instead of only focusing on performance, I want to emphasise relevance. I think about what we do as a product. In VC, we sell a product to our investors (LPs), but also to the founders we partner with - and will partner with in the future. Not a day goes by where I don't question the relevance of our product at Hummingbird, my own product as an investor, and the relevance of venture capital as a whole. We're expert at talking about Product-Market-Fit with our portfolio companies (the holy grail!) and I think we could collectively be doing a better job at defining it on the investing side.
Commit
“It's the time that you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943
The job of a generalist investor might seem commitment-free: instead of working on one specific project or task we spread ourselves across multiple sectors, geographies and companies. The reality is that commitment is everywhere. Every day, we make decisions that will impact us for many years. We commit to investments, to people and therefore build relationships that we hope will last for decades if not a lifetime. It is the most important feature of our industry to me.
“In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can't count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to.”
— John Gardner, 1990 — his full speech here is well worth the read
To close off, I want to acknowledge the commitments that have defined my journey so far and have given my career — and life (no biggie!) — meaning. The interesting part about playing in a highly competitive game is that it forces us to ask ourselves the real, hard questions. There are no instructions coming from the top, no clear way to win, no set path in the grass. It’s up to us to start walking and create the trail. The principles we follow serve as a compass, and the people we commit to make it a lot less lonely.
Thank you for being here
The best is yet to come.
Lola
We did some coaching work together and she’s now a good friend. Hi Freddie!
And hi Andy!