📶 15 Lessons from Brian Singerman (Partner @ Founders Fund)

Login 🔑 | Join 👥 | Learn 🔎 | Sponsor 📣

Good morning 👋

This week’s deep dive is on Brian Singerman (@briansin), partner at Founders Fund.

Founders Fund is widely known as one of the best funds in the world, and Brian focuses primarily on backing the best founders regardless of industry.

Here are some of our favorite lessons, quotes, and additional reading from studying Brian.

Read the full post below, and explore all investor deep dives here.

Together with Guidde
Video documentation your team will use 🎥

Tired of explaining the same thing over and over again to your colleagues? It’s time to delegate that work to AI.

Guidde is a GPT-powered tool that helps you explain the most complex tasks in seconds with AI generated documentation. Turn boring documentation into stunning visual guides so your team can get up-to-speed faster..

The best part?

They now have a startup program you can try for free by clicking this link.

Lessons

• In all things, always double down on your winners. If you were right all along but didn’t hold enough ownership, aren’t you going to feel like an idiot?
  

• Invest in the micro; ignore the macro. Doing this alone will set you apart from other investors keeping up with the 24-hour news cycle.
  

• Look for existing moats, not theoretical ones. If a company has to pitch you on what their moat will look like, you have to determine how realistic that outcome will be.
  

• At the end of the day there is a scoreboard, and the only thing that matters is returns. Especially true today, distributed capital is more important than markups.
  

• You have to invest in the world’s most important companies in order to generate the best returns. Nobody in the world is smart enough to know where those companies will come from. This is why Brian is a generalist.
  

• If we were going to maximize returns, we would do it over a longer timeline. The compromise is a typical fund cycle (10 years + 2 years of extensions).
  

• Teams + moats + strategies > everything else.
  

• Good moats should be obvious. Good software will get cloned; you need something else.
  

• Different people, different evaluation processes. Brian is not a spreadsheet junkie, but other people at Founders Fund are. The fund does not force their investment team into all looking into things through the same lens.

Quotes

Reading

Confluence.VC Premium
The venture community that pays for itself 💲

Everyone’s experienced membership regret. That feeling when you see money leave your account knowing it could have been better spent? 🤮 Horrible.

What if there was a community that could pay for itself by connecting you overnight with thousands of over venture and growth equity investors?

Confluence.VC does just that. It’s application-only, and every new member is a vetted member of the VC ecosystem. Once inside, members get access to a knowledge library, member directory, Slack group, and private deal flow with hundreds of investment memos.

The best part? The basic membership is free (as long as you’re approved), and the premium plan offers a 30-day free trial.

Sooo … what are you waiting for?

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

- Clay and Tyler

P.S. We’re paying other newsletter writers using beehiiv to boost us. Here’s how to put some more money in your pocket by telling your audience about us.