Fund | Community | Sponsor | Recruiting | Careers
Good morning 👋
Venture is a storytelling business that sometimes returns capital.
If that is true along and the best story wins, as an investor, you can’t afford to be average with your language.
Many of the best investors of all time found a way to communicate their ideas differently than the pack, and they were rewarded in the marketplace for that differentiation.
When you’re new, you want to fit in and speak like everybody else. When you’re old, you want to be different.
Here are some examples of jargon and language cliché mistakes I made that I now filter for …
Big breakdown
Things you say that signal you’re new
Graham Duncan is one of my favorite people to learn under, and he has evaluated 1,000+ fund managers over his working career.
On a podcast with Tim Ferriss, he said something that hit close to home:
And so when people use a lot of jargon and clichés and language that, at times, doesn’t feel like their own, to me, that’s a sign that maybe they’re a little bit earlier, and they could use another stage of apprenticeship.
As somebody who made a lot of mistakes when I was newer, it got me thinking.
What are some things you say that will turn off somebody more sophisticated in the asset class?
Here is a non-definitive list from me:
Not having a unique voice. This is the overarching theme for this entire piece. There is ZERO demand for generic writing, and by choosing to write generic pieces, you are choosing to be ignored.
Theme bouncing (data center buildouts, deep tech, robotics, etc.). The people making money in any of these categories today have been at it for 10+ years. “Tourist investing” is synonymous for “dumb money”.
Not explicitly defining what "outlier" means to you. Thinking you can spot it without first defining what you're looking for is a guaranteed way to light money on fire. For starters, you need to study the outliers of the past.
Being busy all the time. Even if you are, nobody cares. Ironically, the people who have the most on their plate are typically the fastest people to reply.
Requests for startups. I am convinced these never attract quality.
Using "proprietary deal flow" in a sentence. The people who have the closest thing to "proprietary" access will never refer to it as that.
Referencing the founders in the portfolio as "my founders". I won’t waste my time trying to explain this one.
Trying to talk like Gen Z. You're an adult describing somebody as "cracked" - what are you really doing?
Having strong opinions about the city you choose to work. SF, NY (really the only two culprits) - nobody cares. If you build something great, people will want to meet you.
Feeling the need to borrow credibility to introduce yourself. Every time somebody does this, they are essentially acting as a billboard for somebody else's story.
Overly-indexing on markets instead of companies. It’s easy to have surface-level thoughts about where the world is trending. It’s harder to develop a thesis on opportunity zones as that reality plays out. It’s even harder to have nuanced takes on why a specific team is going to win a race within the larger game.
Not understanding the incentives of your role, your firm, and how you make money. What the fund is betting on (carry vs. AUM capture), how good work is rewarded (getting deals done vs. waiting for the right deal), how you get comped (carry vs. discretionary bonus) - the faster you learn, the better you can become at your job.
Not doing prep work before a call. At this point, there is zero excuse to waste time on basics that can be found with a quick search.
Being caught up in the "current thing". I already get enough propaganda about the current thing. I want less.
Feeling like you need an opinion on everything. There is some irony in me writing this as I give my opinions about things that that make you sound new. Contrary to popular belief, not talking has huge ROI.
Writing overly-formal emails. We all have things to do - keep it moving pls.
If you have more, I’d love to hear them.
Fund updates
What I’m up to
Outlaw invests thematically into people and companies at conception. Good thematic investors follow a framework as follows:
Philosophies → Theses → Themes → Investments
Shoutout @kokoxsu for the thinking and visual
Investments are downstream from theses. Theses are downstream from themes. Themes are downstreams from guiding philosophies.
I will break down each of these in future pieces, but to give you a sense of some of the founder selection up to this point …
Over the past ~four months, I have probably spent >500 hours across LinkedIn, Sales Nav, and Harmonic finding the founders I’m going to spend more time with this year.
At the time of writing, I have mapped out 112 stealth and pre-seed founders building across the themes I care about.
Every founder I am spending time with are one of the following:
Founders with 1+ exit under their belt
Former founding employees at places like Ramp, Cursor, Clay, Attio
Founders with an audience of 100k+ relevant to their product
Venture is a game of spotting outlier companies; outlier companies all have outlier contributors. My job has been to find those outlier people as soon as they launch their next thing, and the Outlaw portfolio will be a representation of this work.
I have started holding AMA (ask me anything) sessions for people who want to learn more about the strategy and my philosophy beyond what is shared in the links below.
If that is you and you want to get more involved, I have linked my calendar here.
Share Confluence.VC
Share this newsletter with your friends, or use it as a pickup line.
1 referral
Free month of Insider
5 referrals
Free month of Operator
👉 Your current referral count: {{rp_num_referrals}} 👈
Or share your personal link with others: {{rp_refer_url}}
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.
