How Sal got into investing

I was an econ major at Stanford, after which I decided to pick up a Master’s degree in computer science. While I was at school, I was looking for a job, so I reached out to some ventures funds that looked interesting. Luckily a few firms responded, and I landed a role at a firm called OCA Ventures in Chicago. 

The team there taught me how to do early diligence, take first calls and first passes at decks, and write investment memos. They even let me lead an investment in a company called Hubly—it was an exhilarating experience for a sophomore in college to be able to make an investment. After about a year, I decided to stay on with one of their early stage portfolio companies, Alembic, and get some operational experience. But I’d really enjoyed what I was doing at OCA, and that ultimately drove me back to back into venture. 

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Key opinions

* The strongest companies are founded by entrepreneurs who see a problem in their industry they feel so passionately about fixing that they need to solve it. I’ll put my money on problem-first companies over company-first companies any day. 

* Automating workflows FTW. Kyber Knight is a four-person fund, so I’ve been focused on automating or operationalizing as many of our workflows as possible. A lot of that can happen at the top of the funnel, at the sourcing stage. Harmonic runs a lot of my early outbound processes, for example, since all the data is aggregated on both the people side (e.g., tracking LinkedIn movements) and the company side. It’s a great solution for early-stage investors where there isn’t much data on the companies or the people. But however a firm can automate, there’s good ROI there.

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Key outlooks and predictions

* The firms that will get ahead are the ones that can adopt new technologies. I have a technical skill set, but just because I can do something from scratch doesn’t mean its a good use of time. With Harmonic, for example, I don’t have to build on LinkedIn’s API and track people with my own code anymore. It’s a nuisance (and hard) to build something that has a five-nines guarantee. Offloading that work allows firms to level-up their other workflows and focus on their real differentiators.

* At the end of the day, a firms’ network will always be its most valuable asset. This will be the case no matter what VCs’ tech stacks look like in the coming years. So keep showing up to events, approach people, be wildly curious, demonstrate your passion for your work and theirs. (And by the way, the more you automate and operationalize internally, the more time you’ll have to do this!)

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The gratification of a first-time fund

What I love about working for a first-time fund is I get the best of both worlds. Sunny Dhillon and Linus Liang, the GPs at Kyber Knight, have each been in the venture world for well over a decade. They worked at Signia Venture Partners together and their returns are top-quartile, so there’s a lot of experience there and I’m grateful for that mentorship. 

But at the same time, being at an early fund means you get the excitement of trial-by-fire, or of drinking from the proverbial fire hose—choose your metaphor. I lose the perfect amount of sleep at night over my job, and I mean this positively: I’m deeply invested in building Kyber Knight, and I feel my ownership far more at a small fund than I would at a large one. There’s something very satisfying about feeling like you’re laying it all on the line, every day.

In my first conversation with Sunny and Linus, they really sold me on their vision of sweating it out alongside founders, and that’s been very rewarding as a member of a first-time fund too. It’s our names on the door; everything has to work. For me, it’s energizing to grind out long hours with a small team, and to discover and lean into the disproportionate advantages we have. For example, our LP’s are especially helpful with top-down go-to-market motions, and with finding early design partners for pre-seed and seed-stage companies. 

The advice I’d give to a new investor

Organization and time-management are essential. Optimizing my time has been the biggest learning curve, because of course there are only so many hours in a day. And in those hours, you're managing events to do brand building; you’re supporting your portfolio companies anytime they call and inserting yourself as an additional employee for them. You’re finding new deals and bringing them to the team; you’re managing existing relationships with investors who are both upstream and downstream from you. You’re thesis building, reading, and trying to stay up on the news. 

So the advice I’d give myself is to time-box: Isolate specific days for specific tasks. To the degree that it’s possible, I now do one day of internal, one day of pitches, one day of portfolio help, and so on. Of course, it’s not always possible to keep it that clean. But time management is really something to focus on.

By extension: automate as much as possible. For example, I take Harmonic data and feed it into Airtable to set up their native automations. I use Otter for voice transcription on pitches and to generate quick summaries to send out to the team. I use Zapier to help with more complex tasks without having to maintain a codebase. Anywhere I can identify repeatability, I’ll automate there. Typically I spend a couple of hours on the weekend automating tasks for the upcoming week, so my next cycle of work is even more efficient than the last.

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The ongoing power of a firm’s network 

There are a lot of new tools and innovations in the VC space, alongside tools that have existed in other industries and are now being used in the context of VC for the first time. That said, venture remains a very relationship-based business—particularly in the early stages. The best way in is almost always a warm introduction; so putting yourself out there, meeting people, and doing all that offline work will continue to be the biggest differentiator. It’s the power of our network that gives us a unique angle—whether that’s to get allocation or to have some information asymmetry about someone leaving a company early.

So yes, it’s remarkable to have these tools that allow us to see and do as much as possible as a four-person team. And that's what the technology enables: We can run a four-person operation like a 20-person operation, and we can spend less time looking for founders and more time meeting them. Because at the end of the day, your differentiator as a VC will always be who you know and what your brand is. Network is paramount; it’s your most valuable asset.

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