YouSaid · the spoken record

Allan Jean-Baptiste

lines on the record: 48
first: 2022-09-01
most recent: 2022-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The problem is that people do know so much my life was about photography. And in fact, I had my first career as a photographer. Would that surprise people? I don't know. But particularly old days in film when you would spend time in the darkroom and you really had to figure things out for yourself and figure out whether or not you liked it and be less concerned about whether or not someone else liked your work, but still wanting a little bit for someone else to like your word. I think that's been pretty formative.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given my background in family, one thing I've loved to do for a long time is actually ski it. No one in my family likes the cold being from the Caribbean. I also hate being cold, but it's something that I taught myself growing up in Boston. Originally skiing in blue jeans and leather gloves because no one knew any better than teaching myself how to not fall on the icy slope so I wouldn't freeze to death. To today when our first team off-site was actually a ski trip, it was a really great way to spawn over shared experiences. I'm an avid ski Europe. If anyone wants to go on a ski trip, let me know. It's one of the best ways for me at least to be completely focused on just one thing. And in many ways, that's really freeing. You got to make sure you don't crash into a tree or fall down the hill or find some other way to hurt yourself. That's what I like to do in my free time.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this may scare you. So I went to Williams. It was one of the best experiences of my life. There's a lot I picked up around that community, but one of the things that intrigued me was the Chapin Library, which is their rare book collection. In the early 1900s, they were deeded thousands of rare books. And I built this passion for collecting them because at first it started out like I couldn't really afford the art that I wanted. Let me find my next type of art. And I'd go around the Berkshire picking things up. My wife thinks of it as hoarding, where I am now assembling what I think of as a really special time capsule of knowledge to your point on old. These are books that are out of print. You can't buy them on Amazon and they really provide a lens in a high fidelity way because they're from the period of the time in society and topics that they hit on it. I keep collecting and it's something that I hope.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the key in these is always protecting the relationship, disagreeing and challenging each other in the right way and thinking long term, what both of us have is that mindset and that culture and way of operating. And for us, it makes us better. There's a dynamic of sharpening iron, even the quality of ideas and the derivative ideas and the bank shots that come off of those types of discussions when you do challenge each other productively. It's really great.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up back to the core of what is the actual purpose of the office? And Marco made some really great points around our needing things more than just a roof. And we found a way to meet in the middle. In all of these things, we're making investments and all of them have opportunity costs. You have to decide where you're making those deeper investments. That was probably one of our most recent arguments. And Marco did a good job of helping me to think a little bit more expansively into how we could use an office as a tool.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're both pretty principled with a point of view. And so it's common for us to push and challenge each other. One of our most interesting arguments, at least for me, was really around our office, actually. What is the role and purpose of an office? So we're looking for a new office space. And honestly, I'm cheap. In my mind, I'm like, is there a roof check? Is there a toilet check? Is there a door? Amazing. This is a great office. We're going to do great here. Let's sign a lease. Marco had a really specific view on using the office to build community. How do we bring our portfolio and our operators and our LPs together, even when they're just in New York or for events? How do we leverage our office as a tool for what we're trying to build? So at first, I was probably pretty hard-headed around how much we should invest in it, what we really need in our fun one, and we had to have pretty open conversations.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say there's a lot that I'm proud of in our first year. And as Marco mentioned, a lot that we're excited to keep working on. But I'm most proud of the culture that we're building. We've been really intentional with setting that up. It's really a culture that supports new ideas and intellectual independence while still being rooted in a level of rigor and collaboration that we're both really used to. I'm proud that we're doing a good job with our culture and that we're having a lot of fun as we do this as well. It can be tiring and it's a lot of work starting a new fun, but we've had a really good time doing it so far. And I'm sure we will for the next 30 years as well.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're always thinking about what could we get better at. I think Alan and I require that way. So it's nice to hear. I think we should vote share one. And for me, the quality of the people that we've surrounded ourselves with has made this journey, this labor of love, this foundation so rewarding. It's you, but it's your team. It's so many people in our lives and our communities that have come out for us. It's the people in both Alan and I's respective lives who have opened up their networks and we've grown through each other. That's really special. And I think what we have done a good job of is there's not a lot of things you can control in our business, in minority investing. There's a couple that you can try. Who you take money from, who you give money to, and who you hire are closer to those things that you can control. For Al and I, I'm particularly proud of the job we've done there and how we've started to build and grow our team and the foundation we've set.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we think about and our lens based on our experiences and how we grew up in this business tends to be a little bit different. And that anchors us in what we underwrite, that asymmetric risk reward is still there. And frankly, in certain cases, it's not as competitive because there are just less funds playing offense.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To tack on to that, I think a lot about timing and again, how fortunate we are in so many ways. But in this case, we talk to our peers and there's the dynamic around having businesses in their funds that have high watermarks from 2020, 2021, even at the start of this year that will take years potentially to grow through if they can grow through it. And the beauty of not having that distraction and for us having that ability to focus and that purity of thought is really powerful in terms of letting us make the most of this moment and dislocation. The other thing that hasn't changed is at the end of the day, what we're doing is we're doing our best to figure out within this market, if we're right on demand, how growth compounds leadership and the efficiency of the unit economics. What's the long-term free cash flow yield of that business over time? The core fundamental”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're really excited because this is a great time to be launching a new firm. Our approach of being thesis driven hasn't changed. We are trying to be aggressive in these new markets. What has always been difficult is that transition from early venture to early growth for businesses. And I think that we have pretty differentiated experience and skills, not just at supporting companies at Series B, but C, D, E through IPO and beyond, but also really what later stage investors are looking for in companies and the level of depth and sophistication in which they underwrite because we've led and done those deals as well. So I think if anything, our experience and the platform we're building of supporting companies moving from early venture to early growth is only becoming increasingly strategic to founders. We're excited for this fun one. We're actively looking for new investments. We're not sitting on the sideline waiting for things to settle down.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other area where we looked at value is really around hiring, finding the next great talent for your team is incredibly important. And this group of operators is also an incredible group to pull from for things like independent advisors, board directors, and obviously potential hires for your executive teams. And what we're proud of is these are a really diverse group of operators, majority women, majority ethnically diverse, not because we went into LinkedIn and said black executive in sales and marketing, but because we went to school with these people. We see these people on the weekends. We invested behind them. That's been a really great way for us to add differentiated value. And actually two of them we've already placed into companies. So it's bidirectionally valuable, both for the operators and our network as well as Ansa and our companies. And it's something that really helps us compete differently by bringing different types of”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The networks of people who we have been working with to put together a group that are kind of like an elite task force of tactical operators that are there to solve your growth challenges. It's everyone from next generation of operators in engineering and product and data and sales and marketing and legal and finance. And these are actually the people who lead the teams. They're the people who develop the strategy. They do the work at top public and private tech companies. And they have real world recent experience in pushing through those scaling challenges. We've put this group together. It's now about 35. There's a great list of others who are trying to get into the onsetwork as well. And we're really excited about them. They're the next generation of great leaders. They're already doing it today, maybe not with the cachet of some of the people that are a little bit more well-known in tech, but they're a year or two away from being that themselves.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing I'd mention is really around support. And we have been really intentional in building a differentiated type of support for our founders. In starting Anza, given we took the time to build the foundation right, one of the first things we did was survey founders about what it was like working with the VC, what worked, what didn't. And what we kept hearing was you couldn't really get operating support. You can't get people on the line quickly, different VC advisors' information is really dated because they came in housed to the BC three years ago and now there's a new channel for marketing or even because they're not in the day-to-day execution of some of these ideas and strategies. What we realized was a lot of VC networks overpromised. They're people with large cachets who sound great on a page but don't really have time or aren't even accessible for your $10 million investment. What we thought to do was to productize”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategically to our advantage given we're part of a rare pool of people who have worked with companies like that. And I could go on, but if you think about companies within enterprise security, I can't think of better outcomes in our business than CrowdStrike, CSCAR, and many of the businesses that Alan served and worked alongside. Those relationships have led us to see the next generation of those companies and win the hearts and minds of the next.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“work that looks to catalyze where we think we can be great collaborative partners often that's around people capital and specific things and operations but we use those conversations to try to catalyze a financing to try to avoid quote unquote process the best way to win a process is often for us to avoid the process that's a key area that way that we compete and we earn that right through the work One thing that I think we were really fortunate about in our careers has been if you look at the end markets that we've worked in, whether it's cyber security and enterprise infrastructure, crypto and fintech more broadly, consumer internet globally, because of the teams that we were a part of have been a part of some of the best outcomes in the spaces. If you're building a connected hardware business that has a high value subscription, Peloton is the gold standard, regardless of what else is in the market. And we use those cards not often, but”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of it comes down to a couple things. One is our approach. The benefit of focus, Alan always says internally focus on focus. And now I've brought it home and I find myself telling my one-year-old that. But it gets back to this approach. On day one, before even the first meeting, we come in with the view. We know that we need to do that to build and own the mindshare of the entrepreneur early in our own processes, we are building deep thesis-driven work that helps us identify both those businesses and catalyzes an earlier relationship. So while we're not in the business of incubation or seed, there is mutual respect and alignment on where the world is moving with the companies we choose to work with because of that foundational relationship. And prior to a financing, prior to saying yes and communicating that, we're building a company-specific roadmap, often alongside management in parallel with some of the”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deal. By the time you get to making an actual investment, you're asking the same one to nine can't vote five. And so if I'm leading a deal and I'm very close to it, I might be a nine. But if Marco's a two, I should really pause, stop and think, and figure out what is causing him to still feel that way after we've gone through all this work, after I've shared my findings and perspectives, and really figure out whether or not that is the type of deal that we want to do next. We don't all have to be perfectly aligned on each individual deal being a home run, but we respect and want to preserve the sanctity of our partnership. And that's what's most important.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where a non-consensus culture, so you don't need both Marco and I to be screaming from the rooftops that it's the best thing to ever come to market. But we have a deep respect for each other's intellect and way of thinking and experience. As we're going through a process, we do a couple of things. First, for the second or third meeting, I would set Marco up with the founding team so that he can have conversations with them on his own, even without me there, where he can kind of play down a bit, ask the questions that he wants to get across and starts to form his own view. In addition to that, as we're going through each meeting and doing our work, the way in which we do check-ins is not just talking through here or the open areas of diligence, and this is what I've learned, but also starting to take reads of everyone's temperature. We like to use a scale. One to nine can't vote five, and that gives you a really good indication of how your partner and the rest of the team are feeling about an individual.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty differentiated for traditional venture. We're building a concentrated portfolio. We want Fund one to be about a dozen companies because for all that time and for all that effort and research and thesis building, we want to invest deeply behind where we have conviction.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we do is we build company specific work streams for diligence. This is way in advance of when we think there might be a financing. And we're building these work streams to understand why is this company the best suited to win in addition to, will this market still exist five, 10, 15, 20 years from now? And how do we start to use our network of operators and executives to start to reduce our risk of investment? Are there companies we can introduce them to for potential customers? Can we source new individuals to go work there, become executives, and start to have a better sense for where is the company today? What can we understand about it? How do we look around corners to understand where there will be risks and what can we do to mitigate them now? From all of that, it's a lot of time. It's a lot of resources. We want to use that to drive really large returns on our overall time and investment. So that's why we're building a portfolio that is”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned before that I love to have a plan, the way in which we balance risk is by having a really structured approach to developing that conviction and building those deep areas of knowledge. So the first thing we do is that we invest a ton of time into speaking with experts, speaking with incumbents, talking to employees, even speaking to companies that are way past our state of investment, and things that are tangentially related to where we're thinking of investing. From there, we spend a lot of time trying to understand the potential market sizes for these business models, the end customers, the geographies, and that can be really difficult and take a lot of time because the markets often don't even exist yet. And so it requires a pretty data-oriented approach and a highly analytical approach to start to build that degree of understanding of the competitive landscape and the opportunity within a specific market. From there,”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of appeal to hitting them where they ain't, so to speak, to be doing something that others aren't doing, that lack of competition tends to lead to a lot of the good things if you can have the courage to do that. It's a little lonely being alone sometimes. And you've got to ask yourself, are they seeing some risks that we're not, or is there a certain type of work that needs to be done that we don't think is worth it? Focusing on the risk aspect of it, how do you get comfortable in managing the risks that would at least appear to be in play when you're in less competitive areas?”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gets really difficult to figure out who covers what, but also even to identify what to bring in because it doesn't really fit within your individual small area of focus. In addition to that, it's structural for these new markets and distribution models where we spend our time focused, there aren't research reports. There's no Gartner report. There's no public comps. There aren't even really good private benchmarks for them since the markets are coming online. And when you think about the structuring of traditional firms, it tends to be that the most junior people are doing a lot of the sourcing, developing a lot of the theses, having those initial conversations and building a point of view. But the investment committee and the people making the decision are a completely different crop of individuals at the firm. So it's really difficult to build conviction and build conviction early when you don't have benchmarks and you don't have research reports and you're not the one who's actually doing the direct work, being close to the nuances of”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of reasons there aren't as many, especially established firms exploring a lot of these areas. For one thing, as you grow your firm, you just start to silo your people. So instead of being more of a generalist or covering multiple sectors, you start to cover very specific end markets. And within those end markets, even more specific subsectors. And given one of our theses is that the next generation of great businesses sit at the intersection of multiple sectors and multiple business models.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Businesses there, it's a real problem that affects millions of Americans. It's incredibly stigmatized so often people aren't actually seeking help, which makes it ripe for telehealth and newer age solutions. The challenge is what's the right approach in that space. And so we've done a lot of work in and around that market to start building conviction in a company that we haven't invested in yet, but we're incredibly excited about. I hope that gives you an idea of how we think and the way we look at the world.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Planning. I was particularly exposed to it for many reasons, as were people in my partnership, but what it led us to was this idea that men are to blame in almost 50% of the cases, but because of the paternalistic nature of the last thousands of years, nobody has recognized it and built a solution that helps men be better partners in this process. Back to company here in Brooklyn called Daddy. At the time, the company was six people, no office, a couple hundred thousand revenue. We scale that to many multiples more and sold it, I believe, for what's publicly reported to be a nine figure outcome. One of the things that whole experience showed was how many actual categories of diseases are mischaracterized as misgendered. If you start looking at other psychosomatic consumer issues like anorexian bulimia, they're definitelyn't any public comps in that market that are pure play.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, we'd love to go into depth around a couple, but I'll start with one. One of the things that we've observed is our best investments lead us to the next frontier of our thesis work. If you back up a few years, I previously led an investment into a fertility business actually focused on the male factor. It came out of a bunch of work in and around healthcare that started with the macro that we're in today about how rising out of pocket costs and this increase in gaps of care forcing people, regular people and consumers to buy healthcare like consumers at retail stores for the first time, largely because of the cost to value Delta, but also because of the fact that despite the highest per capita spend globally in the US, the healthcare outcomes here are far below developed country peers. We've noticed a few gaps in care, including in fertility and family.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rolling funds on angels lists. And that's great. It's great for the ecosystem. And that's exploding. And then on the other hand, you have phenomenal strategies, but many of which have become five and six sax in assets over a shorter amount of years. So they've left the part of the capital markets where partners, real partners and real owners are writing 10 to 20 to $30 million investments in emerging growth companies that are post-product. So post-seed, but pre-IVP, iconic TCV, where it's a really unique part of that business's life cycle, where you can influence the outcome, have a real piece of ownership. And we believe that we're best suited to do that.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we were finding and working with, it was winning the mindshare of people like Julia Cheek, who's the CEO of Everly Health, who I believe is one of the best CEOs of our generation and has built a very scale nine-figure plus top line business with great unit economics, but she had to go on Shark Tank to raise her first dollar. Those types of people are the people that we grew up with, we went to school with, we're in the communities with, and we over time have become phenomenal partners too and aspire to be the first call for. The last part is around the opening in the market. What Alan and I felt is twofold. The perception of venture being crowded has always existed as we've been building our careers. Five or seven years ago, it was, hey, SoftBank is raising the first hundred billion dollar fund. That perception has existed. And what we've seen is it's become increasingly crowded at the extremes. On one end, you have these niche solo capitalists, people with day jobs who raise”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continues to eat the world. The second part that is an opening for us that has become a little bit recognized today but is core to how we invest is around the best outcomes tend to sit at the intersection of different business models. They're not just pure play, direct to consumer businesses. They'll have a stickier B2B component. They'll be monetizing payers and consumers if it's a healthcare company. They'll have higher retention in certain regards. What we're seeing is most firms took a little bit of the easy way out and came to market with a narrow view on what they were going to do because that's often the easiest thing to underwrite. So that's the first part on the undercover types of businesses. The second is around undercovered people. As we started, both Alan and I have always been the other in our lives. We look different. We feel different. Alan's black and I'm mixed and I married a female entrepreneur and grew up in a female household. And all of these little things shape us in unsaid and said ways. And when you looked at the types of entrepreneurship,”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are three at the core. The first is undercovered end markets. If you look at how we built our track record, we were often working in TAMs, total addressable markets that didn't exist and weren't papered by a gartner or an IDC research firm. There were no initiating coverage reports that detailed for a Wall Street analyst how big those markets were and how they were growing and the fundamentals underneath them. Consequently, they weren't consensus yet in many ways and they weren't really owned and picked over, frankly, by large cap firms. And so when Alan and I over the last decade have grown to be leading investments, those were the markets that we gravitated towards, not just out of interest and seeing where the puck was going, so to speak, but also because of the white space around the table and our ability to own the mind share of those entrepreneurs. And we feel that's a growing set of categories really as software.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The word is derived from the Latin word ants, which I believe means handle of a cup, as well as an opening or opportunity. We go back to the root, and that meaning around an opening or opportunity really resonated because it describes what we look to do and how we're coming to market today.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you got most of it, what you haven't mentioned, something I broadcast a lot, is we look for an alignment of appetite. So it's something as fundamental as why do you want to do this? And that is manifest in things like, I want this firm to be enduring as opposed to I want to make a quick bug. Particularly in the adventurous space, it's kind of an easy throwaway. We want to work with people that we know that everyone who meets them is going to root for them because that's where you'll really get the force multiplication. I'm glad you had a good sense of what we were looking at, but it was that and more. Yes, and on that. But enough about us. Let's get back to you. Allegedly, your name means an opening or an opportunity. Tell me more about where this name comes from.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A nascent firm related to that is having your partners really be receptive to feedback as they grow. And I'll never forget how you reframed our perceptions on emerging managers, taught us what it meant to be a nascent firm, educated us on how you all have grown and scaled alongside a number of great what were once nascent firms. When Alan and I left that conversation, it just felt like, frankly, a really special partnership. And so I think we were mutually solving for that.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a question we should be asking you, but we'll take a crack at answer, Egate, and you can help correct what we got wrong because we'd love to learn it. There's a couple things, at least reflecting on the process and how much work your team put in over, what, maybe 14 months, including maybe as many meetings as well as some in-person time and dinner and what have you in campus visits. I think over that course of those interactions, what I believe institutions like Printco came to see is that people really matter. And as you got to know us, you were able to identify our talents. And I think you built conviction over that time that it would be those characteristics and not to sell ourselves, but whether it's intelligence, hunger, youth, network, character, the drive to build a resilient, enduring business, those characteristics, whatever you found, were really core to what it takes to build.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I also think when it comes to competing for the best entrepreneurs, what's incredibly additive is having somebody like Alan who will approach a problem in a way that really resonates with a different type of founder than the types that I would back. We think a lot about what access do you compete on as well externally in addition to how much value do you drive internally? And in many ways, it's an interchangeable analogy, but I feel like it's the motor and the steering wheel. And you're really just need both to be in sync. It's not just good enough to have one. For me, it's been really powerful having Alan as my core thought partner over these years in building onsa.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mark or nine's individual styles are very complementary. It helps us get to the best outcomes and answers. Marco is pretty casual. He's a big picture type of guy, super creative, has really big ideas. My style is more bottoms up. I'm a builder and I love to create a plan to achieve a goal. Those two styles actually resonate differently and can resonate well with different types of founders, LPs and operators. And it's been a real strength not just in finding great deals or convincing LPs like Princo to back us, but also in just our decision making. Our goal is to build a culture of independent thinking. We think that's the way in which you reach the optimal conclusions. I think we both really respect that we approach problems differently and at our core, we think in really complementary styles.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our truth is that our life lessons are interwoven with our investing lessons and our firm building approach. And so when you think about our core values, one of the first ones is we play for each other. For us, that means even our partnership design. It's not just an equal partnership where we're obviously encouraged and incented to collaborate. It's this belief that at scale, we're going to compete five versus one. You'll get the full force of our entire team that's always and consistently played our game. And we're playing it in this market and building our product in a way where our partnership, we hope, has an unfair advantage over time given the little things like that that go into our approach. Those are lessons that we've picked up from competing over the years in deals, but also how we grew our lives really as individuals and have made us better investors.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my family's mottos is it's better to roll down a hill than to walk up it. And that's one of the life lessons that we've used in building Ansa. It makes a lot more sense over the long term to put in the time and the energy to do things right the first time, no matter how difficult it is. Because then from there, you can always roll down the hill. You're not always trying to walk back up it. Naturally, the approach we've taken from who we've raised money from, at what terms, where we invest, and even how we build our team. At times, it can feel like we're moving not as quickly as we can, but from our perspective, it's the right medium and long-term strategy to build something that lasts beyond ourselves. The goal for Ansa is not to build a firm for the next 10 years, but to build one for the next 30, 50 plus and really build a venture capital firm that can own the market.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and part of the question also ties to why now and where we are in our lives, we feel really fortunate to have been longtime friends, collaborators, competitors, and thought partners. We were both at this point in our life where we had been investing for the better part of a decade Had a unique set of experiences where we were empowered to take real risk building teams, building infrastructure and new strategies. And that taught us a lot about both ourselves as investors and us as people, where we developed real clear sense of our game, so to speak. And we've always felt that you don't beat Tom Brady by playing Tom Brady's game. And for us, the way that we built our careers was by playing our own game. And Ansa takes that game and really productizes our style of investing in a very focused way.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Mark and I have known each other for Eight or nine years now, we first met friends and competitors competing for deals. During our junior years, Inventure Out West. We really deepened our relationship through a fellowship that we did together about four years ago called the Kaufman Fellows. In Kaufman, it allows you to form a really strong sense of community and trust with the rest of your fellows. And through that, Mark and I were able to talk about our goals as investors and as people. Also, the type of opportunities we saw in the market. And that's what we've built Ansa to do.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Media, for example, I learned a ton through that experience building on what I was doing in a prior life at a monthly strat hedge fund named BAM starting and building their venture and growth equity business. I got my start investing at a firm called TCV in Palo Alto where Alan and I met. That's great. Do you want to talk about how you came together?”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“life so did I grow with them. We spent most of my childhood in Long Island in a fairly idealic setting. Being a child of immigrants teaches you a lot of things about life. It informs a lot of our worldview. But one in particular that's really Corta, what Al and I connect on is this dynamic of being comfortable in uncomfortable situations and finding ways to play above your weight and figure things out. That's been the core to us building Ansa in many ways. More professionally over the last few years prior to starting Ansa, I was a partner and a member of the investment committee at TCG, which evolved out of a holding company called The Turning Group, which I joined when it was actually a holding company. I joined to help build our first GPLP fund, stand up our office here in New York, build out our team in infrastructure here, push us into newer spaces and newer markets that historically weren't really focus areas of the firm. And so things that were outside of subscription.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“always really tough to follow but we do our best More elis and like Alan, there's a lot of shared professional and personal experiences. Also, first generation American child of immigrants, our family actually settled a little bit down south in Queens, public school. I, parents develop their own.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting and a great experience in addition to investing in companies like FanD I also learned how to create infrastructure from how we source to how we hire to our investment processes. And for me, those experiences have been really helpful in launching Ansa, but that's probably plenty about me and my background. So, Marco, why don't you share a little bit about yourself as well? Alan.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks, Andy. I'm Alan John Baptiste, a co-founder of ANSA. I'm originally from Boston and I'm the child of immigrants from Haiti. As the beneficiary of my parents' hard work, I was given a lot of opportunity growing up from them figuring out how to get me into a top New England prep school to finding programs for me to learn classical music. It also meant that I was often in environments where I was distinctly different. And as a beneficiary of a lot of those doors being opened for me, it's really important to me to create space and opportunities for others. And that's why I've spent a lot of my time and career investing. After college, I joined Goldman's TMT banking team before moving to San Francisco to become an early member of the team at Capital G Google's Growth Equity Fund. While there, I invested in companies like CrowdStrike and Zscaler and learned two main things, how to define big ideas and how to use deep analysis for decision making. After Capital G, I joined KKR as a founding investor for their growth equity strategy.”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be with you, Alan Marco. It's been too long. We're going to have a lot of fun getting the world to get to know you all a little bit better here among my favorites. Why don't we start out with you telling us all a little bit about yourselves and about Ansa?”
2022-09-01 · Capital Allocators · Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.36) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source