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Joelle Kayden

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72
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2022-02-14
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2022-02-14
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  1. “I think when you're young, you're in a hurry, right? You want to accomplish things quickly. And sometimes that's not possible. And so, you know, if I look back on the first ten years of accolade, we had so many headwinds of things that were not in your control. And so I think it's really important to segregate out what you can control and what you can't control and to really focus on those things that you can control and be really disciplined and recognizing that things do take time. You can't always be in a hurry to demonstrate what you think you're capable of. Times are tough and you've got to tough things out. And so I'm very grateful for the fact that we had time to sort of build the foundation of our firm in a very challenging time and we stuck with it.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I had some very unique parents, so one, they were research scientists, and so they did what they loved, and they worked incredibly hard, and I learned the value of hard work, but also of really pursuing your passion and staying the course, because science takes a really long time to make discoveries, and I don't think I have the ability to focus the way they did, but I think their passion also their charity in terms of being willing to help other people.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I am a very direct person, and I don't necessarily understand how other people communicate, and I think over time I've come to appreciate that individuals have very different communication styles. I remember listening to a podcast where some CEO, and I forget what the company was, but on people's cubicles, obviously dating myself. This is when people went to the office, right? He'd have like different color codes for what type of personality you were so you knew how to approach that person. And while that sounds incredibly corny and sort of ridiculous, it actually makes a huge amount of sense because sometimes you just misinterpret what people are trying to say. I've made that mistake many times, and so I think really trying to put yourself in the shoes of the other person and trying to understand what they are trying to say without inferring what they're trying to say or taking it personally or misinterpreting what they're saying because of how they communicate.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Stanford Business School took a risk on one of the more untraditional candidates and admitted me for some reason that I still to this day don't understand because I had absolutely no business being there, but I'm eternally grateful because obviously it changed the direction of my career and also gave me access to a community of incredible people and my classmates and an alums going forward that I'm eternally grateful for that opportunity.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Oh, that's an easy one. I would say, you know, first and foremost, Rusk Garson, who's the founder of Welsh Carson Anderson and Stowe, believed in me very early on in my career, and I had the fortune to work very closely with that firm during my tenure at Alex Brown, where we were privileged to underwrite many of their companies, particularly in the healthcare sector. And in addition and probably more importantly, as Russ is an extremely philanthropic and generous individual who now has devoted himself to a myriad of activities where he's made such an amazing difference and really wants no credit for it. He at Accolade is our true North, because sometimes I say to the team, what would Russ Carson do in this situation? And it's a pretty easy answer to figure out that that's the right thing. And then I would say the other person is this goes back very early on in my life when the head of admissions.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Be accused of recency bias here, but I can't tell you the number of funds that come in and tell us that their top desile performers based on, you know, a portfolio whose average life might be like six months because they've had a few markups in a couple of companies, and they think that is a track record on which they're entitled to raise their subsequent fund. Until you have a fully liquidated portfolio, you really don't have returns.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Lack of humility and lack of common courtesy. We're in a world that moves really quickly, and I think sometimes people forget how important it is to take time to be thoughtful and thankful”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I've always been someone who's loved to exercise in some way, shape, or form. I would say also post COVID I acquired a puppy, so walking my dog. And listening to your podcast, Ted.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Fly fishing. I think people would be surprised to find that that's something that I love to do. No cell phones, standing in nature. It's just a very therapeutic activity. And I was not very good at it for a very, very long time. And I learn every time it's totally humbling. the thrill of the perfect cast and catching a fish is pretty awesome.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “There'll probably be a couple that survive, but we have dozens of those, and each one serves a different niche market. So I think there's going to be a big shakeout over time just because there are too many companies and not enough capital. And frankly, not enough talent for all those companies to be successful. So I suspect the shakeout will come more on the company side than on the fun side”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Not sure that the people who have been very aggressive in writing checks and the velocity of capital deployment, I just think that's a hard train to stop What's very appealing to the entrepreneurs to get lots of money at high valuations with not a lot to do on that. I think the firms that are at risk are those are sort of in no man's land that are still continue to want to do diligence and feel their value add, but yet they're not investing at the early stage and they're competing against massive pools of capital.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, hopefully, accolade is going to look pretty similar to how it looks today because we've increased the team significantly over the last year. We've doubled our asset base. This is a period of digestion, and hopefully we've invested in some sectors that are very volatile. I mean, blockchain is volatile. And so I think it's important to get some proof points on the scoreboard before we make the next move. And so I think we have a pretty well-defined strategy in our core product, which is venture and growth equity. I think growth equity you can sleep at night with blockchain, there's a lot of volatility in that sector of the market, particularly as it becomes more liquid in a lot of the assets are in tokens that fluctuate wildly. So we think it's important to have a long-term view, but it'd be nice to get some proof points before we moved on to do anything very differently. So I think it's more of the same.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Intently and trying to understand how best to execute against the opportunity. And so we were in the right place at the right time with a very high quality group of managers that's hard to replicate. And so we've been very fortunate to grow that business very aggressively. But it's nothing that any of us could have predicted when we started this when no one had any interest in it.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “When we thought about it, we thought about it two ways one, we thought about it offensively in the sense that we thought this was a sector where our limited partners could make a lot of money. But we also thought about it defensively, that if this was in fact a fundamental technology, which we think it is, that it was highly disruptive to a lot of industries, not the least of which would be the venture capital industry, and therefore it would behoove us to become knowledgeable about it. And we just, to some extent, got lucky. I mean, when we tried to raise the first blockchain fund of funds, it was a real struggle. And I teased the team that somehow or other our success seemed correlated to the rise in the price of Bitcoin when it went from five thousand to sixty thousand suddenly interest peaked, but I think also institutional investors and fairness started hearing from their venture capital firms that this was an area that they were focusing on.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, first of all, let me be clear. I give 100% credit to my team on blockchain, so my partners have done an absolutely spectacular job of being very early five years ago in doing a deep dive. We have the luxury of time because we don't really do that many things. And blockchain really is an outgrowth of what we saw happening in the venture community, I would credit Chris Dixon and Andreessen and the team at Notation Capital, Small Fund in Brooklyn, that really had an early lens on that this was going to be an important fundamental technology to pay attention to. And my team picked up on that and was all in. And so at the time that they engaged, there weren't that many managers. There were maybe 25 to 50. And so they could spend the time talking to people who had lots of time to talk to us because there was very little institutional interest in what they were doing. And so”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I'd love to chat a little bit about blockchain. You have a newish vehicle last couple years investing just in that space. How do you decide when to dive in for a new area like that to create a new fund”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It's hard to execute that. You could buy that fund that shorts Ark, but that's not something we do. We're not in that business, but I haven't heard much of that happening. But obviously when you see the correction that's happened in a lot of the companies that were really iconic in venture-backed companies in the last, really, it's in the last year where they're down 30 to 60 percent. Someone is selling these things pretty aggressively. So I think the momentum money is definitely moving out of that sector of the market. So I don't know how you hedge against something like that.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So, if you go back 20 years ago, maybe the first time it felt like there were a lot of highly valued IPOs, a bunch of investors in the space started hedging programs, effectively hedging out the public stocks that were held by their venture managers. And I'm curious what you've heard about those activities this time around.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “experienced inflation rising interest rates, inability to raise capital, etc. So I think there's some painful lessons that are going to come down the road. I mean, it's not always going to be like it was, but it went on for such a long time that there's sort of a whole generation people who haven't experienced what we've been through investing over thirty plus years.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So I think a lot of I've talked to a lot of my colleagues in the business and I think maybe this is a rationalization, but we sort of look at our allocation to a manager and we think of it over three years instead of over one fund cycle and we sort of divide by three knowing they're going to be back sooner. So you create your own time diversification that way. I'm not sure that's a great answer, but it doesn't mean that that particular fund won't be at risk, right? But at least your dollars that you normally would allocate to that manager are hopefully spread over a longer period of time. And you maybe will revert back to something else. It's hard to say I think it's concerning. And also the last decade has been very favorable to all of us that have been investing in this asset class. And there are a lot of young people within those venture firms that have never experienced a down market and certainly young founders that have never”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, when you bring that experience to bear, and now we're seeing it again, there's always this balance between you want to be supportive of the venture firms that you like and continue to like, but if they're coming back rapidly, you're losing that vintage year diversification. So how do you approach that?”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “The thing to do. And that did not end well. And so I think that's the greatest risk is that you're deploying capital very aggressively in a frothy market in a short period of time. And so you don't even if some of those investments didn't work out, you don't have the benefit of being able to participate in investments in a different environment that might be able to sort of save the performance of your fund.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, so look, it's a long cycled asset class I think people understand you've heard it a hundred times you can't time the vintage that you're investing in. You know, if you invest early and it takes seven to ten years for these companies to reach maturity while valuations might have escalated today, it really matters more what the exit environment is going to look like than what the entrance environment looks like. I mean, that's one of the reasons we don't love late-stage venture, this sort of growth round, the very expensive, very momentum driven rounds, we think that's where there's the greatest degree of risk. And as you alluded to earlier, we really haven't seen that kind of style of investing in venture capital before. We've definitely seen momentum investing in the public market, but we've not seen it in venture capital in TBD, whether that's a viable strategy. And so I think...”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So you've been through 2000, you've been through 08, and here we are sitting in 2022. And there's a lot of money sauceing around. Valuations are really rich. I'm kind of curious, how do you approach investing when There's a feeling that things have been awfully good for a while until obviously very recently, but we'll see what happens.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think it goes back to the team. Look, the world of venture, particularly when you're investing in technology, evolves pretty quickly, right? So I think the mistake you can make is thinking you're an expert in something when you're not, and that you really have to bet on the team and their ability to sort of ride in the next wave. That's really critically important. And so I would say that's the one thing that coming to a judgment too soon based on allegedly some knowledge of the portfolio and you're looking at it and you decide it doesn't look that great because it takes a long time for there to be returns, right? I mean, it takes 10 years. So sometimes it's just hard to tell and you make a bad judgment call.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “and are their characteristics of the ones that you look back on that you missed that you've been able to identify that there was something in your analysis or judgment that would tell you the next time we see that we will invest.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Oh gosh, there's so many. The first one that comes to mind, because it's so painful, is emergence. We had the opportunity to invest in emergence too. And I think because we knew so much about software when they said that they were a SaaS focused fund and they had put $2 million into Salesforce, we were like, well, that's not that unique, partially because we had this growth equity portfolio that was focused on software. And so we had seen that evolution. We just totally missed the opportunity to invest in that fund. I think they've had spectacular returns over multiple fund cycles, and that's particularly painful because we knew them well and we had the opportunity to invest and we just, frankly, it's not we, it's me. I missed it. No one else did me. I'll take, it's on me. I don't know that there are other examples that are that apparent.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “When we invest in an early stage seed focus venture fund, we would like them to do better than five X for an established venture fund. Occasionally you'll get an outlier, but 3 to 4X is still on a consistent basis not easy to do. In growth equity, I think we've been extraordinarily lucky lately just because there's so much capital in the space that those managers are doing above three, four, some of them. Some of them have done a lot better than that. And so again, on a risk adjusted basis, it's been a pretty attractive place to be. But that's sort of the ballpark.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Usually it's never any one thing. It's usually that the fun size over time evolves to be too large relative to what we think the opportunity is or what we think the team's capability are. So sometimes a team that's going to have a great fund at 500 million is not going to have a great fund at a billion. And that's just simple math. And so that's probably the biggest reason that we stop investing with someone. The other reason is, you know, we have a lot of data and sometimes funds aren't performing consistently at the level that we would have anticipated they would or relative to other opportunities that we have in our portfolio. And so it can be a function of return. You know, obviously we've had some situations where there have been some team blow-ups. Those are pretty easy to pass on in the future. But those are actually looking back. Most of them could not have been predicted. Things happen. You want to avoid that as much as possible.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So, you mentioned earlier that there are funds that you'll invest with that you decidedly won't re-upp for the next fund. And I'm curious, what are some of the examples for whatever reason that you didn't want to re-upp?”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Carrie is going up, fees are staying the same regardless of fund size. I don't know what to tell you. There's a shift in the balance of power, right? The limited partners don't have a lot of leverage in negotiating terms with certain funds, and so to me the more egregious ones are early funds where they tell us that the lawyers say these are industry standard terms and unlike your lawyers are not writing you any checks as far as I've noticed, but I think the lawyers are at fault for pushing some very aggressive terms for first or early funds, but if you've been a successful firm, you can dictate your terms and there's no shortage of capital available to fund your investments. So limited partners don't have a lot of leverage on terms at that point with a fund.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “but really understanding that because in venture it's missing the upside not protecting the downside that's going to lead to not have a successful fund. The most important thing is being in those right companies and owning enough of them”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yeah, so, well, particularly in venture, as you know, particularly if you're investing at the earliest stages. Owning a lot of a company that ends up being a category defining company or a fund returning company is so critically important. And that's hard to do. That implies that you are a highly valued individual to gain that right to have that kind of ownership on the cap table. It's very hard in this environment where there's so much capital to buy up ownership as things progress. And so that's why I think increasingly you're seeing every large firm raise a seed fund because they want to get in sooner to get that ownership and be able to write that big check and preempt the Series A very competitive market. But that's what's really important is also having sufficient reserves to be able to put additional capital into your winners and the corollary to that would be for those companies that seem to be struggling either find a reasonable exit path for them or maybe not fund those companies.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Of it is as our managers get bigger, we really like smaller fund sizes. So we have had a lot of $150 million growth equity managers that end up scaling over time, but initially maybe they had a pledge fund before they started their firm. And so we can see a bit of a track record. There's a small team. They've worked together. They know each other well. They're coachable. We can help them understand how to build an institutional firm. So there are lots of ingredients. There's no checklist, but obviously portfolio construction matters to us, discipline, how they think about liquidity, how they think about things like recycling. Do they fully invest the funds? Things like that that are tactical versus actually the investing piece of the firm. But all of those ingredients really matter to drive returns.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “that's a great question. I think a lot of it is partially, and I don't mean to dodge your question, partially, you know, we have a portfolio, right? So we have a fairly robust portfolio of managers, and we like many of them or most of them or all of them. So to add a manager is right now is somewhat of a challenge unless we have a new product where we have the capacity and lots of managers. Sometimes it is this manager accretive to our portfolio in terms of what it is that they do. Basically, we like people who are trained in the business. They've apprenticed somewhere else. For us, we don't need a referenceable track record and a tributable track record, which I know is very important to certain institutions, but we can sort of gauge how good is this person in terms of being a deal partner, in terms of sourcing, in terms of really having a differentiated reputation in the community.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Those managers. So, however, we can be helpful without being overbearing or whatever you want to call it. We want to be a thought partner.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, so I think it's just something that's core to human nature to want to try and be helpful, right? So as I say, we do not want to be a Monday morning quarterback. We do not want to pass judgment on what it is that our managers are doing. But if we can make connections between our managers and areas that we understand deeply, if we can make introductions, if we can arum one of my partners who's a fairly recent graduate of Stanford Business School, has a great network. And if he can help with recruiting for people into our different firms where we know that they're looking for someone at their portfolio company levels, if we can make customer introductions, we obviously make a lot of introductions to limited partners, partially because we do back first-time funds, and it's so important to help them in the capital raise. And I think we've gotten known it being having a pretty good nose for finding talent in terms of finding young managers. And so those introductions are so critical to the success of.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “when one of our now partners was a vice president, I said, you need to get to know everybody who's a vice president level person and our managers. And lo and behold, some of them have gone on to lead individual fund efforts, et cetera. So we really try and permeate the whole organization because just meeting with the top people doesn't really necessarily tell you what's going on underneath at the firm. And so we really encourage broad participation by our team with those people who associates should know associates and the VPs should know the VPs and the partners know the partners. And so we try and really over time develop that sense of the firm as a whole.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Everybody goes through growing pains. None of us is perfect. But I've been super impressed with the quality of the teams that we've been with for a long time and how they've evolved over time and how they haven't had a lot of turnover, which I find remarkable because they provided opportunities for team members to grow from within or to own different products or to lead significant efforts, etc. And so I think that's super important because it is an apprentice business. It takes a long time to be a good investor. Pattern recognition is something you always hear about. That doesn't happen overnight. And so I think it's really important that our managers have great cultures at their firm. Every personality is different. And so spending time and really understanding the team, one thing that I've told our team is that the younger ones like”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “So once you've sort of laid through the different strategy buckets that could work, there's then this whole dynamic of the team and the culture of the organization. And I'd be really curious from all your experience to learn a little more about your perspectives on what works in terms of a venture capital organization.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I still think it's a big chasm I think institutions are getting their feet wet a little bit. There's a lot more discussion about it, and there's a big conflict about is it going to compromise our returns because these endowments of foundations and academic institutions are the sources of capital for your mission-based activities, for your scholarships. And so there is that tension. And what we're trying to demonstrate is that you don't have to compromise returns by investing in women-led and diverse managers. But there's been no data on that. And so it is very much of an early days in terms of trying to prove that out. And so I think people are separating out a small pool of capital to sort of run an experiment and see what happens with it. But it's not core to their portfolios at this point.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Individuals can have a differentiated lens on what the opportunity set is out there. And so we struggled mightily to raise capital to address that opportunity and we're fortunate to have a separately managed account. Very non consensus”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “We really started to see a cohort of interesting managers develop both women-led and diverse managers over the course of the last several years, and I think that only accelerated some of it is COVID, some of it is post George Floyd, some of it is people just looking around the table and recognizing that the other partners really didn't look like them and they didn't want to spend the next ten years trying to figure out how to be successful within a more traditional organization, the rise of a solo GP. I mean, I don't think it's any one particular thing, but we saw people who were extraordinarily talented, who were struggling to raise institutional capital, and still struggle today to raise sizable funds. And so recognize that that's really an inefficiency in the market, and we all know that that's where one should be investing is inefficient markets, where we think”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “and accelerated. The change in that behavior by people will say a decade that's also true of healthcare where telemedicine had been something been talked about forever and all of a sudden overnight it catalyzed of massive change in consumer behavior and it's not going to go back the other way going forward and so companies that may have languished then all of a sudden gotten huge tailwinds and so sometimes it's the confluence of domain expertise and some very important tailwinds that makes you look like you've been a genius but to your point this is an industry that does thrive on that kind of disruption and being able to capitalize on that is what's really important”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Yeah, although they get discovered pretty quickly, right? The generalist firms have moved very aggressively into fintech. Ten years ago it was Ribbit and QED mostly as a family office but still very active in FinTech because FinTech wasn't a thing but then last year I think I saw data suggesting that FinTech was the biggest category in venture capital in terms of accruing dollars, which means that it's not just specialist firms, it just becomes well known and then generalist firms perhaps have an individual partner or a number of partners that end up focusing on those areas. So information travels very quickly in the venture community so they have to be big sectors of the economy and things that are changing for some reason. And so I think we all understand that COVID really catalyzed changes in terms of how we interact with financial institutions.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I don't think that's the only way to win, as we discussed with brand, but I think it is one way to win, and you can just judge by the consistency in their ability to be identified with companies that matter hugely in terms of generating those outside return. There's something to that, you know, you can just look at the portfolios and see how often they end up in the companies that are really the fund drivers or fun returners even.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “that they pursue. So I think that is true. And I think it's more a function of the domain expertise to the individual partners and then the support that they get from the partnership as a whole. And that sort of feeds on itself where I think people do have a sense of, I always call them the ten top five venture funds. Because everybody has a different list and it does move around a little bit. And it's a little bit unfair because there are firms that have done a spectacular job in different sectors that don't get as much visibility.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Yeah, I think venture capitalists will tell you that the team that you back matters the most, and there are extraordinary numbers of very talented teams coming out of large, successful technology companies, whether they're Stripe or Facebook or Google, and so because they've been associated with those companies, they can pick those people out when they exit those companies and get to know them early on. And I think founders will tell you that while they do pick firms, they really pick the individual partner. So if you're a marketplace consumer facing company, your number one draft pick is Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horwitz, and you get a lot of ancillary services from Andreessen, but you really want Jeff on your board. So I think part of it is reputation that's been built over time in terms of their level of sophistication and knowledge of how to shepherd these companies to the IPO market or to a trade sale if that ends up being the right.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “We don't like investing in later stage venture. We believe inventure you need to be early or you need to be a series A brand name manager and early whereby you secure your ownership and knowledge of the businesses very early. We think on a risk reward basis and our data shows this in our funds over the past five funds that investing in growth equity on a risk return basis is a far more compelling opportunity and attractive opportunity, particularly given its liquidity profile than late stage venture, where, as you pointed out earlier, it's really an arbitrage between the private market and the public markets. So we get our liquidity and our sort of later stage exposure through growth equity. Most of those companies can sustain themselves through positive cash flow, which enables us to weather cycles very well in our 2008 fund is one of our best.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “So with your lens and interest in getting into some of these early themes, I imagine in the last couple years you saw these as a potential opportunity. And I'm kind of curious how you thought about assessing them and in this case not decided not to invest.”

    2022-02-14 · Capital Allocators · Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source