YouSaid · the spoken record

Ramtin Naimi

lines on the record: 145
first: 2025-07-29
most recent: 2025-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“On a business standpoint, it was probably Arian Schut giving me that job at Core Innovation Capital. I actually look at that one single point in my life that had I not landed a job at a venture capital firm when I was flat broke with nothing to my name, or would I have ended up? Would I have just gotten a job somewhere? There was a million scenarios that I can point to where I wouldn't have ended up where I am today. So I could point a lot of things to that guy giving me a job when no one else in the world would have at that point. So that's probably the kinds of things someone's ever done for me in business. Kind of thing that I think has ever done through my personal life is my wife just being the perfect wife. She truly is the embodiment of everything you need to succeed in life.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tomorrow. If you want these companies to continue running circles around their public counterparts, it's not like winning a lottery. What was the instance with Google? Something like over 100 people made over $100 million. 92 of them were never heard of again. And then the other eight ended up becoming BCs who wanted to make more money than that. So I think that's the risk you run into with that liquidity is people in these lottos and these companies are so large right now that that is the type of liquidity that the early hire is and senior management of those companies will experience.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the restrictions on secondary have gotten really, really tight. You can make an argument that excess liquidity early is a killer of productivity. And is there a way to throttle that? And it's, yeah, you keep your companies private. You keep people satisfied with liquidity. I think that's very good from a company building perspective. I think it's problematic from a venture returns perspective. I mean, no LP is interested in getting liquidity in 3% to 5% installments. So I do think there needs to be a solution to that. There is seemingly a new swath of continuation vehicles popping up in Silicon Valley. So it seems like there will be ways for people to get large sums of liquidity and the venture managers get to maintain their basis and their position of these companies. So I think it'll all net itself out, but I don't think the end result is ultimately these companies are all just going to go public. I think they've all found a hack, which is your top 100 performers today if you give them all instant liquidity on their position tomorrow. 92 of them probably might not be your top performers.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're still private companies. The one thing that's interesting to think about from that perspective is what that actually means for an LP and what it means for early managers. I think it actually benefits us in a way that it might not benefit the later stage guys. But one thing that's an unintended consequence of this is it maintains hyperproductivity in these companies. I always joke that that early liquidity was the bug and not the feature of crypto. People got rich too quickly and they stopped building things. in this latest swath of these companies that can absorb 500 billion to $1 billion checks. The reason the productivity of these companies is comparable to an early stage startup companies because there's been no early liquidity. You have people still grinding and working and the liquidity is coming via these 1% to 5% tender offers, which is more than enough to give people a down payment on a house, but not enough to give people”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing I tend to talk about somewhat frequently, which I'm trying to figure out whether or not it's a feature or bug, is the scale of the companies that are staying private. And it's a one-hand feeds the other type of thing. Because as these mega funds and you know all of them scale, they can only scale because the size of the companies that are staying private are scaling. If you have a $5 billion, 8 billion, 10 billion, $12 billion venture capital firm, you need places where you can write $500 million to $1 billion checks. You now have that in a way that you didn't have 10 years ago. And you probably have about a dozen, maybe 15 places you can write checks that large in venture capital today. Those companies fan the flame that allow these VC funds to get larger and larger, and they break the narrative that venture doesn't scale because venture actually does scale if you can write billion dollar checks into companies that are still growing. The companies in venture that are the largest are still outpacing the growth of any of their public company comps. So they still do have venture scale growth.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're going to continue to get double digit ownership in the best companies in the world early. Their funds will get bigger and bigger, and as LPs, your exposure to those companies will be less and less, but you still will have exposure to the greatest companies. And I think what we brought to the table was definitive proof that we're accessing the same quality of company, granted less ownership, but granted dramatically more relative ownership. When they look at our fund, if there's overlapping companies in our fund with any other fund they have in their portfolio, 94% of the time they have orders of magnitude more look through ownership to that company to our fund than they would through one of the others.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think like anything, there is a risk reward profile. You take more risk with somebody that the reward potential is higher. If you take less risk with somebody, the reward is lower. So looking for individuals, especially if you have a more non-pedigreed background like I had, that are going to be more interested in manager strategy fit versus what is your track record and why should I care? And then in terms of what you need to do to make yourself appealing to LPs, there is multiple tiers of LPs. There is the highest tier of LP that can access any fund they want and they're already in amazing venture capital firms. And then there is LPs that don't get into those deals and are looking for more exposure to other types of companies. We fortunately have an LP base that is heavily concentrated in the best firms in the world and then they added abstract to their roster. And that actually ended up being very beneficial for us because those are a lot of institutions that hadn't added a manager to their platform in a while because they already had.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think by and large those people have done dramatically better than the LPs who may be less imaginative and tend to only back managers who've spun out from other platforms. I think that's the easy manager to back. It's okay, cool. This person's been a venture capitalist for 10 years. You can look at their historical track record and pretty much underwrite what their future track record is going to be. Arguably, their future track record won't be as good as their historical track record because the deals they were able to access those platform funds might not be deals that they have the ability to access or win in the future. Paula Valent is a great example of this. She used to be a Bowdoin and now she's a Rockefeller. She was a day one LP to Chase Coleman. I think she was very early to Josh Kushner. She was my first institutional LP. Bowden, small endowment, but I actually think there's stories that show that it's actually one of the best performing endowments in the world relative to scale and stand Ruckenmuller famously chairs their IC. Oftentimes you'll see that the managers she's in are mega managers today, but she was with them since day one.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're very fortunate. We have an incredibly high quality LP base that consists of blue chip endowments and foundations and very impressive founders of generational companies, either them directly or through their foundations as well. Great hospitals, just great organizations to make money for candidly. And then some other more traditional down the fairway guys who are just good because they've done this for a very, very long time and they're good mentors because they've been LPs and other funds for 20 to 30 years. We're very fortunate to have the LP base that we do have. And then we also have Titans of Industry as well, as I mentioned earlier. I think there's two types of LPs you meet probably more than that, but I'll narrow down into two. There's the ones with Imagination and the ones without imagination. There are certain LPs who have built portfolios of amazing venture capital firms and they had invested in them before they were amazing venture capital firms and they were fund one commitment to people who might necessarily have checked all the boxes of a traditional venture capital firm.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that trumps everything, but relating into business when a company invested and really starts to work, that's always really exciting. When you see the stars start to align for one of your companies and you can be there to fuel the fire in any way you possibly can and be the crew to that formula one driver, I think those things are really special.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the companies that I decide to invest in when I decide to invest in them that moment. You meet all these companies, it's like you meet a company like, okay, okay, okay, hey, hey, this is cool. This is really interesting. And then you start peeling back some layers and you just get more and more excited about it. And then you have to win. You pull out every single stop. You clear your calendar to whatever you need to do to earn your slot on that foundry's cap table and to earn their trust as their partner. There have been windows of time where we went two months, three months without investing in a single company. And in those three month periods, I'm like, what happened? I know there was good companies. Did we just not see any of them? Did we pass on ones that were obviously good? And I just feel like I had three months where I just wasted time. We achieved nothing of value in the last 90 days. How do we prevent that from happening again? Are we not seeing enough companies? I find a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. And then also outside of family related things, obviously watching my kids talk or speak or catch a ball or draw.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People say if we were able to do all of that during COVID, we'll get through anything. So basically, in two years, we lived in one house together and had two kids together, and I ran my business from the house for two years. It was a great experience. And honestly, we didn't even argue once throughout it. So that's when it kind of became that it was just a made-to-be relationship. And then we ended up getting married in the backyard of our current home when we were pregnant with our second child. We just had a third in December, who's now almost six months old.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's very involved. She's friends with everybody. She's close with my partner. Then she actually cares about what I do. And she's always been my biggest cheerleader since day one. March 2020 came around and we were engaged and we ended up having to postpone our wedding because every venue was closer the next two years and we saw a lot of our friends traveling the world and really enjoying their COVID experience. We basically decided whether we were going to do that or whether we were just going to start having kids. And so we did start having kids. And our first daughter, Lily, was born in October of 2020. So during COVID, we actually had two kids and raised two funds. So we were very productive during COVID.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a wife and three kids. My wife is pretty involved in my business. I actually met my wife at a holiday party when I first met her. She was the director of marketing and communications at Bessemer during our relationship. She became the head of marketing and communications at Spark Capital. And now she sort of freelances and keeps herself busy by making sure we don't screw those things up at abstract. She oversaw our entire rebrand. She's very big on founder experience and aesthetic of the brand and the firm that we built. But I met her when I just turned 26 years old. So really she was there at the founding days of abstract. What was really special about her, her meeting somebody like her, was that I love what I do. I love talking about it. And because she worked in the industry herself for six or seven years, she understands the significance of something that I might be excited about. She understands the significance of something that I might be upset about. She appreciates what I do. She views it as a fan.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With very humble beginnings, whatever they did instilled something in us, instilled some sort of a chip in a shoulder in us. But the smartest thing that they had done, which is I really give credit to my mom for. And I didn't have this specific to Iranian immigrants or other types of immigrants, but my mom was way more focused on us being in the best neighborhoods growing up versus the best house. And she thought being exposed to what is possible is better than to have a nice house or a big house in a place where you're a big fish and a little pond. We were the tiniest fish in the biggest pond in the neighborhood that we'd grown up in. So I had friends whose fathers were the CEO of Visa or the CEO of Blue Shield and lived in these extravagant homes. So I knew these things existed. I knew the path to that wasn't just being a doctor lawyer and there was other things there. So I think the best thing that my parents did for me and my brother was exposing us to that.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some data licenses, there was no expenses to the business whatsoever, but there are certain founders like him and other people in our portfolio that I point to how much you could actually do with just $600,000 or a million dollars. But the reason I pointed to him is we were raised the exact same way. We think about things differently, but for two immigrant parents, having kids that have both built things.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mom is really tough, but also the most loving mom in the world. And my dad is totally soft, really soft-hearted guy, but very strict about having direction in life. My dad's number one thing was like, as long as you're working hard and you're good at something and you know how to create something out of it, you'll be successful at it. My brother, he started a company as well, vertical SaaS company that sells into the automotive industry. Which one we moved to the Bay Area is the industry my dad got into. He ended up working at car dealerships and then working his way up until eventually became a partner of a franchise group that primarily deals in luxury exotic cars. And my brother worked with him for a little bit and learned a little bit about that industry. And he bootstrapped a vertical SaaS business that he just recently sold for a little less than 30 million bucks. But the cool thing about it was he went to YC and raised less than $600,000 to the company and just ran it with him and his co-founder and no employees and they got it to just shive six million of ARR but highly, highly profitable besides two employees and some hosting fees.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing what we can as best as we possibly can. And I think everything we have done historically has proven that we can do what we think we can do, what we said we can do, what we said we will do. And I think we can continue that pace.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the number one thing that's changed is in the early days I just wanted to be accepted as an outsider. And I think that's happened because I actually think Silicon Valley is a very special place. If you proved it to earn your seat at the table, no one actually cares about anything else. You're at this seat for a reason and we'll leave it at that. So I think that's no longer a chip at any instance of the firm's history. It was the early days where like they didn't know what they're doing. They're just following other people. I'll start leading deals. And then we started leading deals. And it's like, okay. They only know what to do with seed. They have no idea what to do at later stage. And they might be right. We're still early in doing some early side later stage things. But at any point in any type of business, when there's other people who have a right to be there and they see you as someone who doesn't have a right to be there, you're going to get a lot of shade thrown your way. I encourage my founders not to focus on competition. I try not to focus on competition. I just try to focus on”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple things. One, the definition of abstract is existing in concept but not reality. And that's pretty synonymous with seed stage companies. And two, I wanted the name to show up places quickly. I remember back then I spent all my days on Crunchbase and Crunchbase had things alphabetically listed. And I realized my firm started with an A, it would be at the top of the list on everything. So I wanted a firm that started with A. And then I wanted a word that was easy to remember, didn't sound like any other venture capital firm. And then came up with the word abstract. Then I found the definition for abstract. And I'm like, this actually just seems like a perfect name for a CCH venture capital firm.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got serious check writing ability or raising my own fund because who would give me a fund at that point in life? And that's when I learned about Angelists.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As much as somebody possibly could have been and had to start completely from scratch once again. And then I ended up with an entry level job at a small venture capital firm. That's where I met my partner today, Alex Davidov, he was a partner at Core Innovation Capital. Within a few months of being a core, it became pretty obvious to me that fintech Series A impact-ish investing wasn't what I wanted to spend my career doing, even though I have a ton of respect for Ariane and the mission that that firm is on. And they've actually done phenomenally well with returns. They actually led the seed round of ripple. I ultimately wanted to figure out how to become a generalist seed stage investor. And the reason I focused on seed stage was because that was the only place where I thought I could access enough capital to the point where I mattered. Any later stage, there's no amount of capital that I thought I could access that would actually make me a relevant conversation in those places. So that's why seed was the obvious starting point for me. And then I needed to find a way to build track record that didn't involve working at a firm for a decade until I.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember once when I was explaining this to institutional LPs in the early days, it was something I was very embarrassed about, and I was trying to figure out how to talk about it. Jerry Yang was one of my LPs, so I spoke to about it. And then he said, now I knew about it. He's like, I loved it. And I was like, why did you love it? He goes, you should wear that as an entrepreneurial badge of honor. Any founder in the world with a failed company would have been in that same exact position had they put their own money up for a company. That's true entrepreneurship. You put everything you had into something because you believed in it. And when it didn't work, you had to start from scratch. Venture capital is you put everything somebody else has into whatever you believe in. And if it doesn't work out, then you get a job at Apple or Google. That was actually a really interesting way to phrase it for me. Not that I don't think there's various tiers of entrepreneurship, but the whole concept of wearing is a badge of honor. It's like, yeah, you lost your own money on something that, you know, typically most people just lose other people's money on. Looking back on it, that was cool. That was the epitome of my resilience journey. I got knocked as hard on my ass as I possibly could have and was humble.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awful. There's nothing pleasant about that experience. In hindsight, losing your net worth is a lesson better learned at 24 years old than 54 years old, so I'm grateful for that. But the learning there is if you're going to start a startup company, raise other people's money into it.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Structuring for five years, and thankfully, things worked out. And I wiped it all off within two years. It was a nice comeback.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much everything I made on my hedge fund I lost on that company and ended up in debt. And that was kind of my first reality check in life when I realized that I'm actually not a genius and I could lose money and maybe I should have just gone to college. Why did I put myself through all of this? But thankfully, one of the venture capital firms that I pitched that company to was a firm called Core Innovation Capital, founding partner of that firm is a guy named Aryan Schute, who's one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life. He's just a good guy. Core's focus is investing in fintech that provides upward mobility for the emerging middle classes, somewhat impact in nature, but very much focused on returns. And when I went down to the company, I ended up reaching out to him and he gave me a job. So I ended up ultimately getting my venture capital job flat broke. And when I ended up getting all this debt, I needed a way to restructure it. And that was probably the worst moment of my life was sitting in the waiting room of a bankruptcy lawyer's office trying to figure out what type of bankruptcy I need to file. And ended up a big chapter 13, which is not a write-off of debt, but a re-”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think companies like London Club and Prosper. And I thought that sector was going to be the next big thing, the rate of capital going into it, the rate of growth of those companies. And I thought that if that sector would reach its full potential, there would need to be a liquid secondary market for it because those loans did have maturity periods and those maturity periods scaled anywhere from three years to five years to seven years. And banks trade debt like a liquid asset class all the time. So why wouldn't the individuals trading on these platforms be able to have the same access to liquidity? So I wanted to build an exchange that allowed debt investors to have that same level of liquidity. I self-funded this company with everything I made previously and I built out a team and went to the regulatory framework of setting up an exchange and then 14 months in when I had a product that was actually ready to raise external financing for that sector had completely collapsed. I think Sequoia started writing Prosper down to zero and lending club but plummeted like 85% from its peak IPO price and I had spent my entire net worth building a supplemental product to a collapse.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm walking into like a venture cap from a goo, and I felt like a salesman. Everybody was wearing jeans, t shirt, baseball caps, sneakers, just based on the way I dressed. I knew I blew it on the initial meeting. But he was kind. He gave me some pointers. He gave me feedback. And I met a few other people as well. But the consistent feedback was, hey, listen, your background's not that relevant to venture capital, but you should consider starting a company instead. And over time, I've just learned that there actually is no relevant background to venture capital. Similarly, there's no relevant background to starting art gallery, apparently. And everybody suggests I should start a company. And I think that's terrible advice to give anybody. You should never advise anybody to start a company.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“VCs, Angel Investors, founders, just anybody I could read about online, and Silicon Valley is a nice place. People are pretty receptive to cold emails. I got a few meetings with individuals and I just learned more about tech. And I wanted to find a way to immerse myself in the ecosystem. And I just spent more time with individuals. I wasn't really getting anywhere. So I was like, if I want to do this for a living, I can't be one foot and one foot out. I need to just immerse myself into this entirely. So I decided to wind down my hedge fund and focus on that. And the hedge fund did well. Everybody produced multiple. And then I tried to get a job at one of the big venture capital firms. And I ultimately got a couple of interviews. And I remember I look back on this and cringe, but one of the first guys who ever took a meeting with me, I reconnected with recently this guy named David Crane. He runs Google Ned Jews. I shot him a cold email and he responded. He was probably the most senior person who responded. And he asked me to come in for a meeting. I wore a suit and tie. I walked into the office.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of 2011, I remember is distinctly being one of the worst months of my life because it was the European debt crisis when Greece was on the crux of defaulting. I think the market had 13th consecutive down days, and I was short ball. I actually experienced while you could actually go into debt venture capital firm. But thankfully, we recovered from that. It took a few months, but that was a very, very painful month. I was in the Bay Area, and I just kept hearing more and more about tech. And I didn't particularly enjoy running a hedge fund. I did well financially relative to my age doing it, but I didn't like sitting in front of a computer screen for 15 hours a day. It's a very lonely job, and it's a very stressful job. People on venture complained that the feedback loops are too long. I agree the feedback loops and hedge funds are too tight. I think you can convince yourself you're a good investor or convince yourself you're a bad investor too quickly in hedge funds. If you look at hedge funds and default, they tend to have a shorter duration of life than a legacy private equity firm or legacy venture capital firm because it's just very hard to outperform in public markets for extended periods of time. But I was in the Bay Area and I want to learn more about tech just because it was my backyard and I kept reading about it. I started cold emailing.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I decided that I wasn't going to go to college and I was going to start a hedge fund straight out of high school. I got a Series 65 license, which is the license you need to start a hedge fund. There was a local financial advisor that I spent some time with for a summer, and he did PWM for some high net worth individuals. And some of those guys saw me trading on my screen. They're like, oh, if you start something, we'll put like 10, 15, 20,000 bucks into it. I ended up raising a fund in January of 2009. I rolled my money into that fund, which is the largest check-in of the fund. And then I raised digital $3 million from 45 individuals. So lots of tiny checks that didn't really mean a whole lot to anybody. And Mantra Fund in January of 2009. So timing was definitely on my side. Focused on concentrated positions in triple ever DTFs, momentum trading on high voltage. And then derivatives on those two strategies to get even more leverage. On the first two strategies, I just had no idea what I was doing. But thankfully, the market was forgiving of a strategy like that, but extreme volatility along the way. I had certain months where I was down 37% one month that I was down 51%.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until my senior of high school that I actually made money trading, I got very fortunate through a combination of lucking out with volatility and not understanding risk management, where I was trading out of the money call options and put options against triple-levered ETFs that tracked the banking sector during the financial crisis, an ETF that would swing anywhere between 10 to 30 percent on a daily basis given what the Federal Reserve was doing on TARP or no TARP or Lehman getting bankrupt or Bear Stearns getting acquired by JPM and I had made a few hundred thousand bucks trading over a few short week windows on derivatives against those instruments. And that was like a good thing and a bad thing for me. The good thing was that it gave me a ton of confidence in myself and I convinced myself that I was genius. And the bad thing was it gave me way too much confidence in myself and convinced me that I was a genius.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would net like $2,000 a weekend, and I would do like two to three parties per month. So it's good to side business for high school”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I ran to the bathroom and I took out a garbage bag and I just started stuffing it with cash. And then that became like a business that ran for like the next couple years until it didn't really make sense to host parties. So like how much money would you make?”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anybody who wanted a Sweet 16. I did this for a couple years between the years of me being 16 and 17 years old. I would run out of venue. I would get a DJ. And my only condition was they could invite anybody they want. It was going to be their birthday. Their name was going to be on the banner. The DJ was going to do shout outs to their name, but I got to charge cover charge. And I also got to make the party dramatically larger and invite anybody from every other high school in Moraine County. I turned this into a real business. I would get the venue, I'd get insurance for the venue. I would go to the local gym and get the ruted out meat heads. I'd give them 50 bucks for the night. They would block the side door so nobody snuck in. I spent so much money on the first part that my parents were worried that I was going to lose all my savings that I saved up to throw that one event. And the funny joke was I had a pencil box to collect all the cash. And then within about 10 minutes of the party, there was too much cash. I couldn't close the pencil box anymore.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I started at 7 30 in the morning, and I think I was there till 7 30 at night. For whatever reason, I ended the day very proud of myself. I don't know if I should have, but I really appreciated what hard work was. Well, I do think there is a concept of working hard and smart. I do think you have to do both hard work is just something that was always instilled in me in early age and I think founders work hard. I think you have to build hard to build anything of value or anything success. There are certain people who are willing to work that hard and certain people who aren't. I would argue that the five people who called in sick that day aren't willing to work that hard and they probably haven't really gone much further in life than that West Helm Stockroom. But then my side hustle business, which is where I actually made most of my money in high school, was I grew up in Marin County, which is a relatively affluent neighborhood. There are some people that are a lot more affluent than others. There were certain girls whose parents would throw them very extravagant sweet 16s. And there were other girls whose parents wouldn't. And I saw a hole in the market there. My high school business was I would finance Sweet 16s.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had a deal with UPS. Every morning, UPS would pull up a truck and the stock guys would unload it and put it in there. And that's just how they made an inventory. And I remember this is probably like the single hardest day of physical work I had in my life where our manager said, tomorrow we have four trucks. So we staffed six stock guys to unload these four trucks. It's going to take half the day and we're going to call it a day. And the guys at UPS, they didn't actually unload the deal was just to drop the trucks off and then they would pick it up when they were empty. And I remember I showed up that next day and everybody called and sick except for me. And I had to single handedly unload four UPS trucks worth of furniture.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did focus on that. And while some had a lot of very low sectionals and sofas, and I would ask them if they have a coffee table at home, like, yeah, I'm like, is it a low coffee table? They said, no, I'm like, well, have you ever seen a coffee table that's higher than a sectional? Like, you have to prop your legs upward. It's not going to look good. It's not going to be comfortable. You should take this coffee table also. So I ended up having like the highest average ticket salesmen. The hourly rate was nothing compared to what you got on those incentives. So I really just focused on upsizing those sales. But then half a summer and half a school year. I actually opted to go to the stock room because I was able to get more work done in the stock room because you're on the floor all day long. That's when I got an appreciation of hard labor because as I mentioned, West Alma was one of those stores that stocks everything.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just want the sectional, then I would take everything off of it to show them what it would look like when it got home. That would constantly encourage them to take it because they would be very unhappy with the way it looked when it came home. And there was no harm in returning it. Because unlike commissions, incentives were not rolled back when things were returned.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had this job when I was 16 and 17 years old, and I used it to finance a side hustle, which I'll tell you about in a second. But everybody in West Hall has a corner of the store, and every corner is its own version of a style of an apartment that you can have. And I worked there on the weekends. And I always kept an eye out for people that came to Marin from the city with zip cars. So they rented a car to take some furniture home. So I always spotted the people who rented a car because I knew they were there for a mission. And when they came in, West Elm wasn't commissioned-based. It was incentive-based. You didn't get a percentage of your sales. You got a progressive bonus based on the size of a sale. You were incentivized to upsell people. If a sale was $500, you got a $10 incentive. If a sale was $1,500, you got like $150 incentive. We graduated exponentially. So somebody would come in and they would want to buy a sectional and they were ready to take it home. Staging is everything in those stores. I'd be like, do you guys want to take home the pillows? You want to take home the coffee table? What about the rug? They're like, no, no.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wanted to teach myself to trade stocks, and I quickly learned that $2,000 was not enough money to trade stocks, and I wanted to learn to trade derivatives instead. I learned that the multiple potential derivatives was order of magnitudes, what you get in the stock market. I did that throughout my duration in high school. I only had two real jobs in my life. Job number one was when I was 14 years old, I shelt books at the local library. And then job number two was I worked at West Elm, the furniture store, which is actually my wife's favorite story about my upbringing because of the way I did sales.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a very non traditional by Silicon Valley standards childhood. My parents are Iranian immigrants. My dad immigrated pre-revolution. My mom post-revolution. I have an older brother. He's five years older than I am. And we grew up in Los Angeles, just outside of Calabasas. And my parents are small business owners when I lived in LA. My father owned a couple of restaurants, a couple dry cleaners, and my mom was in school to be a dental hygienist. When we moved to the Bay Area, because that's where my mom had a sister and she wanted to be closer to family, that's probably about 12 or 13 years old. My dad used an immigrant coming from another country, so they're all financially motivated. He kind of in an early stage instilled in me that America revolves around money. You need to figure out a way to make it. I heard it a little too often as a kid. One of the things that I could point to when I was younger was the stock market for whatever reason my dad always had CNBC on in the mornings before school started and always saw in the background. And when I was 13 years old, he was kind enough to lend me $2,000 in my”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamental business progress in that time frame. And that hasn't happened since 2021. In 2021, I was funding companies, and within a couple months, the series A got done. And that is very actively happening again. I'm funding companies that are raising A's within a couple months and then B's within a couple months after that. And if you look at the company relative to what I invested in versus what the company is today, they're basically just paying 10 times the price for the same exact company I invested in a couple months or four months ago, plus or minus a few hires and maybe some design partners. I do think the industry is getting a little drunk on IRR. And the same thing that happened in 2021 is happening again in terms of my latest funds or coming out of J-Curb way too quickly. I think Adventure, your IRR should be backweighted. It should be rising. Exactly. In the 2021 vintage and the latest vintage, our funds are getting to 30 to 40% IRR within the first few months of initial deployment, which shouldn't be the case. There should be negative IRR, at least during the deployment period.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reminiscence of 2021 is the timeline from graduation from seed to A, A to B, B to C. And the last six months, I think I've funded seven companies that have already raised Series A rounds within weeks of me leading their seed financings. And at a four to five X multiple at which I finance the company at just a few weeks prior. And not a whole lot.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think at the end of the day with venture, you're trying to capture outliers if the companies are shaping up to be the next power law companies of the future. You'll do whatever it takes to get into one of those companies. So for the follow-on round, I will say that I don't think it's in a bad place because these are truly incredible companies growing a truly unprecedented rates and achieving adoption that no one ever thought was possible. So they're clearly have unbelievable signs of product market fit very early in their life cycle. So that's the side that I wouldn't say is healthier, unhealthy. I'd say it's undetermined. It's good for the asset class overall. If you're investing in companies that are growing this fast, LPs will ultimately do well. Will they do as well if they would have if these companies were invested at half the price and double the ownership? Sure, but markets get efficient over time. And I think venture is an asset class is getting efficient and efficiency brings and returns back to the mean. And then you're starting to invest in managers that you think could find alpha in one way or another. The part of the ecosystem that seems unhealthy to me and is very”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes and no. People argue that these AI companies are raising it astronomically high valuations. And I actually don't know if that's true. And I don't think anybody will know if it's true for another three or four years because while the multiples seem insane, the companies are also growing at unprecedented rates. Historically, you could look at a SaaS company and say, well, if it's growing 3x, 4x year over year, and you could project the 5x over the next two years, you can justify paying this price today. With AI companies, this company grew 20x year over year last year. It's on track to grow 15x year over year this year. Maybe it grows 10x year over year next year. What is the fair multiple to assign to that deal? It's hard to determine what the correct answer to that is, but there's also way less predictability in its potential growth because there's no shortage of application layer companies that become obsolete overnight when it becomes a new feature of one of the foundation model companies. A company could have grown 20x last year in 10x this year that shrinks next year.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. You got to buy the bundle. You got to support the program. I do think there are certain individuals that you meet that tend to be charismatic, trustworthy, have good judgment, and will have an ability that given enough time and opportunity, they can build a very good reputation, a personal brand for themselves as well.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was another VC that explained this to me once, and I asked him how he identified who to hire for his venture capital firm. And he said he tends to optimize for people who either already have personal brands or have the ability to build a personal brand. Very good venture capital firm, strong brand, but he was the one who actually explained to me Sequoia benchmark and Andreessen have incredibly strong brands such that if you're a less well-known individual partner at Sequoia, a less well-known individual partner at Andreessen, you can still compete and win some of the most competitive deals in Silicon Valley because of the brand that you're affiliated with. And he said, now the amount of time and resources it takes to build a brand that can compete with those firms on brand is counterproductive to what it takes to be a great venture capitalist. But building a personal brand is something you do in tandem to being a great venture capitalist. I asked him to explain. I was like a library what a personal brand versus.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. But I think that's really the missing link. And there's other people that work at the firm, and you'd mention this earlier, where my name, you hear it more often than abstract. And I really do want the firm to be abstract. And I think that'll be beneficial because scaling a platform, scaling a team helps when everybody at the team can do things, when everybody at the team can go out and compete, win, and support their own portfolio companies. And if there is a brand way that they can all leverage to compete, that allows them to have more level playing field in doing their jobs.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be brand. I think brand would trump anything else that the machine doesn't have today, primarily because when a founder comes referred to us by an existing portfolio company, most of the work is done for us. You're not going to find much about these guys online, but they've been phenomenal partners to me. They've opened doors for me. They knocked it out of the park on our fundraise. They brought together the most solid angels to fill out our cap table. And he's always available when I need him for anything. If we don't have that and we're cold reaching out to founders, it's much more of an uphill battle to convince them why we should be in the same conversation of all of the other venture capital firms they're talking to whose names they've heard of before, which is why I mentioned that winning deals for us is a very manual process. Other firms just get to win because of their brand. They don't have to spend the man hours that I have to and call in all the favors that I have to to win the deal. So part of the reason I'm doing this.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source