#105 with Avlok Kohli and Xavier Helgesen - Leading AngelList Ventures and Buying Businesses Like Berkshire Hathaway

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Shaan Puri** (0:32)
What's up, guys? Sean here, and no Sam today. He is out sick with one of the more painful sounding things that you can get. I'll let him explain all the details, but we're wishing him well. And so I got the message, and I started texting people. I said, hey, I need a guest for today, and I actually got two. And so two guests on this episode. The first is Avlok, who is the CEO of AngelList Venture.
AngelList is a badass company. They're doing a lot of interesting things. They just launched this rolling fun thing that I've been talking about that I think is very, very cool. And he tells a couple of stories. First, he tells a story of how he sold his company to Square really early on and how acquisitions like that go down. I find that fascinating. And then the second thing was we brainstormed some ideas. I put them on the hot seat, and he had some ideas around meeting tech because I think a CEO spends a lot of their day in meetings. And eventually, you look around and you say, I think this could be better. And one of the ideas in particular, I think, is quite good. A very simple idea that I think has legs.
The second guest is Xavier. Xavier is a good friend who was one of the first guests on the podcast. Back in the first 10 episodes, he told about his past. Well, today, he's talking about his present, which is what he's doing now with Enduring Ventures, a company both me and Sam invested in. And it's a company that buys companies. So if you like the episodes with Andrew Wilkinson or Brent Bishore, then you probably will like this one. Xavier goes into a little bit of detail on a couple of the acquisitions that he's made and how they went down and what areas he thinks, you know, there's still a lot of opportunity. And you'll be seeing Xavier around on the podcast, I think, a little more. But this is a good chance to say hello. So, two guests, one episode. I hope you guys enjoy it and I hope you like the new intro music. Let's cue it up.
Alright, we're rolling.
I have a guest here with me. I'm excited. We've never met, so this will be our first conversation besides emails. So I have Avlok Kohli here. He's the CEO of AngelList Venture. I don't know if you know this. You probably don't care either, but I've said for years, I remember five, six years ago I was, somebody said, if you had to be, I think they were saying if you had to be acquired by any company, but really what they were saying was like, if you had to go work somewhere, not run your own company, where would you wanna go work?
And I was like, I love what I'm doing, but if I was gonna go get a job somewhere, and this was six years ago, I was like, I would go to AngelList. I was like, I think AngelList has probably the biggest opportunity of any company that I know of in a space that I care about, which is like, let's say, the entrepreneurial space.
Yep. Because I just thought, man, they have the... At that time, it was pre-buying product hunt.
I think you would maybe...
I don't think syndicates even existed at that time. It could have maybe existed, but it basically was like, AngelList was this platform connecting startups and angel investors, roughly. That was kind of roughly it. But I was like, it's kind of like LinkedIn, but it's full. It's like a LinkedIn that doesn't suck, and the community who uses it actually really loves it, and it's a vertical community that's creating a ton of value, which is like the tech sector.
I've always really admired AngelList. Now you work at AngelList. How did you end up there? It looks like you had kind of like an entrepreneurial background. So give us like two minutes of your story of the bullet points. How did you get to being the CEO of AngelList Venture?