20VC: David Tisch on Why Ownership in Venture Does Not Matter, His Biggest Investing Misses and Hits and How His Investing Style Changed as a Result & 3 Core Reasons VCs Pass That Do Not Make Sense

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and if there's one element where the podcast is criticized for often, it's that I agree with the guest too much, and that I do not push back enough on some ideas shared. Today, we completely tear that apart. The guest on the show is brilliant, but we have some very different opinions around portfolio construction. And so this is an awesome and very rare debate on 20VC. And so with that, I wanna welcome an old friend of 20VC's to the show, David Tisch, founder and managing partner at Box Group, one of the leading seed-focused firms of the last decade, with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, Glossier, PillPack, Plaid and many more incredible companies. Prior to smashing the world of seed with Box, David was managing director of Techstars New York and was a prolific angel investor alongside it, making early angel investments in the likes of Vine and Warby Parker, to name a few. But before we dive into the show state, did you know that more than 80% of US public stock is owned by just 10% of Americans? This divide is even greater in the private markets. Carter makes it as easy to issue equity to your employees as it is to issue payroll, and for employees, as easy to accept it to. More than 16,000 companies issue equity to their employees through Carter. Whether you're just getting started or getting ready to go public, the team at Carter can help. Check them out at carter.com. And then another incredible product you have to introduce is Secure Frame. Secure Frame helps companies get enterprise ready by streamlining SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance. Secure Frame allows companies to get compliant within weeks rather than the painful months that it is today. Join companies like Stream, Hasura, Benipass and unlock more sales with Secure Frame. And 20 VC listeners get 10% off at secureframe.com forward slash 20VC. And finally, I've always been a big history fan and so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the very first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley's formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world with 50 plus years working with VCs.
They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle a myriad of issues that arise throughout a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC bank to companies going public, head over to cooley.com and also check out cooleygo.com. That is enough from me, though. So now I'm very, very excited to head into what is an incredible discussion with David Tisch, founder of Box Group.

**David Tisch** (2:22)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:25)
David, it is such a joy to do this. I've wanted to do this one for a very long time since our last episode, really. But thank you so much for joining me again today.

**David Tisch** (2:32)
Thanks for having me back. I've spent the past year trying to come up with new material to talk about with you. So we'll see how it goes.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:38)
Well, I'm sure we've got a lot to discuss. But for those that missed our first episode, like tell me, how did you make your way into this very weird and wonderful world of venture? And what was that kind of founding moment for you with Box?

**David Tisch** (2:48)
I think you have to date yourself when you go back and tell a story. And the world in 2010 or nine, when I started making early stage technology investments, it's just so different. Venture capital isn't this word that gets talked about in school. People aren't aspiring to join our industry. Startups are still in the rebel phase of what people are doing to go against what normal is. And I think today, when you look at it, startups are taught in university. They're taught in grad school. There's hundreds of different programs that allow you to start companies. It's just a different era if you go back as little as 12 years ago. And so for me, it was just a love of technology, the internet specifically, more than it was technology. And watching at that time, pre-mobile, that the internet, sort of that moment that they call Web 2.0, starting, where it started to unlock a combination of two things. One is like better software for doing things online. Connecting people was probably the biggest change, sort of the Facebook era. And the second was doing more things offline. So how do you use the internet to connect the world? And I think my head had always been oriented around falling in love with watching that happen from childhood days, that when I sort of figured out you could do this as a career, it was like, wow, this is what I should be doing. And so I started making a couple investments. I ended up joining Techstars to help launch and run the New York program. And at that point, I had accidentally signed up to be an investor. And so Box Group became my way to invest into companies that were outside of the Techstars ecosystem. And nine years ago, left Techstars to do Box Group full-time. And so we've been doing it full-time for nine years and Box Group's been around for about 12 years.