259. Developer Tools, The Surge of European Tech, and Why Founder Needs Differ Across Regions (Reid Christian)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to the podcast about Venture Capital where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is The Full Ratchet.

**Nick Moran** (0:18)
Reid Christian joins us today from the Bay Area. He is general partner at Charles River Ventures, an early stage venture fund investing in enterprise consumer and bioengineering.
CRV has backed over 500 startups in its 50-year history, including Airtable, DoorDash, Drift, Dropbox, HubSpot, Postman, Twitter and Zendesk. Prior to CRV, Reid worked with Battery Ventures and Symmetric Capital. Reid, welcome to the show.

**Reid Christian** (0:43)
Thank you, Nick. Great to be on here and thanks for having me.

**Nick Moran** (0:46)
Yeah, it's great to have you. I mean, you and I have talked a bit about your background and your path, but for the audience, can you share kind of your journey and your path to venture?

**Reid Christian** (0:55)
Absolutely. Well, I guess it starts on a beautiful dirt road in rural Maine where I grew up. My folks had me go into a Waldorf Education School, which is an alternative education schooling program across, or all around the world, really, but got it started in Europe.
Then went on to Bates College, a small liberal arts school there in the great state of Maine. And after that, a couple of investment banking internships and a desire to then leave that great state, stumbled down to Boston and started my professional career at a growth equity firm called Symmetric Capital.
And Symmetric is known, or actually it's definitely unknown, but it's memorable for two reasons. One, it was a group of Summit Partners investors that spun out, raised a $200 million fund, hired a bunch of young kids like myself to scrounge up any bootstrapped businesses across North America and pitching a minority investment for liquidity and growth. And the second reason that it's memorable is because it was a one-and-done fund. They were so successful with their six or seven investments that they decided not to raise another fund. So I took that learning experience and that kind of launched me into the venture world.

**Nick Moran** (2:26)
Amazing. And you've been at CRV now for how long?

**Reid Christian** (2:30)
I joined CRV a little under four years ago after Symmetric. I had a brief stint at a startup in Boston called Sulcify.
In the product information management space, helping brand manufacturers get their product information from the manufacturers, getting that data to e-commerce retailers. Then I went over to Battery Ventures, multi-stage enterprise focused VC firm. Worked there for a couple years, mostly focused on kind of dev data and security, investing across Series A through Series C, B2B SaaS businesses, and then moved with my wife from Boston to the Bay Area and joined CRV, focused on early stage investing.

**Nick Moran** (3:18)
I noticed that Salsify closed 155 million Series E recently. I hope you had some options early there, Reid.

**Reid Christian** (3:27)
You know, it's funny. They called me an MBA intern while I was there, because even though I wasn't getting my MBA and I wasn't an intern, but it was set up as a one-year engagement. I had a long lead time before my start date at Battery, and I asked around for what the best team was in the best early stage company to go hang out and work with, and everyone pointed me to the team at Salsify. So I went there and unfortunately didn't get any options, but more importantly got an incredible experience and an awesome network. So I'm still cheering for those guys big time.

**Nick Moran** (4:04)
Amazing, amazing. So I suspect the vast majority of the audience knows about CRV, but can you talk about the thesis and kind of where your focus is?

**Reid Christian** (4:16)
Absolutely. So CRV, formerly known as, well, still somewhat known, depending on which part of the country, as Charles River Ventures, got its start exactly 50 years ago on MIT's campus, right there in Boston on the Charles River. The initial idea was to fund research coming out of the university. And it was pretty early in the venture world. Very small checks, small fund, high risk investments.
And that core thesis has basically played out for 50 years as we've raised now 18 funds. We just raised the latest one, which will start investing early next year. That's a $600 million vehicle focused on seed, series A, and opportunistically series B investments. And the idea is take risk, back exceptional founders, and really kind of look to be in business with entrepreneurs that are going out and changing the world.
The trajectory of the firm is pretty interesting. As we started in Boston and the Boston ecosystem was quite strong for many years and it remains strong today. But over the last 10, 15 years, the firm has somewhat migrated west. As part of that, we've kind of refocused the brand around CRV as our competition would always tell entrepreneurs that we were an East Coast firm. And now nine of the 10 of us partners are in the Bay Area, but still make investments across North America and through Europe.