306. Selection at Day 0, Investing in Immigrants, and Navigating Founder-Problem Fit (Manan Mehta)

**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)
Manan Mehta joins us today from San Francisco. Manan is founding partner at Unshackled Ventures, a day zero venture fund for immigrant founded startups. Prior to founding Unshackled Ventures, Manan was head of marketing at NO, which was acquired by Intel. Manan, welcome to the show.

**Manan Mehta** (0:34)
Thanks for having me, Nick. I'm looking forward to it.

**Nick Moran** (0:36)
Yeah, likewise. Talk us through your background and your path to VC.

**Manan Mehta** (0:40)
Yeah, so I think we take a pretty unconventional pathway to VC. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, son of immigrants. My father ran global sales for a company called Tipco. Really best known now because the CEO and founder of Tipco owns the Sacramento Kings.
I got a dual degree from UCLA in engineering and econ, and then took that engineering degree and decided to become an investment banker. So I did that for three years doing all tech M&A on the west coast here in San Francisco.
That was between 7 and 10 So quite the time. Think about finance industry and with credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities.

**Nick Moran** (1:20)
Which firm were you at Manan?

**Manan Mehta** (1:21)
Yeah, I was at the Royal Bank of Canada. And so courtesy of our friends up north, it was much better. Being a Canadian bank, specifically in the early 2000s, they were much more conservative than some of their counterparts in the US.
While a lot of the banks were trying to get their balance sheets to look okay, RBC saw it as an opportunity to be proactive and hire a lot of people. The conservative background resulted in very minimal exposure to the credit default swaps and the mortgage backed securities in the US. And so as a result, RBC moved up the cap tables and rank tables pretty quickly. And that was a great place to be. And so the marquee transaction that I got to be a part of was the $1.8 billion take private of Skype that Silver Lake Andreessen and Index did together, early days of Andreessen Horowitz at that point in time.
It was cool to be part of that process.
Along that journey, I met the founder and CEO of a company called Chegg. Many people know them for their orange boxes, textbook rental company for college students. He was working on another startup and I was tasked to figure out what he was doing because Chegg was looking to secure some bank debt, but the CEO and founder was working on something else. Again, conservative bank wants to know why the CEO is doing something else. I got to know Osman Rashid. He was a founder of Chegg.

**Nick Moran** (2:50)
Immigrant, I assume.

**Manan Mehta** (2:52)
Immigrant from Pakistan.
In that journey, after my three years of investment banking, I reached out to him and said, hey, would you hire me? Would you hire somebody who's got three years of investment banking to join your team, your next company called No, and I won't forget this. I met him on October 26th in person for a 30-minute meeting, and I joined the following day, started the following day. He told me, this will be your MBA.

**Nick Moran** (3:19)
Was it him or was it the experience itself that really drew you in?

**Manan Mehta** (3:24)
It was a little bit of both. Certainly him, very dynamic, very compelling. He had built his pedigree as somebody that was trying to challenge conventional wisdom and innovate this model. Also for me, it was a really good opportunity for me to go from theoretical knowledge as an investment banker and cut my teeth a little bit on how do you build something? How do you sell something?
Having no marketing background whatsoever, I asked him, where can I fit? He said, how about you join the marketing team? I think the combination of joining an early stage team when you can still talk to the CEO, coupled with a very dynamic CEO who had been successful up until that point already as an entrepreneur, and then he promised me an MBA bootcamp, if you will. It was really easy to say yes, and so much so that my first day was the following day. We didn't wait the weekend. We started right away. Three years into that journey, ultimately the company got acquired by Intel.
I rose from an entry-level position to running the marketing team, and it was just one of those experiences where you can sit in board rooms, in board meetings with the likes of Mark Andreessen and the CEO and other investors, that as a 27-year-old was irreplaceable. That was my first exposure to the VC landscape, if you will, just in those board meetings. Right before the acquisition by Intel, I asked Osmond, will it be the right time for me to leave, to start my own thing, because I didn't want to go to Intel. I was relatively young and didn't want to pursue that career pathway, and I wanted to take some bets and risks on myself. So I started a company in between, no and Unshackled, with a co-founder that was on a visa, on an H1B visa specifically, and nine months into that, I ultimately realized that his immigration status was slowing us down. He couldn't leave his full-time day job.