519. Don't Play the Game on the Field, What the 500 Largest Exits Tell Us, How and When to Sell Secondary, and VC's Identity Crisis (Micah Rosenbloom)

Nick Moran (0:00)

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Now, on to the episode.

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. Micah Rosenbloom joins us today from Soho. He's a managing partner at Founder Collective, one of the top OG seed firms now investing out of its fifth sub $100 million fund.

Micah Rosenbloom (0:51)

OG is just a nice way to say old, isn't it? I'll take it.

Nick Moran (0:56)

Well, people say, I'm the OG podcaster and... There you go. Old is the key word there. But prior to AFC, Micah co-founded three companies exiting Brontes Technology to 3M.

He's led investments in Verkata, Talo, SoCure and Lovery. And the firm's portfolio includes Uber, The Trade Desk, Whoop, Suno, Shield AI, Airtable and Coupang. Micah, welcome to the show.

Micah Rosenbloom (1:24)

It's great to be here. It's great to be with a fellow Chicagoan. There aren't many of us in Venture Capital that follow the Bears. One of us follows the White Sox, the other follows the Cubs, but it's cool. There's something about growing up in the Midwest that I think gives you even more appreciation for all the cool stuff we get to do.

Nick Moran (1:39)

A hundred percent.

Micah Rosenbloom (1:40)

You're just still there. I left, but I'll be back there in a couple of weeks to visit, so.

Nick Moran (1:44)

You've escaped, but not to better weather.

Micah Rosenbloom (1:46)

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, marginally, I guess.

Nick Moran (1:50)

Well, good. Well, hopefully our Bears get it together this year.

Micah Rosenbloom (1:53)

Yeah. Caleb is not. Yeah. At least we got the Pope. I need the Pope for VC. Hopefully he can help me in that.

Yeah. But that's a whole other matter.

Nick Moran (2:01)

That's a whole other thing. Thanks for coming on the show. It's good to see you again. I thought we would start out with your writing, right? You've been publishing an essay almost every day for the past year. Reminds me of the great Fred Wilson a little bit. What made you start doing that and how has it changed how you invest?

Micah Rosenbloom (2:20)

Some of it was just, I just started writing and I never stopped, but we had this realization a year ago that half of the deals, half of the inbound opportunities we get were from new people, usually one degree away from someone we knew in our network. But we get a lot of stuff cold, but we rarely invest in that.

And I wrote about this yesterday, there was a time in this business where you could rely on a few dozen relationships for most of your deal flow, but the world had changed. And so I started thinking of VC as sort of a mid-funnel nurturing business, meaning I needed to keep people who were, people I know and people who were friends with people I know, aware of us and me. And so LinkedIn seemed like the perfect place to start kind of nurturing the middle of the funnel. And so that's what I did. And so now I'm two, three times a week. This is sort of content marketing, but it's also therapy, frankly, for me. I try to like get out ideas that are in my head and oftentimes people say to me, and to some extent we're doing this on this pod, that these are ideas that they're thinking about too, and it resonates and I have conversations about it. And then we also do events for the broader New York ecosystem, Boston ecosystem. So we do meet people we don't know, but I found this was the way to kind of activate my more immediate network.

Nick Moran (3:40)

Does it feel like it's working? Do you feel like you're seeing more deals and having...

Micah Rosenbloom (3:44)

This is the $25,000 question or the $5 million question. Anecdotally, I would say yes. I mean, I do get, I would say, multiple times a week comments on it from others. I think this is a... Eric Paley, who you know, my business partner for 20 years, would say, in venture capital, everything is a B activity, except investing in great companies and working with those companies. And so I will concede this is probably a B activity, but I think it does help in the awareness game. I think the world is so noisy and I try to be so authentic. Even though I do use my good friend, Claude, it's really my brain and my editing and my ideas.