Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23)

**Ted Seides** (0:01)
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I'm Ted Seides, and this is Manger Meetings. This show is an exploration of investment opportunities. Through conversations with money managers, conducted by one of the managers' institutional clients, we'll share the stories and strategies that attracted their attention and capital. You can learn more and join our mailing list at capitalallocators.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:40)
All opinions expressed by Ted, guest hosts, and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Capital Allocators or their respective firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Capital Allocators, the firms of guest hosts or podcast guests may maintain positions in securities or managers discussed on this podcast.

**Ted Seides** (3:04)
On today's manager meeting, Chris Douvos interviews Bill Trenchard. Chris was an early guest on Capital Allocators and is the founder of Ahoy Capital, a boutique fund of funds focused on early stage venture.
Bill is a partner at First Round Capital, which focuses on seed stage investing in technology companies. Bill joined First Round after starting five companies and led First Round's investments in Uber, Flexport and LendingHome.
Before they get going, Chris and I discuss his initial discovery of First Round, the evolution of the firm and his ability to get capacity and what has become a first tier oversubscribed venture capital firm. Chris, great to see you, bud.

**Chris Douvos** (3:48)
Likewise, and it's been too long, my friend.

**Ted Seides** (3:50)
So I know you've known First Round for a long time, but would love to hear how you first came across them.

**Chris Douvos** (3:56)
It was a wild time. We're talking like 2003, 2004 I was kind of a young buck at Princeton's Endowment then, and I was like, hey, it feels like something's going on in entrepreneurial finance. And we were a post.com bust. Funds had gotten really big and then had shrunk.
But I kept hearing from entrepreneurs that the game was like changing radically. The way that everybody did due diligence, they run up and down Sand Hill Road and they ask their favorite investors who's good today. And you just get like warmed over conventional wisdom because everybody's shilling their buddies. So I started going to see entrepreneurs and I'd show up at these places. And when I was out in San Francisco with a couple of cases of beer and pass them around to the team and we'd sit around and jibber jabber. And I said, well, you know, is anybody doing it different? And when I was with the video head guys, they said, well, look, we've got three investors. We got August Capital, who was great. They loved August, more traditional firm, Maveron out of Seattle. And these two guys found us.
These two fill you guys, Josh Coplman and Howard Morgan.
And they're running this little fund called First Round. It's kind of Josh's and Howard's money, I think they said.
And they really get what we do. And it turns out that by that point, gone to TIFF in early 2004
And I said, wow, this is really cool because First Round is right around the corner for me in Conchok in Pennsylvania. And I started sitting down with Josh Kay. And Josh started articulating a vision for a new kind of venture firm. He said, look, with First Round, what we're trying to do is turn venture on its head. The typical venture firm runs like a hub and spoke model where everything's going through partners. We have the technology. What if we could create kind of a peer to peer dynamic where the entrepreneurs are the network and the entrepreneurs are helping each other and you remove the bottleneck of the venture capitalist? And by creating that community of entrepreneurs who could help each other with different tech enabled stuff that the First Round guys have built, you could potentially create something really powerful. In 2004, it was just a vision, but man, it's been fun to watch them grow and evolve over the past 17 years.