Builder, Inventor, or Operator? The 0-1-2 Framework for Evaluating Founders| Andre Charoo (MapleVC)

Andre Charoo (0:00)

When you ask someone the vision, what's the vision? And then you ask them, so where do we start?

What's zero to one? When the answer is linear, when you can connect those dots very clearly and it's legible to you as an investor, as a smart investor, you're like, oh, I see how we're gonna get there. You're most likely talking to an inventor. My smartest colleagues laughed at me for joining the Limousine Service. What they didn't know or see or didn't have the opportunity to ask the question was like that vision that strangely, if you know what TK is doing on Adams, he has an ambition that is still not fully satisfied, where the arc of the ambition is so big that it's coming through different entities to even achieve it.

Amrit Rao (0:52)

I'm Amrit Rao, general partner at Village Global. Today, I'm joined by Andre Charoo, founding managing partner of Maple VC and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Andre is a full-time venture capitalist focusing exclusively at the earliest stages of company formation.

Before he became a venture capitalist, he was employee number 25 at Uber and an early employee at Hired, as well as a number of other startups. On this podcast today, Andre shares his framework for classifying founders in three different categories.

Builders, inventors and operators. He uses this framework to identify strengths and gaps in early founding teams when there is little else to evaluate when he makes an investment. We also dig in to Andre's advice for how founders can pitch VCs, what VCs get right oftentimes, as well as what they miss and how to fill in the blanks. All right, Andre, welcome to Village Global's podcast.

Andre Charoo (2:01)

Thank you for having me.

Amrit Rao (2:02)

Oh, it's a pleasure. So let's jump in. Tell us about your journey from Canada to here.

Andre Charoo (2:09)

So, gosh, where do you start? Born and raised in Toronto, suburb of Toronto. Studied economics at the University of Toronto. Wanted, for whatever reason, to be an investment banker. Don't hold it against me. Tried in Canada, but Canada rejected me, and so I landed in the US and started my career as an M&A banker in a bank called Wachovia Securities, now Wells Fargo. And then Debt Capital Markets was like the second year. So your typical two-year analyst program brought me to the US, and like first job out of college kind of thing. But then when my peers went to the traditional routes, you know, private equity hedge funds, business school, none of them interested me. And that's when I decided with my flatmate at the time in London, to start a tech company. And just to give you context, this is 2006

And fortunately raised a bit of money for that from a fund here in the valley. And I first stepped foot in the mission, San Francisco, 2007, with some, call it pre-seed funding at the time. And big, big ambition.

And surely thereafter, 2008 happened. And while we shipped a product, got customers, and it was such a wild ride, the team got to maybe five-ish.

The day of negotiating, call it the seed term sheet, was the day Lehman went bankrupt. Like on the day. And then one of the investors was actually on the East Coast, and we were selling a talent platform that, interestingly, related to this topic, would discover talent from schools that big tech companies weren't recruiting from at the time. So call it overlooked talent, or talent that we thought was interesting. And it's actually, we got Facebook as a paying client to enter Waterloo, actually. Wow. That was like the first time they entered Waterloo, obviously.

Amrit Rao (4:30)

We opened big tech to Waterloo.

Andre Charoo (4:33)

I don't know if I want to take all that credit, but helping put it on the radar was sort of the impetus. And Chamath Balahapitiya became a contact at that time.

Amrit Rao (4:49)

Happy birthday, Chamath.

Andre Charoo (4:50)

Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And we reconnected sort of a couple of years ago now, but that was when I first met him.

And yeah, like on that day of negotiating that term sheet, you know, the investor was like, how do you feel about selling recruiting software in the environment we're about to go into, let alone for students, right? I was like, as much as I had every answer in the book that this was going to work, the writing was on the wall. And so, you know, pivot after pivot after pivot, the writing was on the wall. And so, that then, I mean, I fell in love with company building at the earliest stages, you know, you have a vision, you've attracted people to join you on that vision. Almost felt like I had no even, you know, qualification to go after it, but you raise some money, you just get little wins after little wins, and then it kind of gets stripped from you. I was like, okay, I'm going to go, when you first land here, right, the plethora of ambitious founders just hits you like a wave, right? And so part of it is like, oh, am I as good as them? Because you just failed. But the other part is like, whoa, I can go join one of them and like help them on their journey to go build something big. And it needed to be really early for me to get satisfaction. Maybe that's because I was like wanting to re-create the founder moment that I didn't get to necessarily have.