EP 43: Semil Shah (Partner, Haystack) - The State of Venture, Investing in Figma, Hashicorp, Doordash and Almost Investing in Coinbase

**Logan Bartlett** (0:05)
Welcome to the 43rd episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and I am joined today by Semil Shah, who is a... Semil, what's the title? Is it General Partner? What have you decided to call yourself?

**Semil Shah** (0:17)
I just say Partner.

**Logan Bartlett** (0:18)
Partner.

**Semil Shah** (0:20)
The terms of loss meaning...

**Logan Bartlett** (0:22)
They really have.

**Semil Shah** (0:23)
They really have.

**Logan Bartlett** (0:24)
A partner at Haystack.
For folks that don't know, Semil's now on Haystack 6 He's had a number of really successful investments, including companies like Hashicorp, Doordash, Instacart, Figma, Carta, Applied Intuition, among a bunch of others. Semil, I think you had posted, hey, I want to do more podcasts. Someone had added me in the comments here. That was the genesis of this.
I think the reason, from my perspective, this would be an interesting conversation, or I was excited to do it, is I think ostensibly we do the same job. We probably both call ourselves venture capitalists when people ask what we do, when we don't just try to say we work in tech and avoid explaining or telling people we're VCs. But I think we approach the industry in very different ways.
I grew up within battery and then Redpoint. You started your own thing, you did it within a venture firm and started small and then built up. I think you do kind of seed, pre-seed. I don't know how you defined it versus I'm definitely more growth as well. I figure we could have a pretty interesting conversation about the state of the industry, how we approach venture capital, all different things in a particularly interesting market environment we're in. Thanks for doing this.

**Semil Shah** (1:53)
Let's do it.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:55)
Just to level set people, can you just take us through your path into Haystack 6, the version of how you actually found yourself being a VC and a partner at a firm that you founded?

**Semil Shah** (2:09)
Yes. A lot of people do come up to me and say, wow, you did this or Haystack's doing that and it's great and how you designed everything.
On the rare occasion where I stop them and really have a conversation, I usually tell them all the ways we got here were basically through, one, avoiding things I didn't like and two, I had no other options. It wasn't like a grand design.
I don't mean to say it was accidental, but really I didn't want to do late stage investing. We'll get into more of that when you talk about the craft of entry points being later or sitting on boards, for example, or getting into spreadsheets. It's just not how I operate. And then also I was never able to raise the size of funds I wanted to, so they always stayed constrained. And I think that constraint, one, of just staying earlier to avoid the formality that happens in venture as more capital gets put in, and two, to avoid larger funds because the market wouldn't afford them to me, I think drove a lot of the success of why I'm here today, but it wasn't the original driving force.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:17)
It's funny when people ask like prescriptive questions like that of how to get into venture, and I similarly like either through just forward momentum and in part rejection. Like I remember when I was graduating, I wanted to go work in private equity because not for any reason that I knew what private equity was, but I was told that like paid well and that was what successful people did. And so because I was rejected from some private equity jobs, I like sort of explored my way into venture. And funny enough, I like actually internally, I say I was rejected from an associate job at Redpoint in 2013 I think the team would say that there wasn't actually a job opening. But like, you know, for me, had I joined Redpoint in 2013, I feel like I wouldn't be here today. Nine years later, right? It's sort of like the path that got me here was different than. And so in being prescriptive about these things, so many people kind of accidentally fall into the industry over the last decade. And I don't know if that's going to be the case going forward. It certainly was.

**Semil Shah** (4:29)
Mine was a little bit different in the sense I really felt like I wanted to be in venture. I knew a lot of people in venture. I was sending a lot of friends and founders to venture capitalists were getting funded.
I consulted with a bunch. So I actually just assumed, oh, I'll get a job. And, you know, that never happened.