How To Invest In: Early Stage Fintech Firms with Clocktower Ventures, Partner Ben Savage

Daniel Scrivner (0:07)

Hello and welcome. I'm Daniel Scrivner, and this is Outlier Academy, where we study the world's best entrepreneurs and investors to deconstruct what they've mastered and how they got to the top of their game, all to help you win and achieve outsized success at whatever it is you're pursuing.

And today, we're gonna hear from Ben Savage of Clocktower Ventures. Ben's background is fascinating. From starting his career at Bridgewater to launching the actively managed ETF platform Artivest to becoming a partner at Clocktower Ventures in 2013 Ben focused on investing in financial innovation well before FinTech Investing took off over the last five years.

And in this episode, we discuss everything from what he learned about giving and accepting feedback as a gift at Bridgewater to why Clocktower focuses on hiring great macro thinkers and focuses on human capital when making investment decisions. And why they've explicitly never invested in any crypto or DeFi projects because of the belief that most things benefit from centralization. This episode is filled with narrative violations and non-consensus takes. And it was one of my all time favorites to record. For the notes, links and transcript for this episode, visit outlieracademy.com. And if you enjoy this episode, please share it with one friend or leave us a short review on Apple Podcasts. And with that, let's jump into my conversation with Ben Savage of Clocktower Ventures.

Ben, welcome to Outlier Academy. I am so excited to have you here.

Ben Savage (1:36)

Thanks for having me, Daniel. I'm really delighted to be here.

Daniel Scrivner (1:39)

I want to start off this conversation by just having you give a quick overview of your background because I find it fascinating. You have some experience on the public side. You have some experience on the private side. And that all knits really nicely together at Clocktower Ventures. So let's start with just a quick overview of your background.

Yeah, sure.

Ben Savage (1:56)

And I do think most of the time, especially in the investment industry, people tend to pursue these very deeply vertical careers in sort of one discipline and then maybe expand. And really from the very beginning of my career, I've sort of been a broader palette that I was drawing from as an investor. I started off, joined an investment bank at a college called Wasserstein Pirella in our merchant banking business at the time, doing both private equity and venture capital transactions.

And did that really for six years. Started at the height of the.com bubble in August 1999

Daniel Scrivner (2:27)

Perfect timing.

Ben Savage (2:28)

Interesting timing. So spent three years in New York and then three years in the Bay Area. I kind of landed in San Francisco in August of 2002 when I was probably the only net migrant into the Bay Area that year or something like that. It was just a wasteland at the true nadir of the.com bubble. But after six years of that, went to business school at Stanford and then shifted to the public markets, really in business school, when I joined a small hedge fund in Connecticut called Bridgewater Associates on the back end of Stanford, because I was drawn, I think, to the idea that to be a really good investor, you wanted to learn as many frameworks as possible for thinking about markets, thinking about the discipline and craft of investing. Bridgewater, obviously, a lot of people know about it now. Back then, not many people did, but those who did were sort of very clear, no, no, this is a good place, they know things. So I went to Bridgewater, spent a few years there learning public markets and how to be a bit more of a macro thinker. And then when I left Bridgewater, founded a company that was a fintech startup that I founded in really 2010, 11 time period. And there was an initial business plan that was to focus more on applying some financial technology to public markets that then later pivoted around the time I left into focusing more on private markets.

And then when I moved to Los Angeles, I met my current partner, a guy named Steve Drobny, and the two of us sort of started building, along with other partners, the firm today that is Clocktower Group, which spans public and private markets and represented in some ways kind of a closing of a circle. A few years into Clocktower Group, which really started purely in public markets, liquid markets, we launched Clocktower Ventures, which was sort of a return for me to venture capital after a decade of doing other things. And wow, did sort of the industry and the market change in that time period.