Ignite VC: How Jeffrey Becker Bets on Founders Before Product, Revenue, or Traction | Ep280

**Jeffrey Becker** (0:00)
To be better than average, you have to be different. There is just no other way around that. I truly believe that if you obsess enough about things, you need to pick the things that you believe should be different, and you need to exploit them. And I don't think enough people look at the whole picture and try to find the exploitations. I don't think they try to be different.
I don't have a lot of founders who change their pitch intentionally to stand out. I don't have a lot of people that change the motion and the way they do things in an effort to stand out. I think that most people believe a good story, showing up and doing things when other people do it is enough, and it's just not, it's like, it's A, it's boring, and B, it's uninspiring, but it's also just not enough. If you want to be better than average, you gotta be different, and I think you gotta be different in order to stand out, and you gotta stand out to raise the output and to attract people. That's the thing I'm always challenging people to really think about and to just lean into.

**Brian** (1:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast today. We are delighted to have Jeff Becker on the mic. He is the general partner at Antler, co-leading the firm's US Fund out of New York. Antler is the Day-Zero residency-based pre-seed model now operating in 27 cities with roughly 1,900 portfolio companies, including some that you've probably heard of, like Levelable, Aralo, Micro One, Pixverse, and many others. Before Antler, Jeff spent nine years at LinkedIn in sales leadership through its run to almost a billion members. I think like 20 over 10 billion revenue. We're delighted to have him. He writes the Money Morning Meeting Substack and host Antler's Further Faster Podcast. I'm looking forward to learning how to do my podcast better.
Thanks for coming on, Jeff.

**Jeffrey Becker** (1:56)
Yeah, Brian. Thanks for having me. Excited to dig into all things pre-seed.

**Brian** (2:00)
Yeah. I'd love to get your origin story. What's your background?

**Jeffrey Becker** (2:03)
Yeah. Well, okay. I grew up a little brother. I say that because I always talk to my founders about like, what was it like growing up? Who were you? I say that in part joking, but really because it made me very competitive. I was always competing with my older brother in sports, in baseball, in school. We went to the same college.

**Brian** (2:18)
How many years apart are you guys?

**Jeffrey Becker** (2:20)
We're about three and a half years, so I just missed each other.

**Brian** (2:23)
My boys are two years apart, and so I see this even more viscerally.

**Jeffrey Becker** (2:27)
Yeah.

**Brian** (2:28)
Now that they're teenagers, they don't even talk to each other. They don't even like barely acknowledge each other.

**Jeffrey Becker** (2:32)
Yeah. My mom always said we were like, you're destined to be best friends and you get older. We always said no, we beat the crap out of each other, but now we're good friends. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of like core to my DNA. And I think being a baseball player, being in sales really my career was always competing and trying to find ways to get an edge in something. And I always felt like to be better than others, you had to be different in some way and try to like find and really kind of elevate yourself against others. You had to pick things that you could be different at specifically, especially in sales. But then as I became an angel investor, as I started another company on the side, as I worked at LinkedIn, those are things that I felt gave me a bit of edge against others. And so it's always really kind of just about winning, like dropping into any arena and I just want to compete on that thing. But yeah, LinkedIn, as you mentioned, is a great experience, a rocket ship from 2012 to 2020 I did nine different jobs there over nine years, basically all in sales but across three departments. And we led our key accounts program for sales solutions before I left. And then more recently, angel investor, founder of a company called Earhooks, we kept earbuds in your ears for 10 years and sold those to a quarter million people around the world. And then the center of all three of those things being at LinkedIn, hyper growth and tech, being a founder nights and weekends and scaling that thing globally, and angel investing really to me was being a venture capitalist. But I was never in finance and I hadn't built my own SaaS business. And so for me, I really just had to go do the job. And I started writing checks. I wrote checks into Loyal, which just got their first two FDA clearances and are on the path to their third, which will be the first company in history to sell anything FDA cleared for extending life of any kind. But the focus on dogs, which is super exciting one, Headspace, Misfits Market, Public Goods, Alter Pharmacy, just some really cool stuff that I got to angel into in the early days. And then now full time at Antler for four years, we're really trying to do the same thing, which is back people and do that by getting to know them, spend time with them and underwrite the maniac and by basically the future.