Innovating VC Beyond Silicon Valley

**Grace Gong** (0:00)
We're almost, oh, we're live. Hi Nick, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Nick Moran** (0:04)
Thank you so much for having me, Grace.

**Grace Gong** (0:06)
I'm such a Lumpen fan of the FourWretched, and I feel like you are literally the OG of podcasters slash podcasters turned fund manager. You are one of the most iconic people in my world. So welcome to my show again.

**Nick Moran** (0:24)
Well, the key word in OG is old. So you're the new face of Venture, and I'm just so pleased to be on the show.

**Grace Gong** (0:31)
So thank you, Grace. I want to go back a little bit on how you grew up and how you got to where you are. As a person who went to school in the Midwest, I went to U of I, University of the University of Washington. So I feel like I have a deep obsession with that area. I feel like people are a lot more chill and more connected to a degree. Why don't we start with how you grew up and what lead you to tech?

**Nick Moran** (0:59)
Yeah, I think like the first 18 years of my life, I was focused on one thing and it was a sport. So I had my head underwater for like two to four hours a day as a swimmer. And I chose my college because I wanted to be an Olympic athlete. And very quickly after getting to school in Indiana, I realized that was in over my head. And there was a lot of folks out there that were faster than me.
I was sort of a big fish, small pond when I was in high school and the reverse when I got to college. And so I pivoted in VentureSpeak and focused a little more on school and kind of found a new passion, obsession, which was business and entrepreneurship.

**Grace Gong** (1:45)
You have like, so I wonder like when it comes to coming into Venture. So I believe you are a person who created a main product at a company and then later on you started angel investing and you started like studying Venture yourself throughout your podcast and you literally started the first podcast in the VC industry.
And I wonder what was the motivation back then and like how did it get started? Because I feel like it's very popular podcast nowadays. Like it's kind of like a table stick for every VC firm. Everybody has a podcast. But when you started, like what was the scene like and how hard was it to, you know, like convince like people to get on the show since like it was like a new medium.

**Nick Moran** (2:32)
It was a lot easier than I expected.
When I was just an individual angel investor reaching out to folks, I would never hear back. And all of a sudden I show up with a microphone and everyone was thrilled to come on the show and speak with me for an hour. Occasionally I did get a no or a lack of response, but it was very rapid and the audience grew rapidly at the time before Substacks and Twitter and like the big thing in the industry was Mattermark, the Mattermark Daily and we get featured a lot and the audience just jumped really quick. So we were really lucky, but why did I start it? It was just solving a problem.
Early when I was trying to invest, I had no deal flow and I had no network and I was experimenting with a variety of things to solve both of those problems. And fortunately, the network piece was solved quickly. I realized when you show up with one of these, I think we both have the same one.
When you show up with one of these, people are happy to talk with you. And so immediately I started building a network of tier one, series A and series B VCs. And then over time, the audience continued to grow and grow and all of a sudden I was getting deal flow. I went from looking at eight deals a month to eight deals a day. And that's when the epiphany hit me that the best deal in Washington DC that has no seed capital at the time, 2013 was way better than the middle of the pack deal from Stanford or YC. And that's where the thesis came from. So it wasn't even my own investment thesis. The thesis was given to me by my listeners.

**Grace Gong** (4:16)
Amazing. I wanted to ask as a podcaster to podcaster, so since you started the full ratchet in 2014 and your font journey started in 2015, can you walk us back a little bit on how you turned the podcast into a font back then?