Ravi Mhatre (Lightspeed Venture Partners) - The Language of Technology

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Who you are defines how you build. This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.
Brought to you by Stanford eCorner.

**Ravi Belani** (0:14)
On this episode, we're joined by Ravi Mhatre.
In 1999, Ravi founded Lightspeed Venture Partners, a VC firm that focuses on enterprise IT, mobile and internet and cloud-based services and applications, and has also invested in consumer businesses like Cheddar and Stitch Fix.
Welcome everybody to the next installment of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar from Stanford. I'm Ravi Belani, a lecturer in Stanford's Department of Management Science and Engineering and the Director of Alchemist and the Accelerator for Enterprise Startups. And so we are incredibly honored today to welcome Ravi Mhatre. I would love to kick things off by, I think venture capital is this glorified and romantic job that is oftentimes shrouded in mystery that many people wonder about. And I wonder if we could just kick things off by you just describing what a day is like really for you as a venture capitalist. What is a typical day if there is a typical day?

**Ravi Mhatre** (1:15)
Yeah, hi, it's a great question. And I think for anyone in the audience who's curious about venture capital, I would encourage you to ask as many people in the investing business as you can to create a sort of a collage or an image of what it is because each day really is quite different.
When you are in the venture capital business for long enough, you have a variety of responsibilities to the entrepreneurs who you've already backed. You're meeting with new prospective founders. You're spending, you know, particularly in a bigger firm, a lot of time supporting your partners.
Who may be looking at new companies and meeting with new founders. You're also thinking about where new market opportunities are. And so each of those is a different discipline. And when you really, you know, I went back and looked at my calendar when Ravi Belani asked me that question and I was really surprised at the, it's almost gets to the point where it's, you have attention deficit disorder because you're having a context with so much. But you know, I do think there's some common threads when you think about, you know, any day when I wake up, a couple of sort of guiding principles for me. One is that you are constantly in a mode where I think to be good in the venture capital business, you have to be a listener and a learner and you have to always have the mindset that you are in whatever context you're in, you're trying to really absorb new information and add it to, you know, your understanding of the world around you.
And again, that could be meeting a new entrepreneur who's got a vision for a new space and you wanna learn as much as you can from that person because it'll inform your view maybe on, you know, a whole market or maybe other companies in related areas where your firm has already invested. The other thing about, you know, I would say a common thread is every interaction you have in venture capital really is about a relationship with another individual. Again, it's your partners, it's prospective entrepreneurs. It could be your limited partners, founders you work with. And these are all situations where you are, you know, you really don't have direct line authority. In all those contexts, you are, again, having a relationship that spans a long period of time. It's built on, you know, a bilateral trust and you are in a mode of needing to both hear what the other person is saying and needing to persuade them typically or influence them through some indirect means. So, you know, those are kind of more abstract principles, but I'd say if you ask me about any day in the life, in my kind of sort of activity, I'm always in the mode of essentially meeting people and trying to listen closely to what it is they have to tell me and, you know, what they are excited about. And then I'm, you know, in a mode of typically wanting to, you know, find ways that I can be additive and build trust and create value in that relationship.

**Ravi Belani** (4:17)
And so Ravi, if there are other students now that are thinking, you know, I would love to do that, that sounds fantastic. What advice do you have for students who want to become venture capitalists?

**Ravi Mhatre** (4:29)
You know, my strong advice would be as a first step, talk to and get to know people who are in the investment business. And venture capital also is not a monolith.
There are a number, a variety of different ways in which people practice technology investing. There's an angel ecosystem. They're now this whole cohort of solo capitalists. There are people like me who are investors at large global investment firms and everything in between. There's some firms that specialize by sector. So I think it's, I would encourage people to really talk to as many people as they can to get a flavor for the job.