Sandy Kory: The Founder Obsessed Investor Behind BillionToOne, BaseTen & Palantir

**Sandy Kory** (0:00)
I hadn't been everywhere in the world, but it did seem like Silicon Valley had a pretty amazing density of talent, and so it's like, oh, this might be the smartest, most ambitious group of people in the world.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:09)
Did you know what Palantir was doing?

**Sandy Kory** (0:11)
A little bit, but they couldn't even describe it.
Their business was kind of a mess. I remember having coffee with them in 2008 and explained to him the definition of revenue. No one there knew the definition of revenue. Ironically, it didn't matter to the business. They were making great progress. It was like, revenue has a specific technical meaning. Someone at the company should know this.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:30)
You've been early to an incredible amount of names, to the point where it's definitely not luck.

**Sandy Kory** (0:36)
Most of the conversations with the investors are focusing on that.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:39)
So you're not asking about the product at all?

**Sandy Kory** (0:41)
No, 90% of the conversation is going to be on the things you've done before the startup.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:45)
There's a lot of contrary things here you're saying.

**Sandy Kory** (0:47)
Sometimes founders are really annoyed by it. They want to show me the slides.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:50)
Everyone looks at the slides.

**Sandy Kory** (0:52)
Send me the slides after the words. Sure, I want to look at that. So yeah, I think there's more alpha, the earlier stage you go. And I think there is more room for legitimately different approaches.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (1:05)
Sandy, thank you for joining me today. First in-person podcast for The Delphi Show, and you're the first guest. So excited.

**Sandy Kory** (1:11)
I'm honored. Thank you.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (1:12)
Yeah, for sure. Well, Sandy, my colleague, Rosson, introduced me to you. And he said, you have to talk to this BC. He's brilliant. And I said, okay. I emailed you. You were gracious with your time. We spoke and I'm like, damn, I got to get a podcast episode with him. So thank you for being here.
Maybe just to give a little bit about you, I'll give a brief intro on you. You're a VC and you're the founder of Horizon. Pre-seed and seed stage venture fund. And you've been early to like an incredible amount of names to the point where it's definitely not luck.
That's what we were joking before. I mean, you've been early to BillionToOne, Palantir, Canva, BaseTen, SendCutSend and just a laundry list of incredible names. So I'm really happy for you to be here. Why don't you give us a bit of your background and about yourself?

**Sandy Kory** (2:06)
Well, thanks again for having me.
Well, so I guess my background, where do we begin?
I ended up graduating from Stanford 20, 25 years ago, and that's when I first got exposed to Venture Capital. And I was really fascinated with tech and entrepreneurship. Didn't really take to programming. Venture Capital seemed like this thing that the gods of Mount Olympus were doing, and I would never get a shot, never get called up. But it definitely kind of made an impression on my mind. And even going back to when I was a kid, I loved numbers and statistics, baseball cards, and then I learned a little bit about investing in the stock market. When I was 10, 12 years old, I thought all that stuff was really fascinating. But then when I was in Palo Alto, that was really amazing to kind of see what tech entrepreneurship could do and to see the role of VC. But yeah, that was totally not open to me. So I decided to basically try to go out and make money. And no one could stop me from angel investing. And so I kind of stumbled into investment banking. I didn't really want to do Wall Street or anything like that. But there was a kind of like a startup boutique M&A firm in the Bay Area that I joined. And they found a niche advising bootstrapped technology companies on mergers and acquisitions. And the job actually ended up being very sales heavy, which was kind of funny because I never really thought of myself as a salesperson. But I did pretty well. And so made enough money to fund the angel investing hobby. And so I worked for a few boutique M&A firms in the Bay Area.
In 2009, I made an angel investment in Palantir. In 2010, I got let go from my position I had and kind of had no choice but to start my own M&A firm. So in 2010, I kind of launched on with my partner, Mike, who's also my partner with the Venture Fund.