Tank Talk: Reid Christian (General Partner @ CRV) - Investing in SaaS for the Next 50 Years

**Matt Cohen** (0:01)
Today's Tank Talk would welcome our guest, Ried Christian, General Partner at CRV.
On today's talk, we asked Ried about his journey starting out on the investment banking and private equity side at RBC Capital Markets and Symmetric Capital in Boston.
Next, we dig into his transition to venture capital with his role at Battery Ventures and the challenges he faced moving from the corporate banking side over to the traditional venture capital side. We dig into his lead investment into OpsGenie's $10 million Series A and his role in the quick acquisition that followed by Atlassian two years later for almost $300 million. Up next, we asked Ried about his decision to join CRV as a partner at the 50-year-old Venture Fund and how the firm is investing in SaaS for the next 50 years. We discuss his predictions for SaaS over the next decade and what areas he's most excited about that he has yet to invest in. Finally, we asked Ried about his firm's thoughts on holding investments post IPO and the recent push towards direct listings and SPACs in the tech space. This Tank Talk really makes you appreciate the long-term vision firms like CRV have towards investing and their ability to stay focused on early stage ventures while seeing half of their portfolio companies go on to be public or get acquired. Now, please welcome today's guest to the tank, Ried Christian.
Thanks for joining us in the tank today, Ried. I'd love to kick things off and ask about your journey starting out on the investment banking and private equity side at RBC and Symmetric Capital in Boston and the lessons you learned about financing and investing in companies.

**Reid Christian** (1:17)
Yeah, happy to. I grew up in the great state of Maine and went to a small liberal arts school for undergrad and then stumbled my way down to Boston and fell into the investment banking world through a couple of alumni, both initially at a small boutique investment bank called TM Capital, focused on IT services and consumer retail businesses and then RBC Capital Markets, where I was at within the FIG group, focused in particular on specialty finance.
And it was kind of through that, that I got welcomed into the finance world and then kind of took that, went over to Symmetric Capital, which was a growth equity firm, which I thought was another finance job, but it turned out it was much more of a sales job. And so I was scrounging North America, looking for bootstrap businesses that were growing and profitable within kind of business services, software and healthcare services broadly.

**Matt Cohen** (2:17)
Well, I'm sure the sales part, being at Symmetric really helped on it when you made your transition to venture. You know, let's talk about that transition to venture capital where you joined Battery Ventures as a venture investor for over two years. You know, what was the biggest adjustment for you moving from the corporate private equity world to venture investing?

**Reid Christian** (2:33)
Well, I did take one brief hiatus while entering Battery and spent six to nine months at a startup in Boston called Salsify, where the first day I walked over to the engineering team and asked them actually what they were doing all day. And one engineer in the back basically was just like, listen, Ried, all we do is build APIs. And I said, what the hell is an API? So to say that I didn't know a thing about tech is an understatement, but yeah, landed at Battery, ended up on the kind of early stage venture side, taking my experience of sales, which in the venture world is called sourcing, and realized I knew how to do the job, which was find, identify and track down exciting entrepreneurs. I knew how to evaluate those businesses and markets.
And then I just needed to spend a bit more time on the side, kind of learning about tech, tech trends, architecture and enterprise software broadly. And spent a couple of years kind of really digging in, doing a bunch of customer diligence calls, networking and a lot of medium post reading to get up to speed.

**Matt Cohen** (3:42)
So you learned about APIs, luckily, because while you were at Battery, one of the investments that you worked on was a Series A lead into OpsGenie in 2016 for 10 million. And the company went on to be acquired by Atlassian two years later in 2018 for 295 million. Can you tell us about your original thesis behind this investment and the lessons you learned after watching them be acquired two years later?

**Reid Christian** (4:02)
Yeah, you know, it was very simple. I went to Amazon Reinvent, which is their AWS Amazon Web Services annual conference and walked around the floor of all these vendors.