Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP

Lindsay Larsen is a managing director at UVIMCO, which represents the University of Virginia's $9B+ endowment. At UVIMCO, Lindsay co-heads the endowment's venture capital investing, as well as hedge fund investing and the growth equity portfolio. She previously held roles at Sequoia Heritage and Bluestem Asset Management, and she started her career at Goldman Sachs after attending UVA as an undergrad. In this unique look into how a large university endowment is managed, we dig into how UVA sets its return targets and goals, and how that impacts Lindsay's time spent across VC, hedge funds, and growth equity. We discuss the increasingly global nature of startups and the asset class broadly, and how that's led Lindsay and UVA to consider markets outside the US, particularly China, as well as her bottoms-up approach to picking VC managers and investment strategies. Lindsay has had a particularly interesting vantage point into the VC business over the past decade, and for any VC considering approaching or pitching a large endowment as an LP, this is an important episode to give a listen.

Frederik Groce is a Principal at Storm Ventures and a co-founder at BLCK VC. After finishing school, Frederik spent two years as CEO of Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE) with more than one hundred employees and total assets exceeding $18 million – including overseeing Stanford’s accelerator program. In this episode, we discuss Frederik's path to VC out of college, and how he's learned on the job and been promoted multiple times at Storm Ventures since. We also discuss his work as a co-founder at BLCK VC, which was formed to connect, engage, empower, and advance Black venture investors by providing a focused community built for and by Black venture investors. Finally, we touch on the role that BLCK VC plays within the context of the larger BLM movement, diversity & inclusion within tech, and what can be done to change the problems facing our industry and society at large.

Rob Mazzoni is a principal and one of the earliest members of the TrueBridge investment team, an alternative asset management firm founded in 2007 and focused on the venture capital industry. Rob first worked with TrueBridge co-founder and general partner Mel Williams at UNC Management Company, Inc. (UNCMC) as an investment and performance analyst. In this episode, we discuss Rob's professional path as an LP since college, as well as the founding and evolution of Truebridge Capital Partners since 2007. We cover Truebridge's decision to partner early with now top-tier firms like a16z and Founder's Fund, as well as their decision to commit to seed as a category several years ago via firms like Lowercase Capital. Finally, we discuss their contributions to the larger venture community, including their work constructing the storied Midas List with Forbes.

Jeff Fagnan is a founder of Accomplice and more recently Spearhead, in partnership with AngelList. Jeff is well known as a founding investor, working with most of his portfolio since inception, sometimes as a co-founder including Veracode (Sold to CA Technologies for $614M in 2017). Jeff sits on the board of many scaling startup‍‍‍s including AngelList, Carbon Black, InsightSquared, PillPack, and others. He's also the founder of Spearhead, a program that provides funding and mentorship for new angel investors; Maiden Lane, the first investment vehicle built on top of AngelList; Boston Syndicates (BOSS),a federated movement to create stronger angel substrate in New England; and TUGG (Technology Underwriting Greater Good), a nonprofit foundation harnessing the power of the tech ecosystem to catalyze social innovation in New England. In this episode, we discuss Jeff's fourteen years as a partner at Atlas Ventures in Boston, the spinout and transition to Accomplice, and the many experiments with the venture model that's run with Maiden Lane, Angellist, and now Spearhead.

Michael Kim is the founder of Cendana Capital, one of the first fund of funds focused entirely on backing micro-VC firms. Since 2010, Cendana has been a very early institutional backer of firms like Lerer Ventures, Forerunner, Founder Collective, IA Ventures, SoftTech VC, K9 Ventures, among others. In this episode, we discuss Michael's path to starting Cendana and how he thinks about and decides to back venture capital firms.