Today I'm with Kunal Tandon. Kunal is a founding partner at El Cap, where he is investing in early stage B2B tech with his partner Stew Bradley. Prior to El Cap, Kunal was at Collaborative Fund in New York. Kunal, I don't know if you learned it well at Collaborative Fund, but from our interactions, I really appreciate your very unique, sort of, fresh approach to the venture job.

Yeah, many thanks for having me. I think the unique approach, I think Collaborative Fund definitely played a role, but I think it was that I kind of that I arrived to tech later in my career. I think I had this totally different set of experiences and took a really nontraditional path into this industry. And I think like with the benefit of being a little bit older too, got to develop a different perspective.

I spent almost the first nine years of my career working in a small family business in the import export industry brokering paper and metal transactions across Asia and Latin America, and it couldn't be further from being a technical job. It was phone and email and spreadsheets and printing out PDFs and editing them manually and scanning them back in and sending them and dealing with factories that often didn't have computers. But I think also, like, I grew up as a nerdy kid who loved the internet. And I think for the first time in my life, like in my early twenties, I learned that you could work in tech as a career. That was just nothing that was on my radar before.

So, I think a lot of people who are in venture either grew up on the West coast or it was more in the zeitgeist by the time that they were picking what they wanted to do, and for me, I took the circuitous path. Like I worked in a really non-technical field and then just had to become a student of the industry to kind of play catch up, like read everything was on tech crunch, a bunch of books. And I think that kind of contributed to having maybe a different perspective than a lot of people who do this work.

The thing I've learned doing the podcast is that Everybody's story is so different, but no one I've talked to was, what did you say you were importing paper, metal?

Paper and metal, yeah. So like paper, like the raw material, like the pulp that goes into making paper and then just like scrap metal and raw materials

Were you importing it from? Tell me a little bit about that business and what your role was and what it's like to import pulp.

Yeah, I think like at its bare bones, that business is. You're serving as a middleman. You're a connector where someone is trying to source something or trying to sell something and you're trying to find the other side of that transaction. And what you're responsible for is all the logistics that go into that. So you're making sure that what they say they're selling is actually the thing. You're negotiating the prices, you're building your own little percentage on top, you're taking care of the customs and the logistics and the shipping. And it's something that requires a lot of high trust because like the information quality isn't great. Like sometimes you get like a grainy photo and this is like pretty high quality cell phone cameras. So, you're kind of putting your reputation on the line to make that other side of the transaction where you're like, I know this person, I've built trust with them over a long period of time.

So it was this incredible job where I think working in a small business alongside my dad for the first two or three years, I had this incredible opportunity of you're focused on everything because there's no one else who's picking up the slack. Like you need to figure out how to do a thing, you just had to kind of figure it out. And I think when I would go to happy hour or something with some of my friends who took more traditional jobs out of school, it was this wild contrast where, you know, I have a friend who's an analyst at a big bank or at a consulting firm. And they had a very like narrow scope of things that they were responsible for, I think for the first couple of years, I had a real appreciation for that of like, this is a really unique place to play.

And at the same time, I think as I saw friends going into more technical fields, I started to slowly build conviction while sitting in my full-time seat that like the industry I'm working in and every other industry that's not leveraging technology is going to get disrupted and transformed. And it's not a question of if, but when, so I think it became harder with each year to just be like, we're still doing things the same way that they've been done for 20 or 30 years. So, I think when it was time to leave, like, I was like, I want to go ride the wave of the future.

And now given that you were in it, what do you think about investing in digital transformation and automation?

Yeah. I mean, we're investors through El Cap in a company called Orchestro That does procurement orchestration for direct materials. And we saw that company come across, I think the third week of COVID lockdown in 2020, and we were still a relatively new fund at the time. And that ended up being our second investment, but I met it with a prepared mind. Because I was like, know this problem, I know what it's like, not for the largest companies in the world to direct materials, but for really small companies. And I know how much time it takes to source a single material, let alone if you need to source 500 different materials.

And then someone came and they're like, we've built AI and automation, and this is an embedded workflow, and you just send someone a link, they don't need to download anything new, and it's like a single sign on. And I think I was able to ramp on it a lot faster, maybe than some of the other investors.

And that's an area that we look at a ton, not just around sourcing and supply chain and procurement, but how do you take some of these workflows that are trapped in email and spreadsheets and who's doing a great job about building like really elegant workflows around that. But I think like the other nuance there is like, is the market ready to adopt it?

I think in the U S there's a real bias towards everyone has great devices and fast internet and access to that. And I think mobile phones have brought the rest of the world pretty close to parody, but it's still really different. I think like understanding, like something that works for you and I sitting in LA at our computers is really different than someone in the Philippines who's on like a port who needs to be able to like do the same thing. So, I think , it's really exciting when founders are able to proactively speak to that nuance, and speak to like the audiences that they have to build for.

So you're importing paper, pulp and metal, and then bridge that story to Collaborative Fund and El cap.

Yeah it's far from a direct path, after graduating college, I turned down like the traditional path of going to work on wall street. I had an internship for a summer and offered to come back after graduation, and I said, no, I was like, I can't imagine this being my life every Monday through Friday of waking up early, sitting on this floor in a suit and yelling and moving money that I had no idea what it meant. And after graduating college, I went to Japan for a few months. That was like my version of study abroad. And it was just kind of like drinking and traveling and having fun. And then I ran out of money, which I didn't see coming, but I should have, and I moved back to my parents house and started looking for a job online. I'd missed all, like, the on campus recruitment and was kind of lost.

And after, I think, a couple months, my dad came and, like, offered me a parachute and was like, why don't you come work for me for a few months? It'll give you some experience, something to put on your resume. More importantly, I'll pay you so you can move out of my house, which I think we'd both be excited about. And then you can go and figure out, like, what real job you want to do. And I didn't really have other options, so I was like, sounds good. Thank you. And what I thought was going to be two or three months of working together turned into almost nine years.
Wow, and what were some of the big takeaways?

I think what was interesting is immediately, like, within the first month I knew I would stay longer because there was enough to do. At first, I think I was, like, naive enough to be, like, there's actually a lot I can do and a lot I can make better and a lot of value I can add here. And then I think over time I also learned a ton which is the things that like my dad was always great at which is how do you build relationships? How do you build high trust? How are you accountable to your partners? How do you communicate when things go wrong? And I think those were really important lessons that I learned early on, which were just great to like to build upon over a number of years.

Yeah, I think the tech world is good at the workflows and the automation but doesn't teach the management and the soft skills with the same rigor.
Yeah, I think processes and templates and frameworks are necessary, but they're not sufficient to do this job, at least not the way that we do it at El Cap. I think we take such a relationship-based approach of careers are long and our ecosystem is small, so act accordingly.

And I think knowing that the founder journey is really difficult and we always tell founders we can't take the money back. And I remind them that when I feel like they're holding back or they're trying to reframe something like we can't take the money back, we are on the same side, we are aligned structurally. But also on a personal level, like I want to see you win, and if you're not winning, I also want to support that because someone's company might fail tomorrow, but maybe their next company is going to be amazing. And I want to make sure that we have a chance to partner with them.

It's weird actually. It's a really good reminder. I take that for granted, which is I can't take the money back, but also, I'm also not in a position, I'm not firing the CEO. I'm a seed investor.

Yeah, I think especially first time founders, I think there's a strange dynamic. It feels like some unspoken thing, which is like misinformation that has spread where founders feel like we're their bosses, where it's actually the opposite. I'm like, I'm here to serve you. I'm here to figure out how I can be helpful to you.

And that requires you to hopefully be as honest and open with me. And we talk a lot about how there's this veil. Or performance between founders and investors. And we just take a high engagement approach where I'm like, I'm going to chip away at you.

I agree. I love that. But let me get us back on track to how you went from importing to venture capital.

So in 2015, and I'd started working with my dad in 2007. In 2015, my dad came to me and was like, I'm ready to retire, I've been doing this for a long time. It feels like the business is in a good place. What are you thinking? And super grateful for that because my dad coming to me and being like, what do you want to do? It was like the first time since I joined him that I thought critically around like, well, what do I want to do with my career? Like I'm still young and have a lot of like working years ahead of me, and I thought about it and I told him, I was like, I don't think I want to do this anymore. And he was like, well, talk to me about why. And I was like, I think we're a small business. our greatest asset is the relationships that we've built over a really long period of time. Some of them while I've been here, but mostly all of them predated me and best key relationships are people who are of your generation who are probably also going to be approaching this decision point in their careers over the next couple of years.
And I think my dad had a really open mind and he was like, yeah, that actually makes a ton of sense. So, you know, we spent kind of the rest of that year kind of unwinding the business and selling off some of these key relationships and recurring business lines that we had. And for me, by that time, like, I had become interested in thinking about what it would look like to work in tech.

And I had started going to meetups on nights and weekends in New York, and in 2015, I started a newsletter, which was seven interesting links to things I was reading on the internet every day. And every Monday through Friday morning, I sent it out, and at first, it was like 30 of my Facebook friends signed up, so, like, people who knew me in real life. And some of those real life friends started sharing it at companies that they worked at, so, like, one day I had, like, 50 people from L'Oreal signed up, and the next day, like, 20 people from Google.

And I was like, oh, now strangers are reading this thing, I have to keep sending it every Monday through Friday. And it became this great tool for me to talk about the things I was interested in and aspiring towards rather than the stuff I had been doing. And it became this great tool of I needed to start looking for a new job.

And part of that is you reach out to people who can hopefully be helpful. But I was putting stuff out into the world that had people reaching out to me, being like, this is funny, this is interesting, like, who are you? Do you want to grab a coffee? And I started doing like multiple coffees a week around New York, where I was going to people who were working at companies I admired and roles I admired. And I was like, stranger from the internet, I'm about to go look for a job for the first time in a long time. Like help me think about how to break into this industry, and a couple people put venture capital in my radar.

I was like, I don't even really know what that is. And I think I was the right amount of naive, like you and I both know how hard it is to get a job in venture capital, so I, after like the third or fourth person mentioned venture. I just went and read everything I could. I read like every Fred Wilson blog, all the Mark Andreesen stuff, the Paul Graham essays, and then I Googled venture capital firms in New York. was like, how hard can this be? And I think it was like the second firm I clicked on was Collaborative Fund.

And they had Pharrell, the musician, on their homepage, and that caught my eye first, and I was like, oh, that's different. And then I went, and I looked at their blog, and like, the branding was amazing, and the portfolio was companies like Kickstarter, and Lyft, and Sweetgreen, and I was like, these are things I spend money on, and it didn't feel like this hard tech that I had thought about for so long. I was like, these are products that people are using and are exciting. And then I opened LinkedIn and it was disappointing because I didn't know anyone who worked at Collaborative Fund, didn't have a single connection. So instead, I just fired off a cold email. And I think it was to like, a handle that they had, I think it was magic at collaborative@fund.com.

And I got an email response, I want to say in 34 minutes from Craig, the founder of Collaborative Fund, and he's like, I read your newsletter, I would love to meet you for lunch. And once again, I was like, wow, getting a job in venture seems so easy. And fast forward a couple weeks later, I go meet him at the office. I'm telling him my background like, I'm telling you, and he quickly cuts me off in the first couple minutes. And he's like, hey, just to be clear, like, I wanted to meet, I wanted to see if I could be helpful, we're a small firm, we're definitely not looking to hire, and definitely not a stranger from the internet.

And I was like, sounds good, you, like, you're getting lunch, so it was worth the bike ride downtown, and, you know, happy to meet someone new. And we ended up spending, like, another hour and a half together, and at the end of it, he was like, you know what, I have an idea. Why don't you come and be a consultant here for the next two to three months?

We have a portfolio company that we own a lot of, that's technically really capable and talented, but struggles with everything else. They need help raising their next round, putting together a fundraising deck. Be great to talk about like putting together a go to market plan for them. Do you think you could come help with that over the next 60, 90 days? And I put on my best confident face and was like, absolutely. I had never seen a fundraising deck before, I did not know what go to market meant.

I was going to say, it doesn’t sound like your actually qualified for some of this.

Not at all. It was very much like fake it till you make it. And he was like, do you want to talk about time commitment and compensation? I was like, well, I have the time and I trust you to be fair. I would have done it for free. You know, showed up on Monday and I told myself like, as I got off the subway going to the office, I'm like, I'm going to stay here as long as I need to. I'm going to find ways to be valuable. And what was supposed to be 60 to 90 days turned into a year and a half of working at Collaborative Fund where it was working with different portfolio companies as kind of like a jack of all trades, extra set of hands to help on all the non-technical stuff that goes into the early days of building.

And then I just took the initiative to start reaching out to founders and being like, looks like you're building something cool and got to watch a lot in the office of the other partners having conversations with founders, like how do you think about markets? How do you ask questions? How do you evaluate teams? And that was an incredible experience to be there for a year and a half. And I think it shaped a lot of the way that we think about El Cap.

So many questions, but first just what is Collaborative Fund known for?

Yeah, Collaborative Fund was started by Craig Shapiro. I think Craig has done an amazing job of being like, this does not have to look like a traditional venture capital firm. I think his aspirations were much more of like, what does it look like to just build a really interesting financial institution, almost, of Collaborative Fund now, and I'm going to get some of this wrong, so apologies in advance to Craig if he listens to this. They have a climate fund. They used to have a fun focus on education and play that was co-branded with Sesame Street. They have an early-stage fund, they have a growth fund, they have a public market hedge fund. And they were one of the first firms that had a dedicated crypto fund. But I think like, as my partner, Stu and I thought about building El Cap, like we very much have that ethos too. We look around and there's a lot of successful firms. And I think if you study a bunch of them very closely, the thing that you realize, which is really freeing is there's a lot of amazing ways to do this job and drive returns for your investors, there's no one way. I think the only thing you can be confident about in venture is venture is likely going to look different in the next few years than it does today. I don't know what that looks like, but I know it's going to be different. So as we think about building and continuing to evolve our firm, I don't think it can look the same way that firms have looked for the past 10 years. We have to be thinking, what will it look like for the next 10?

I think about that a lot. I was a product manager. So I think about like my default is to say that we have to listen to the market, like listen to what founders need.

Yeah, I think it's, twofold. I think one part, which you mentioned is listening to the market, right? but I think the other part, which I think some firms don't do early on is look inwards and reflect on like, what are your unique superpowers as a partnership?

And it's like, if Benchmark is really good at doing the job one way, like, and you try and copy them, you're not the same team. Like they have their own set of superpowers and skills that they lean into and that's why their firm is designed that way. And I think every manager, everyone who's starting a firm should like do the work to be like, well, what are we uniquely good at that we can do that other firms can't copy.

Because I think that's where you can differentiate and that's where people can't out compete you. Because it's unique to you I think it's less about like, hey, let's rewrite the way that this job is done just to be different.

Yeah. It's just hard, but I'll add my commentary. Like, like, I think of TenOneTen, like, I was like, we're kind of similar to Bonfire. We had an intern, an MBA intern, who interned at both Bonfire and 10 1 10. She's like, you guys are so completely different. But it's hard from the inside to know that.
I wish that there was some form of like, take your friend to work day.

I have the same thing, I called it a partner swap and then everyone laughed at me.

Yeah, I, I don't know like in practice how that would work, but even when I'm traveling and I'm like fortunate enough to have friends who let me sit in their offices when I come to New York or go to San Francisco, even being a fly on the wall to see like how people interact or the way some people go sit in a corner like that is already super interesting. I'm like, it'd be really nice if I could just sit in on that meeting for an hour. I wish there was a way to see that because I think. it would show us all that like these partnerships are all just a function of the people in the rooms, so they're going to be more, more different than they are similar. But I think there's a lot to learn. I think something that like I want to get better at over this year is trying to spend time with other GPs.

And you're in, I forgot now, Santa Monica, Venice?

I'm in Santa Monica, yeah.

But you said you have stronger networks in New York and San Francisco.

Yeah, we have, a couple founders in LA. New York and San Francisco do feel like stronger networks overall. Like, I lived in New York for 12 years. San Francisco, just a function of the density of folks there. And I think something that I won't even be modest about. I think I'm good at it, I think I'm better than average is making friends on the internet.

Sure.

I think like through Twitter, it doesn't matter where someone lives. Like what I end up doing is I'll start DMing people. And I'll probably do a call with them. And then I keep a running list of like, next time I go to San Francisco, I have 30 people and I'll pick some subset of that and reach out and then hang out in real life.

And LA has been like this kind of bumpy experience of Stew and I both moved here when we started El Cap in August of 2019, we moved to LA. And I think like those first few months, I was just kind of getting my foot in. I'd only kind of lived in New York as an adult and moved to Venice. I didn't have a car. I was taking Ubers and riding my bike and walking places and taking the bus, which if you live in LA, that sounds wild. And I think just as I was getting my footing and was like, all right, like, what is the LA ecosystem all about? I want to like dive in the pandemic hit
So making friends online is not something I do. And do you meet founders? Like, do you use it as a strategy of like, sourcing companies?
Absolutely. I think we've made a handful of investments from people that we found on Twitter. And then the other one, and this is going to be a throwback to like the darkest days of the pandemic, is one of the first hundred people on Clubhouse.

Oh, yeah. Totally.

When it was kind of all the rage during the pandemic and like it was this special thing which felt like freshman year of college where everyone there was just like desperate to make friends and connection and interact and every night like I would open it up at like 5 or 6 pm and you'd see the same faces. And that became this great way, like, I'm in a group chat right now with 25 people who I all met on Clubhouse. And we've all met each other in real life. We have invested in each other's funds and businesses. And it's just this incredible community, and I think Twitter has been that for a long time for me. And I think the understanding that I have is if you send a thoughtful message more often than not, people want to meet more people.
And if you can make it easy for them, they're quite receptive. We do a lot of like internal lists of people that we find online.

I'm interested in your list.

My partner played in the NFL for seven years. That was his first job out of college. And he introduced me to this idea that they do ahead of the NFL draft called big boards, where you're listing kind of like the top prospects who are available regardless of position because you want to be prepared if you know inevitably someone who's picking before you pick someone off your list, you want to have like a deep list of people that you've done the work on and ready to pick and we have internal big boards that were updating constantly across different verticals. And we're like, Hey, this person's almost four years vested at this company they're working at. Maybe they're starting something new or we have a big board based on cities that we're going to. It's like, Oh, here's the New York big board and here's the San Francisco big board.

And a lot of those are sourced from Twitter and it's often as something simple as like that person wrote something interesting, they had an interesting blog post that someone sent to us and you take the extra few minutes and you deep dive and you reach out and I think that's been a really powerful way, especially if you're not living in those cities to be like, it doesn't matter where I am.

It's about like just building contact and trying to be helpful and build a relationship before there's a deal, and before it's a transaction.
I love it, amazing. I find it a lot easier to identify people that I think are truly great than I do to do anything about it. And I love naming it.
Totally. And I think, the other thing, which has been amazing is I think I, I heard about this from Josh Miller, who runs Arc, like the browser company, where when they interview people, and they've done an amazing job , building a team over there. They ask people that they're giving offers to what's your dream list of the five people you'd like to work with.

All the time. I ask that all the time, I love that.

All the time. And, we now do that with people that we admire where we're like, Hey, who are like the three or four people that you think we should get to know that we could be helpful to, or just. Want to hang out with and I think taking less of a tact of like I want to meet people who are explicitly raising right now Or thinking about starting a company like that's harder that's like a much smaller circle and if those people are amazing and I'm just learning about them now chances are like we might be late or it's gonna be expensive or you're gonna have to like really compete for it. Where I'm like, oh, I want to meet the person who might build something in a year, and I'd love to spend time with them now and take a much more relationship-based approach.

I totally believe, I mean, you say to companies that like A players hire A players, but it's just really hard to judge up. And so, you need to find people who are at the top of their game and who they're looking up to and who they find amazing.
Absolutely. It's the best proxy.

Yeah. Although I ask people, my, top two, I think actually uh, one of my podcasts, Nick from Notation said like, top two questions are, who do you think is amazing? Who would you start a company with? And also, who might start a company? Like, like, find these, you know, SpaceX in LA, find these places, centers of talent, and say like, who do you think might start a company in the next year? Let me make sure I have them on my radar.
Absolutely. I think that's the way to do it, is we are in the people business. They are the atomic unit of what we do, and I think indexing around that has been the only way that we know how to do this job.

Okay, I need to talk about El Cap. So you and Stew, he played for the Eagles. I don't even know where the Eagles are based, but okay, he played for the Eagles.

Philadelphia, I don't watch football, but I do know that.

How did you guys meet?

So when I was in New York I became friends with a guy named Dave Ambrose who worked at a tiger cub hedge fund called steadfast. And I think there were like 12 billion AUM, mostly public market. And then Dave was like, you should meet one of my colleagues named Stew. He's covered all our tech names. on the public side for the past four years. He's been getting much more interested in like helping out on the stuff that I'm doing on private and he's thinking about leaving at the end of the year to go start his own thing.

And I think what was really funny in that is like, we couldn't be more different people. It's like being aligned on like these key things, like Stew you grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, played professional football, was a banker at Goldman Sachs for a year and then worked at a hedge fund and, you know, my family immigrated here and I grew up in New York and I couldn't be any more East Coast if I tried, but I think that there was like this initial spark of like, intellectually, we really admired and respected each other, and then I think just like aligned on values, which felt important.

And then in early February of 2019, Stew was leaving steadfast and was like, should we just do this thing together? And I think like similar to when I just naively assumed it's so easy to get a job in venture capital, I think we were both the right amount of naive because we didn't know anything. And we were like, we should totally start a fund. We don't know what LPs are. We don't know how you structure this, but like everyone seems to be doing it. How hard could it be?

Fundraising isn't that hard?

Yeah, who knew? And I think we just kind of like dove in headfirst. We raised a first fund, which was like two and a half million bucks, all from people that knew us I think our first deck, like the first version of it was 80 slides with like nine different strategies.

And, I think we got it down to, like, maybe 20 slides, but based on some of the emails that we get from our LPs, I don't think anyone read it. I think it was, like, very much a bet on, hey, like, we think you guys are nice and smart and seem honest, like, go take a shot. So, we raised that small first fund, we ended up incubating our first investment, I think Stew came to this from a place of, we need to learn by doing. So, he had an idea from like a market that he was following at Steadfast, which was like the way advertising ecosystems around the big players have developed. When Google and Facebook opened up their ad ecosystems to third party partners, he was like, usually the first third party provider has built a really big business because they're the only ones who like intimately understand, but the big platforms also giving them a lot of support and access because they want to make sure advertisers have a great experience.

And he had been investing in and tracking Amazon his entire time when he was at a hedge fund. He was like, Amazon is imminently going to follow suit here. And while we were standing up El Cap, we were also then like, we probably should start this business and that's going to be the way Stew's going to be able to get his operating chops. We're going to get one investment in the door. The only problem was we didn't know a ton about advertising. So, we went to LinkedIn and, you know, start shaking our networks and it turned out that Stew's freshman year roommate at college was working at Amazon, fingers on keyboard, optimizing ad campaigns, and he lived in LA. So, we picked up, we moved to LA, and I think a couple days after we did our first capital call, we invested directly in that business.

Wow. And as I understand it, Fund One, as you said, two and a half million dollar fund has done quite well. Small fund, obviously, but that's sort of allowed you, you're now investing out of fund two.

yeah, we're out of fund 2. And we did two or three SPVs that allowed us to take those board seats, lead a deal, price around, and then we went out and started raising fund two, and that's what we're investing out of now, and doing pre seed and seed. We lead deals, we co lead, we're happy to participate, but very much still that same ethos of like, we want to be hands on, we want to be your most engaged investor if you'll have us.
And, when should I call you? Like if I'm leading a deal and you want to co invest, like what size check, what sort of deals, like, what's the best scenario for you?

Yeah, I think, best scenario for us is we're pretty flexible on check size. We can write checks anywhere from $250k up to a million dollars to start. We're happy to lead, we're happy to co-lead, we're happy to participate. So, I think if it falls in that range, the thing I always say to people is if you think the founders are amazing, then I want to talk to them.

And I think from there, like we're very much of the mind of like, we want to be collaborative, because we've now invested enough companies and now, we're in this new part of the cycle where you kind of see who, shows up and is helpful and who checks out. And I think, you know, we keep those lists internally too of you know, who are the folks that we want to share? We have our venture big board too, of like, who are the folks that we want to share deals with?

And even if people don't invest, like I always ask founders, what was your interaction like with that person? Because, you know, most investors are saying no to deals. So that's not always going to be the litmus test for like, do we want to continue to try and collaborate? But someone shows up late to call, hasn't read the materials, is kind of a jerk on the call. Like we're taking notes around that too, because it goes back to like relationships and people are the atomic unit of the work that we do. And I want to make sure that when we're referring someone that they're having a great experience.

I love it. Who needs a CRM? When you can have a big board? Okay. One more for El Cap.Tell me about these advisers that you have around the table.

Yeah. I think in fund one, when we looked at like what went well, we had to put our egos aside. We weren't like, we're the greatest venture investors ever. We've made four investments and everything's going well. And it's because of all the work that we've done. We took like a real look back and we document everything that we do and every interaction that we have.

And we saw that like one of the things that really moved the needle from like a helpfulness standpoint. provided by El Cap was Stew and I reaching out to our friends and other people in the ecosystem who could be uniquely helpful to companies. If someone was making their first Design hire rethinking their go to market. It'd be like, who's the best person in our network who can hop on the phone, maybe make the right intro, maybe just get on a call and help them with that first interview. And that was amazing, and I think as we looked at that, we're like, we can only ask our friends for so many favors, we don't want to abuse this privilege either.

And we were also starting to participate a lot more in Web3 communities in DAOs, when we were thinking about forming fund two, we were early to FWB, which got started right here in la. friends with benefits, the first like big, large social dao and kind of had a front row seat into like how people bring together amazing groups of people who are doing other things, but around a shared purpose and more importantly, maybe like a shared interest.

And we ended up investing in another DAO called Cabin, which is where the Constitution DAO started, and Stew and I had like an hour drive back to Austin from there. And we discussed like, what does that look like for El Cap? Like we're not a DAO, we're a very traditional fund structure, but what does it look like to try and expand our brain trust and bring some of that support. And actually, create some structure around it.

And we started the El Cap contributor program, and as far as I know, it's the first one of its kind where we share a fixed number, fixed amount of carry, but these 10 amazing people that we call the Avengers for startups and they have full time jobs doing amazing things. And these are all people who have context into the work that we're doing day to day. We run our entire firm on Notion. They have visibility to every interaction. They see all the materials from founders for deals that we're looking at. We have a shared discord, like we've seen contributors talking directly to our founders. And I only find out about it when I go look at the notion notes and I'm like, oh, I didn't know that they were talking to this company this week.

And I think that's been amazing for us. And it goes back to just being like, how do you bring more people into your ecosystem and our first thing, when we bring on a new contributor, we have them build a big board. We say let's do your 10 people. And Stew and I make it a point to try and meet all of those people. So multiply that by 10, like. There's a hundred great people in our ecosystem that we didn't know before.
But I think a lot of firms have advisor networks, mentor networks, pictures of people on their website, and I think that you are legitimately much closer to those 10 people who, I think you said you have like a weekly meeting with them, right?

Yeah, I think what we wanted to do differently, because we talked to a bunch of firms that have scout programs and advisor networks. And I think those things can be really valuable and powerful, but it wasn't aligned with like the problem we were trying to solve. I don't think we set out to be like, how do we get more people in the tent to try and look at more deals?

I don't think it was like. We need advisors who can make customer intros or use their cachet to help us win a deal. Those are really valuable things. Those still come with the contributors, but like the thing that we were trying to solve is how do we better support the companies that we invest in?
I wanted to make sure the people we were bringing in to help us do our job of supporting companies also had high context. So having them in our notion and our workflow is important, having them in discord where Stew and I are talking throughout the day was hyper important.

Great. Kunal, we're up at time. I find your approach very compelling, I can see also why you're very uh, compelling at making friends online and offline. But I, I feel like I learned a lot talking to you.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. This was great.