Entrepreneurship is messy and unapologetic. It’s uncivilized.
After six years of false starts and deliberate practice, I launched an investment partnership in September 2021.
Then the market collapsed.
Poetic, yes. But hardly a coincidence. Raising outside capital as a first time fund manager is hard. It’s nearly impossible in a down market.
As the fund approaches the 18 month mark, I have a newfound appreciation for the quote popularized by Markel CEO Tom Gayner:
The secret to success in the investing business is surviving the first 30 years.
Duke basketball champion Shane Battier knows a thing or two about overcoming adversity. After losing the championship game as a sophomore, Battier led Duke to a national title two years later in 2001 to cap off his collegiate career.
As an NBA veteran of the Miami Heat in 2013, Battier was benched in the Eastern Conference finals due to a shooting slump. Seventeen days later he would set a record for the most three-pointers in Game 7 of the NBA finals and the Heat were crowned champions.
After his playing career, Battier dove into other interests such as media and business. Here is an email he sent to then-Instacart CFO Ravi Gupta when Amazon threatened their business and bought Whole Foods in 2017:
How lucky you are! You get better with chaos and adversity. Staying with your plan, keeping the troops morale high, reinventing but strengthening your pillars and foundation, you'll come through the other side galvanized.
We'll look back and say, ‘yeah, no shit, of course, Ravi had everything under control. He's a boss.’ But we'll laugh because you're just doing what you're there to do. And then we'll go to Napa and drink the really expensive shit.
Battier elaborated:
The line is thin…In any championship journey, there’s always that line, like, oh shit, we may not make it.
Red Ventures CEO Ric Elias is intimately familiar with that line. You just have to survive long enough to outrun it.
Ric and co-founder Dan Feldstein launched the predecessor to Red Ventures in January 2000 with $2 million of seed capital from friends and family. Then the dot-com bubble burst and they were down to $100K in cash and no revenue by November.
Here is Ric reflecting back:
When you taste your own blood for long enough you realize you have to fight the fight. You have to stay with it, stay hungry…I gave my word to all my friends that I was going to do all I could. And I wanted to go to my reunions. [source]
Even when things were bad, I never thought we would fail. We just needed to buy time. I knew if we could stay in the game long enough, we would succeed. [source]
Every great business starts with a great story. Keep going.
See you all in Napa.