“Are you going to write any of this down, because, well when you start, you might see things differently?”
I’ve heard this question far more times than I expected over the last few weeks, and it’s a fair one. This week I joined Construct and became an investor.
Aside from a brief period in investment banking, I’ve spent my entire career either as an early stage operator or a founder. My conversations with founder friends recently have felt like a mini going away party, bidding farewell to my founder and operator self and welcoming a new version on “the other side of the table.”
I joined Bowery Farming in 2017 as our first Chief of Staff, helped build the company from 15 to 500 people, and ultimately led our R&D operations and supply chain efforts. I then launched Mammoth to help food and beverage optimize their supply chain decision making, and built that company for two years. Founders and operators — we like to build, we’re fueled by a shared goal and vision, we like to make decisions quickly and execute even quicker, and while we understand that investing is part of the ecosystem, sometimes it feels anathema to what makes building exciting.
So how does all of that lead to here? I think the best way to explain it is to answer the question above, and “write down” a few of the things I’d like to make sure I remember as I move from being a founder to an investor.
Find people that align with your vision
It’s not just about getting along with someone. When I met Rachel and Dayna, it was evident that they had not just been thinking about, but investing in a clear vision of massive, technology-driven industrial change, the same vision I had been operating and building within for the last 7 years.
The intersection of these “Foundational Industries” is one of the most overlooked and personally exciting areas to be working in right now. Meeting the Construct team was the first time I had spoken to investors with which I shared a similar worldview, and even more importantly where I felt my background could truly drive value.
I view working with founders similarly. Deep shared conviction around a specific future always makes for a stronger, more productive relationship.
For every decision you make as a founder, there is a $Bn outcome that made the exact opposite decision, and both decisions can be right.
This is one of those founder truisms that can make the role emotionally complex and challenging. The founding journey is exceptionally difficult, and decisions only get more complicated the further along the journey you go. I know it is almost trite to make such an observation, but I say it because I thought I understood this part of the founder experience when I was a Chief of Staff, but learned it was completely different once I started Mammoth with my co-founder. Like most things, you don’t really understand it until you do it yourself. Founder/CEOs make so many decisions every day, and the speed at which they make them is critical to their success. It is easy to convince ourselves that small decisions are big, and feel the weight of a potentially wrong answer.
This is something I wish I’d thought about more as a founder, and is something I’d like to remember as I advise and support.
Having a trusted advisor is underrated. Treat these relationships like you intend for them to last a long time.
I was at Bowery Farming for 5 years, and a Chief of Staff for 4 of them. I sat in board meetings and managed three fundraising processes but I also operated in almost every vertical of our business from supply chain to commercial strategy to agricultural science, and even developed our first leveling and comp structure.
But the most impactful part of my role was being a true advisor. The role of “advisor” is particularly opaque, bespoke, and is more often than not, a meaningless term. There is no tangible set of skills one must accumulate before fitting the role. It is a title that is never awarded, but is earned over a long period of time.
For those who have not been founders or CEOs before, one of the least discussed aspects of the role, and leadership in general, is how truly isolating it can be. What is the value of being able to work through a problem with someone you truly trust and respect?
The velocity of decisions made by the CEO is higher than in any other operational role, and there are rarely correct decisions, only trade offs. My most indelible experiences were in this advisor capacity, working through the often interpersonal challenges a CEO faces regularly but that the company never sees, and I know this can be done as an investor because I’ve seen it firsthand from Bowery’s earliest backers.
Moving Forward
Career shifts always seem momentous and deserving of retrospective. I’ve done this now a few times, from banking to operating to founding to now investing, but I think ultimately it comes down to where I feel the principles and experiences above can be most useful, and I can’t imagine a better place to start.
If you’re a founder building in a foundational industry, please feel free to email me at leland@constructcap.com. I’ll be spending a lot of my time focused in supply chain and manufacturing, and will be sharing some of our views on those areas in upcoming posts.