Brandon Drew

Jeffery:
All right, well Brandon, it sounds like we’re already in action. We’re already moving and shaking so let’s just jump right into it.

Brandon:
Would love to

Jeffery:
Awesome, welcome. We’re very excited to have you here today. The best way for us to start is if you can give us a little bit of a background on kind of where you’ve come from, where you’re at and where you’re kind of moving to and then uh, one thing about you that nobody would know.

Brandon:
Great, well I appreciate everybody having me on today. It’s a pleasure. My again, my name is Brandon Drew and based out of San Francisco Bay Area. Been involved in tech for well over 20 years. Um first dip my toe into technology when I was going through my academics at cal poly where I studied engineering and business. During that time period, I actually work for the Department of Justice as a law clerk Reviewing over 500 bankruptcy cases a month over five years.

So I jokingly say I learned what not to do in business before I got into business. And since leaving cal poly, I’ve been a part of five companies as a founder of a co-founding employee with three exits underneath my belt. And in between that time I did a brief stint at Merrill Lynch, where I managed about 450 million with a team of three guys. I really realized where my superpower lies throughout my career is understanding the fiscal aspect of the business or the balancing P&L to understand the health of the organization, as well as having a deep part product background and be able to take a young company with some product market fit and develop, develop a go to market strategy for them so that they can impact the business at a faster rate that they could do internally. Through that process, I last I left my last, my last operator role About five or 7 years ago, um, and have since then been working with companies in an advisory board or board seat capacity. And just about a couple years ago started a fund called SAAS Growth Ventures with my partner Arm Cason, uh, where we do what we do, what we love to do best, which is impact company’s revenue. And then if we find companies that we can impact, then we directly invested them. So we’re extremely deliberate in terms of what our company does, SAAS growth ventures. We are, you can almost look at this as a hybrid of private equity and venture and that we have an operating arm that directly impacts the company’s revenue and by doing so revenues directly correlated to valuation. And that’s where our primary thesis is. Um, in terms of what people probably don’t know for me is uh, you know, the usual, uh, if you do know me, you know, I’m a family guy, father of three kids. Uh, and what I like to call PK or pre kids, I was an endurance athlete doing triathlons and marathons swims, but now that I’m locked in on family and as well as covid, uh I’ve been a beekeeper for over 10 years and I would say that that is my side passion.

And as my wife says, she questions my ability to bee keeping. But we have to remind her is that it’s not be harvesting and beekeeping because if you can keep them and all your beekeeper, they’re pretty difficult to maintain sometimes.

Jeffery:
So awesome. Well that’s uh, that’s a great little background and interesting. But the one that I, the first thing that caught my attention was the beekeeping side.

So I was kind of excited to jump into that aspect of it. What got you started in beekeeping? When did you start? You know?

Brandon:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So it’s kind of a little bit of a try and convince the story down as tight as possible. When I was working on Merrill lynch, I actually saw a couple, you know, you come in, you have to stay the market’s current trends. And I saw a couple reports to my eye that came across my desk within our financial analyst group, which was beekeeping and if we lost the bees and you know, the world’s going to collapse.

And I was like, well that’s kind of important. And at the same time going back and forth from work on NPR I was hearing the same thing and so I did, you know, a little bit of my own research and lo and behold when my closest friends out of San Francisco, his family has a ranch up in Oregon and his parents are in town and his dad’s a commercial beekeeper, more of a hobbyist, but he has about 50 bee colonies on his property.

And so let’s just put it this way, one thing leads to another three or four bottles of wine, if not more by the end of the night, he’s like well if you love bees this much you should become a beekeeper and I’ll give you to my beehives. I was like great idea. Next week we had 2BS and uh down in san to be I guess in San Francisco and I was scratching my head going what are we gonna do now? And basically took a crash course of beekeeping out of Marin County Library. Um And then from then we have my buddy brian and I, we’ve been beekeeping ever since.

We’ve done a lot better than where we were. So now I’m actually known in my area for if there’s any beef problems or swarm issues, they call upon me and I get my kids in there and I teach at the schools and kids classrooms and uh there’s probably about three or four neighbors now that I’ve also helped train up. So my nephew is now a beekeeper. So it’s a lot of fun. And I will say this that about beekeeping. I think this is a great analogy for tech and anything else is just when you think you’ve figured it all out, the dynamics change, right? So I’m learning year to year. Um and there’s a great group of people out here that I can to support beekeeping groups. It’s not fun.

Jeffery:
Awesome. Well, I think to a lot of you have whether climate change is a lot of things that can affect hive and and how it how it’s active, that obviously you have the queen bee and there’s a lot of problems with the queen bee and there’s I’ve read so much on different aspects from the lifestyle and how long a queen bee was living for 10 years ago to what they live.

Now. They’re going from, you know, 3, 4 months and now to 4 to 6 weeks, things like that were it’s dramatically changing because of climate, so it’s pretty amazing what you’re doing and you know, you can look at it from many different angles, but a passion or not, you’re supporting the world and you’re doing things that are helping re pollinate and you know, you’re gonna have to deal with the diversity of the change of your of your hive but still pretty amazing that you’re able to do this.

Brandon:
Yeah, I know it’s a lot of fun and you know the one quick snippet I’ll give you is when we first started off because we live in the city, we had to a house of bees on a person’s ranch up in the Marin Headlands and they had a garden that they were really invested in for over 10 plus years and we put the bees underneath in a apricot tree, or a different type of fruit tree.

And the fruit tree had never yielded any fruit after one spring. The thing was dripping and so they said. And even here of our own, our home garden here which we have a pretty extensive one. It really does flourish because of the bees and pollination.

Jeffery:
It’s amazing!

Brandon:
Now I’ve got honey, its a great to give away during the holidays and people love it. So it’s a great gift.

Jeffery:
Yeah, it’s a great door opener for sure. People love that. You know what the other largest pollinator in the world is?

Brandon:
Not familiar with it.

Jeffery:
Bats.

Brandon:
Well, yeah, they also help with insects as well and keeping them at bay. So —

Jeffery:
Amazing ecosystem. It’s amazing. Yeah. And and the reason why I love that you have this aspect because this ties into, in my mind, it ties into all the things you’re doing.

And when you look at beekeeping, you look at entrepreneurship, you looking at investing, how much do you find it taking this passion that you have and being able to teach and groom other people how much you’ve learned from it by going in and doing something? You had no idea what you were doing in and all the little things that you did to grow the knowledge to become now an expert in your area. And people are coming to you because you’re the Bee guy 10 years ago, you might have been like, I was just a start up guy and I’m an investor.

And now all of a sudden you’re, you’re more than that. What do you think got you to do that? And then what did you see that changed around it?

Brandon:
Right. And so if we can stick with the bee beekeeping uh concept here, um, I think what happens and one of the key attributes to be keeping his pattern recognition of getting into the hive and and understanding the words where has been versus where it’s going and then through experience and again, using many years of uh beekeeping experience, you start learning certain patterns that, okay, this is what’s going to happen.

You might have a swarm soon or the queen is not laying eggs properly. So they might be affected by mites or I have scratch marks on the front of the hive and maybe they might be getting attacked by skunks or racoons at night, killing off the high. So there’s a wide variety and that’s what that does is doing it for many years. You create a baseline of experience and pattern recognition enables you to be better the next year. And then as things change, you quickly cross check that off. Now let’s dive back into tech. I’ve been intact for over 20 years, right?

I’ve worked with organizations as either a founding key, one of the founding employees for several organizations. And there are certain things, as we know, you can learn from a book, but you can’t learn from, you can only get from experience. And I think that has always been the evolution that I always knew that I love the finance aspect, but I knew that I had, you know, being an adventure or angel investing.

It’s what we like to call maturity sport, right? Not that you have to be mature to do it, but you have to have gone through some cycles in order to really get good at it and you’ll be able to see certain signals within the market. And then also the tech plays themselves as well as the founders themselves and all that. You wrap all this up together and then you kind of come up with a battle club how you want to approach it, right? What is your thesis? What is the strategy that you have? What are the key areas that you resonate with? It’s the same thing with going back to be keeping, you know, you have the systemic side, then you have the individual bee side, you know, the the ecology that’s affecting the system. You know, there’s all these different inward and outward pressures that constrain both ecologies, that’s where I think uh you know, for me personally, it’s been an evolution and will continue to evolve um as I get better and better within uh you know, supporting organizations, because I don’t view, and I think this goes back to our core thesis, if we can dive into that really fast is that I think it’s been easier now than ever to raise capital and there’s been so much of a surplus of capital.

But when we talk with founders and entrepreneurs, they’re not necessarily looking for the capital, they’re looking for help. Because if you grip to a serious seed or series A unless you’re profitable, you have a saturation of when you run out of cash and it’s a numbers game, you either have to scale up or become probably get that next round of funding.

If you’re scaling up to get that next round of funding, you have to have core metrics and strengthen indicators that you are investible at that level because again, they’re only gonna they’re only good investment companies are doubling growth over month over month growth in some instances. So that’s where we take a little bit of a different approach with the company’s is we are that insurance uh you know, for them to try and make the best decisions as possible, I to hit those numbers.

Jeffery:
It’s what I like about that. And using the Bee analogy and kind of the reason why we’re diving and using the Bee analogies that uh you’re you’re protecting the colony and you’re figuring out how to grow the colony and your how to survive.

And all the metrics and data that patterns the things that come into it, which is a start up. And uh if you treat it very similar, which it sounds like you have, it’s for you, it’s not it looks like it’s not a short term thing. You know, you want your colony to grow and build and you want to find ways to maneuver and build onto it and add in larger hive and get more yield.

But that has to come by being observant and being inside of the dirt into learning about it. So taking that practicality of what you’ve gone through on the Bee side and obviously your past experiences in the work and you’re utilizing numbers and everything else, which is the data pattern to what you were watching with on the B side, you’re able to help these companies, which again, is a huge miss for startups because they are looking at themselves as this short term super growth, but they have no patterns, they haven’t looked for a pattern, they haven’t figured out how they’re going to be sustainable and then they get faced with a million problems, they don’t know how to attack them. So it kind of looks like what you’re doing is you’re beekeeping to your startups and you’re saying you guys just run the business, run the colony, get things going, and we’re going to sit outside and we’re gonna watch the patterns and we’re going to figure out what things you need to be maneuvering and changing and doing better because that’s what we’re good at. You just keep doing everything else inside the Hive. Is that a fair analogy?

Brandon:
That’s a fair analogy. I would take it a little bit of a step further in that analogy, in that we’re doing exactly that. But most entrepreneurs and they get early attraction, they want to all of a sudden for all this effort and money into growth and higher a sales team, SDRs, PPS sales and they want to hit $10 million. But what they really misses understanding their ecology, right, what are the core KPI S that you’re tracking right now? Do you, are you tracking your opportunity, your SQL is the opportunity conversions to wins your sales cycle, Your calq ratio LTV?

Um, you know, do you have a pulse of the business? Because if you don’t have that, then worrying additional fuel into the far as they say, you’re going to douse the flame because you’re going to be running off into so many different directions versus you know, really narrowing in that directional fortitude of where we need to be going.A nd to get those to get the, you know, as we like to save it from the endurance side, small deposits in the bucket, the compound, they build up their build up, they build up and so rather than trying to shoot the moon, we really focus in on the micro moments to build that foundation of success so that they can continue to grow up. It’s the same thing would be keeping you right. It’s taking an outside look, seeing what they’re doing. Small tweak here, limiting the height of a little bit during the wintertime, expanding it up for growth, understanding their life cycles.

And I think it’s a lot of it is timing. Um, and I would say both as patients, but most of all perseverance because we’re not always going to make the right, uh, we’re not always gonna have the right answer right off the bat, but what we do is we take data driven decisions, which I’m sure everybody has, but we take it to the next level of like really being disciplined about it and my partner are, um, and we actually had our own dog food before we launched our fund. We actually went out in the market for over a couple of years testing this out of whether or not our methodologies actually work.

And I think that’s important to know as well. Um, so the question is, how do you, how do we directly assist organization? Fundamentally going from a 3-5 person team to scaling at a rate that is sustainable and won’t break versus just going from 3 to 5 to 20%. Um, and I think that is, it’s very, I think the best way to approach that and how we’ve approached it with organizations is what is the media need at a young stage of an organization?

They, everybody should be Working to the point of failure. And I don’t mean that in a negative way, I should mean that in a very positive way of that, you know, for instance, uh sales rep should be breaking at the seams and crushing their commissions before you hire a new salesperson, right? vs hiring a 55 people. And I think on top of that, especially at that younger stage of an organization. What’s very important is for the founding team, whether or not their sales people or not is understand the value proposition and how the product needs to be sold, which that’s directly what we can help with versus going out and hiring a senior sales sales leader that is just, you know, targeting the early stage growth.

And the reason why I think that’s crucially important is because once you understand what, how it needs to be sold, you’ll be more adept to finding the right a candidates to fit that role based on their background and their previous experience. And I think that is the hardest thing, you know, as a, you know, there’s so many different books and blog postings and podcasts around hiring.

Right, right. Um, you know, hire slow fire fast, right? That’s always what people say. And I think there’s a lot to be said about that because you want to build that slow growth, very few companies can go from an eight person team to, you know, a couple 100 person team, the company I’ve seen do that, that’s done really well as a group called Hopping out of the UK, they have gone through two rounds of funding and have blown up on this covid, uh, you know, debacle because their technology was perfectly timed for that, luckily for them and they’ve had an incredible growth.

But the founder, I think that was the sole purpose, right, was just making sure that they grow, but also, uh, maintaining the ecosystem and the culture within the company for that hunger, which is always it’s, it’s a little bit hard, I would say a little bit of science, more art than anything else. Right? That’s if you can do that, if you can tell that, then, you know, that’s that’s patentable into itself.

Jeffery:
Oh, it’s a fine balance for sure. And so now that you’re, you’re helping these early stage companies kind of find that growth or find that momentum and the hiring process is what do you guys do to kind of keep that moving to that next round?

Is there you mentioned there’s data points that you’re looking for, um signals, what would happen to be those important signals that you guys look for and how does that work? You just keep making investments from your fund or is it um they’re engaging with you so you can keep that conversation going. How do you keep that moving forward?

Brandon:
Yeah. So I think we should look at the, how we approach funding in general. So what we do is we like to work with the founding team for several months before we commit. Sometimes if we’re committing for the next planned or extension of the fund of their current round, we’re getting to an LOI will put in a short term warrants in so that any work we do with them, we are a little bit defensible. Shoot ourselves in the foot from a, from a fund standpoint. But during that time we were able to get a lot of, we were able to do some due diligence on them more than you would just turn a classic deal room due diligence because we’re working on hand with next to the founder couple times a week, if not more. So we really got to understand the personality, their scalability as well as we do personality assessments for the core executive team to understand there were there might have a little bit weaknesses in terms of versus their strengths like might not be organized but have very great vision.

So we know we need to backfill the organization standpoint, be a little bit more rigorous in terms of our communication with that person. So those are kind of like the first steps. But as we continue to work with them, you know, we put it in the early stage capital to help them grow up once we feel comfortable with it and then post our involvement. You know, we do have sub-funds for follow-on investments, but again, we are looking to help them raise their next round of funding with some of our core partners. And through this entire process, I think what is crucial from day one throughout, you know, it’s always assisting the founder make sure that they know their business from a data standpoint, Are they tracking and the court? I think the core tenants and this would be for most uh you know, some people have more of a mar our air our trajectory month over month growth.

Some people look at ebita depending on the vertical classification of the company. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong answer, but I would say that we fall in line with, uh, with that core of data point of month, over month growth, year over year growth. But also then we start looking at what is our direct impact and how do we increase in their leads and then starting to fine tune all those different areas, you know?

Well, the opportunity opportunity to win our, can you increase the deal uh, deal size with a CV by doing cross selling, uh, within the organization and then looking at short enough that dealers cycle to help them be a little bit more successful. Once you’re going to get your hands around that you gave like the goosebump moment we’d like to call it. Crap we understand this now. Okay, now we can do a replication rinse repeat into other verticals and or with other reps because we know we have a universe of these many leads we have attuned to.

We know we can get them from opportunity to close within 30 days, you know, MQ. All the opportunity within next, whatever those deal with, whatever that is. And then it’s a very, it’s a lot easier for rinse repeat model. And look, the reason why I love SAAS, you know, comes from my finance, my financial background at Merrill, which is, I love annuitized business. And that’s what SAAS is right? If you can control your inputs and you know what your outputs are. You know, if you put in $1 we get a 10 out and we have a limited churn. And we know have a universe of X, Y and Z. Well then it’s just a matter of going to market and not screwing it up, right? And that’s where it becomes really exciting.

Jeffery:
Now it does sounds very uh very exciting for for all the companies. So how do you align these companies up in this type of discussion? So you guys do your networking, you find the company and you’re like, these guys are great, is there like 50 of them that you’re like, these are all great companies?

Or it kind of sounds like there’s some accelerator style into this. So are you taking in a grouping of companies every quarter or every year? Or is it just based on, you know what I love these guys? You dive into them and they’re like, man, why? Why you call me every day? And you’re like, you know what I’m investing in you. So let’s get this lined up, we’re going this way and let’s make this happen. Is that kind of the process?

Brandon:
So let’s say, you know, it’s more of a symbiotic relationship, right? The companies that we resonate are companies that are looking for, they’re coming to us not because of capital, they’re coming to us because of help. And the capital is kind of a by product of that of us having our own skin in the game. And having also just be quite frankly, because we’re not consultants, were investors at the end of the day, but we, we really, I think we’re operators at heart, you know, we love operating. And we do it and then the investment is the upside for us.

And so I think by those two alignments were able to find the right mix of companies and, you know, you mentioned accelerators and we’re going to follow that type of model, I would say, no, I’ve been a part of a number of accelerators. One of my first organizations that I came with was batch one at 500 startups. I’ve been a part of 500 for a number of years.

Ever since, you know, on and off the I. R. Part of some of the you know accelerators at cal Berkeley cal poly obviously I’m really involved with and so I do appreciate the ecosystem of an accelerator. But I think it’s also gone through its own evolution, right? And I think that is you know, there is a lot easier now to get resources and to start a company versus you know, 10 plus years ago, where that was the whole purpose was because they created that ecosystem for you.

Now you can go to you know, easy places online uh to get some of those resources where you didn’t have to go to an accelerator. However, that being said, I do think that there are exceptional accelerators out there that still have that immersive boot camp, you’re gonna come in looking like this and come out looking like that and you know, I’m working with one out of Los Angeles called expert dojo there, crushing it right now.

Jeffery:
Oh, I love them, Brian’s awesome.

Brandon:
Yeah, I love the way that they operate and they like, he really does put his money where his mouth is, he’s like, look guys, we’re really gonna, we’re going to put it would throw everything at, you were going to do everything we can to make you a success. I have one of my portfolio companies in the right now, I can’t speak higher of it, but I think, you know, everybody had every accelerate has to go through their life cycle right and 500 still doing good, you know YC is still one of the top brands out there. You have alchemists and founders and, and everybody in between um and I think everybody, you just have to find for a company, I think it’s really important to why are we, if we are looking at that, why are we looking at accelerator format and does that specific accelerator give me something that I can’t get at another accelerator or is unique to my business? And I think that’s where we’re gonna start seeing a lot more niche accelerators, you know, food industry or you know, you know, FarMag focused and that’s where you gonna see senators confluence of investors as well.

So I do believe in it, but I think you can also survive outside of it, depending on your company,

Jeffery:
For sure. It brings a lot of mentorship and opening up doors as you mentioned, I think that’s kind of a big, big winner for most, but I think it refines their business model, I think you need an audience that is attentive and those accelerators incubators, they provide that attentive hand holding so that they can bash the model so you like you said you come in one and go out different, I think that makes a big push for your business. You mentioned it a few times. How much do you think that early stage pre-seed, seed round companies and even series A how much of their growth and opportunity is banked on coaching mentorship? How much of that value do you see that these startups really need? Because you mentioned right at the beginning that they’re not coming to you for funding right away necessary.

They’re coming for help and help comes in many forms. So you find that though that piece is really a really crucial for a startup. And you would say, if you’re gonna build a company look for somewhere where you can fit in that you can get that valuable help at the beginning.

Brandon:
Yeah, No, I think yeah, absolutely. And I honestly is, there’s so many different analogies. You can throw it, you know, from beekeeping to, you know, the startup stuff. You know, it does take a village. And I think it’s very important for a founding team to have outside mentors and advisors that can help them open the doors soundboard with them and make better rapid decisions than they can’t because the problem that you have when you’re in a startup, I’ve been, and those entities where, you know, we had, we desperately needed outside help, but we didn’t get it.

And you end up being in a vacuum chamber appearing in your own echo. You’re not actually being pragmatic or looking at the marketplace and what’s happening with your organization with transparent ice.

And I think that’s what the advisors and mentors can provide you. I think it takes a different type of entrepreneur to be quite honest with you, to have hubris and some humility that, you know, hey, even though I’m feeling this traction, I feel like I’m king of the world, You know, I still need a, you know, this could be very fleeting and I don’t want to mess this up and not necessarily saying that they’re gonna make that decisions, but I think it’s important to surround yourself with the right people within the industry that are invested in your business. And I would say from an advisory standpoint, it’s if you get the right advisor holding accountable and you know, I’ve and directly invested in the company’s where I’ve been an advisor because there’s not really free equity, you know, the equity is the upside, but, you know, having a little bit of skin in the game.

And I think that provides a little bit more of a tighter of alignment between the founder and the advisor / investor, because they’re both now, you know, they got skin in the game. Deep skin, right, no matter the check size, and I think that’s important as well. But yeah, I know where you’re getting it through an accelerator or just by, you know, industry folks that you’re bringing on that are excited about what you’re doing.

It’s absolutely important. And I would say that even the accelerator program, you know, not having getting, you know, uh, you know, MBA Myself, but all my friends that have gone through the process, you know, they all say, you know, the MBA was great. I partied a lot, but I made a lot of great connections. It’s the network that they’ve got the ecosystem and ecology that they got access to. And I would say in some ways the accelerator as well, you know, one of the uh, last five companies I worked with out of 500 startups.

They love 500 but I think if you asked them wholeheartedly what the benefit was for them was all the people that they met. But that’s kind of the premise behind it, right? So it does work. And, you know, they still talk, they still share, knows some of them become each other’s clients and customers. And so it’s fun to watch them and watch them all grow and become great success. And so I definitely think that all companies should have their own core network outside of their direct people that were working with.

Jeffery:
Well, I think you mentioned is when you’re in tight with somebody in an environment that you’re while working towards the same common goal, if it’s helping you build your business or it’s building a bee colony, you’re looking for ways to change and fix that. And if you don’t have all eyes in, you can’t build other relationships. So if you’re doing it on your own, just looking at your own business, you’re not going to tie things and you don’t have people getting your back and helping you fix things when they’re broken or being able to pick brain on the weather for weather that’s coming in and you don’t know how to react to it.

So there’s I think there’s a lot of things that we don’t, we think we know, but then when we’re forced into them, we have no idea how to react. And we don’t ask questions quick enough and then we have bigger problems later.

Brandon:
More times than not, I get a phone call. It’s not like, Hey Brandon how’s the family, it’s like Brandon her chrome extensions not getting passed through google. Do you have any ties into there? And me trying to make some phone calls that keep people within an organization? I’m using that as a fake analogy. But it’s definitely more of like here’s, you know, here’s our problem notice that you’re connected, this person in linkedin and can you pinch hit.

And I think that’s again, it’s powered by numbers, right? And one of the things we highlighted earlier in this conversation is it’s all about rapid succession and execution. Right? And so I think that’s also to where your network and your advisors, your mentors, your board members and investors can all play a really, you got to hold them accountable because they might have areas of, of influence that they can top into that can help you get to your end game or the end answer. It might not be the end game and I just be like, this is a dead end, but we got there faster and we didn’t burn a couple life cycles on this.

Jeffery:
I love that. And you think that those, there’s like, and again, this could be anything, it’s maybe all time based. But there’s different groups like the, um, networks where you can, um, spend an hour or two hours a month with other CEOs, like you find that all of these types of environments are all good because you’re building depth, you’re sharing vulnerabilities.

Like these make a difference in helping you grow your business.

Brandon:
I do. But I think one of those transactional style conversations is great to get somebody’s feedback on their experience because that’s invaluable, right? Like it’s, you know, that’s that’s what it’s all about, is learning from other people’s mistakes and their successes and why they made the decisions they paid in the sequence that they made them so that you can pattern out to where you’re at and see if you can take assumptions to better results.

What I think one of the hardest parts and I kind of alluded this earlier is that bring it happened. Working with these relationships are having those types of transactional, you don’t get that pattern recognition. So if we go back to the bee colonies as an analogy, if I go into somebody’s bee colony, I can tell them where the bee, how the bees are acting right then and there. But I don’t necessarily can’t predict where the health of the hive is going outside of seeing some key indicators, right? So for instance, if I parlay that into open up a hive and I see that there’s a bunch of mites or beetles, hive beatles.

I know we have to treat for that same thing with the company if I go in and I see that they have over 15% turn on SAAS and I know that they, you know, we got a button that up. But in terms of evolution of where we’re going as an organization, it’s not just a transaction. It’s an evolution where you have to see what has worked, what hasn’t worked with cyclical, what’s non cyclical.

There’s a bigger ebb and flow to the business that you need to kind of pay attention to. And that’s, that’s why when like for instance, I get, you know, due diligence paperwork. If somebody sends me, you know, last 12 months, I wanted a month to month basis because I want to see the inflection points of their last 12 months. I don’t want to see consolidated report and from that, I think I can start seeing the pulse ups and downs of the organization.

Do we have a huge spike here? Do we have a huge crash here? Okay, well, created that heart attack. So that’s are we consistently growing or is it very spotty? And, you know, a lot of stuff that we can dive into on that

Jeffery:
Exactly, and kind of as they’re going through that information, this kind of pulls us back to, uh, the beginning of what your main focus was on the, uh, the data and the numbers and how you guys work with the startups.

So you kind of gone through this journey to get them now. How do you, how do you work with the startup to give them the idea around the types of people that they want to hire? So a lot of the times you want this great person, but they cost way too much. So what are the ways that you can work with them on that finance side? So they’re getting the right person that’s doing the right job? It’s almost like you need to hire five entrepreneurs, they can do every job where every hat and that’s what’s gonna get you a little bit more further until you can start to refine their needs and wants into like single task, single individuals.

How do you kind of get them over that hump so that they can get to the where they’re getting into growth stage and making money.

Brandon:
Right? And so I think the best way to approach that is having a game plan of what is your hiring schedule for the next rolling 12 days, two months, given what we know right now.

Right. And so quite early on with an organization, you need people that are a little bit more Swiss army knife that have skills that are soft skills, like a little bit better on messaging and marketing, but also have a great personality that they can be a hunter in terms of a sales rep that they like, that, you know, they are attracted to money um and whatnot. So I think 1 tool that we have in our tool chest is obviously a personality test and assessment so that even if you do get through the last stages, you at least identify their strengths and weaknesses.

It’s not necessarily to weed people out, but it’s the last step that we use so that when we start working with them, we know exactly how to approach uh and work with them effectively. In terms of like growth and sales, it really comes down to where they are existing right now. Um in some ways what we found with a lot of young stage companies that work with us because they have to have some success, we can’t take a product proof of concept, we can take, you know, PMF stage or product market fit stage company and get them hyper growth. We can’t take companies already passed that stage and get their go to market strategy and refine it so that they can get faster at that shaker. And so we have the luxury of being a little bit of what we feel like our own sweet spot. And so from that we’re taking a more swiss army knife fight people at the very beginning.

But I think you kind of alluded to one good point, which is at a young stage organization, you have five entrepreneurs, people that can wear multiple hats, right? Everybody has to be broad stroke in terms of their skill sets and their abilities and also be motivated by that. And I think that’s a key attribute, right? You have to enjoy that type of work versus somebody who’s been from large corporate, who’s only done, you know, pull this lever down and turn this dial mentality. But as you start to build out your organization, I think it’s really important that you bring on people that are refined niche for the areas of business that are, that are needed at that present time. For instance, if you have had that growth where you’re hitting a half million to a million dollars in revenue, do you have a client manager already in place?

That that’s their sole job just to make sure that you limit the church and, and or get expansion from your existing client base. If not, that’s an easy hire and something that you can put in because the worst thing to do is hire more sales reps or more consumers. And if you have a huge, you know, outlet of consumers going out. So first button that up and then as you start to build out these chloral roles and you start building out queries of the organization and these little niche areas right?

Where they’re very focusing on directs task, but every task needs to be related to KPIs. OKRs.

So they know what it means for them to be successful. But also, I think what the biggest gap that entrepreneurs make is not taking that time because it starts at the very early day, same thing with data, even if you have relatively no sales, start making your charts, you know, it gets you in a discipline and in habit and those, those are great habits and same thing with OKRs and KPIs, even if you have a five person sales team and you talk to these people every day, it’s good just to go through the process, will start to uncover things about the business, about them, about what motivates them and what changes need to happen as you continue to grow.

So yeah, you know, and for me personally, especially within a sales organization, I think I like to look at individuals that have some sort of competitive background, whether the easiest one to identify as sports, Did you play sports, are you competitive college athlete would not? Um, or was there something else that you’re competitive with? You know, competitive eating? I don’t care as long as you had some sort of discipline, what that does for me is that creates a footprint of like, okay, I was disciplined in this area. I knew that I had to wake up at six o’clock in the morning in order for me to get results six months down the road, right. And that’s what it takes right now, is to make those micro moments that add up to hit that end result.

Jeffery:
So it’s like ahh..

Brandon:
I don’t know if you can hear the kids in the back and I apologize, sounds like,

Jeffery:
Oh no, it’s awesome, keeps things moving. It’s almost like you need to hire four or five David Goggins to come work for you because you know, he’s going to drive the hell out of the team and make everybody effective. Which I think is fascinating because the biggest fear I think goes back to this original part where we started which was the hiring from 5 to 15 and going rapid speed and not understanding the skills or the value that they’re going to bring and then getting yourself so far along that all of a sudden there’s one day where you gotta go and acts half the team because you burned too much capital.

You didn’t get the deliverables you wanted because you didn’t measure it. You weren’t being practical that you said by documenting and and managing your KPIs and being able to understand that output. So what is maybe one piece of advice that you can give to the startups? It when they are hiring and they are working their way through this is that they can’t become attached to the people, they have to be attached to. the goal. Read my goal is what you’re trying to achieve. And I think a lot of times I find that there’s too much attachment and you’re losing the understanding of where you’re trying to go to and that people will maneuver in and out all the time into businesses. And that’s a good thing. But at the same time that you have to make everything palatable enough so that the excitement is always there, but you still have to hit your end goal. And if you’re going to be focusing in five years or three years and holding that focus of your business, that means that the people that might be with you today may not be with you tomorrow.

And how do you understand that and plan for that? So that the fear and the first time having to let people go becomes the hardest thing that a CEO will ever do because they’ve never had to do this before in most cases. So how do you work with them on that last little piece? And what kind of advice would you give to a startup to better understand how they got to work through that cycle?

Brandon:
Right. And so wholeheartedly agree with everything that you just described. It’s one of the hardest things for founders to do is to make those decisions. I think it becomes a lot easier when you have copies and okay ours that are directly tied each one of the rules because then it doesn’t become an emotional personal decision, right? Then it becomes a performance issue and performance always comes down to one, either that person is motivation or they’re not the right person for the job, right. Do they have the proper training or in some instances is that even the right time for this role within the organization?

And I would say that more times than not, You find companies that have come to us has been after nine or 12 month stint where they hired a senior salesperson to come in because I had early traction. Typically what we find with that is that salesperson will ramp up for three months and they have about three months of performance, then another three months of the CEO going, where’s the sales reps? I just invested, where’s the sales and revenue? I just invested six months and you nine months, you know, once at the nine month mark and having this coming to Jesus discussion and then eventually over another three months, you know, we do that person out.

Well, you just burn, it’s not so much the capital, which is important, but its opportunity costs right? You just burned a year of your time, if not, you know, six months to a year of opportunity of actually effective selling. And so you know, that is one of the biggest things that we’ve seen mainly at this stage of an organization pre-serious B is hiring sales leadership at a too early of a path within the organization.

And I really wholeheartedly believe that even if the founder does not know how to sell, they must know that they must know that ecosystem for their organization, otherwise you’re not gonna be able to hire the right people. Now in terms of letting people go, you know, I have friends of mine that uh, you know from venture or accompanies my friends that have gone public and everybody says the same thing, I wish I would’ve let go.

People are earlier when I knew that they weren’t going to work out. But I held on because it’s personal whether you through through nepotism hiring friends and or you know, it’s a good person, they’re trying to hold on, but it’s just not working out from our performance spaces. And the only thing I can really relate to that is it’s like any relationship, right, you’re either gonna grow together, are you going to grow apart?

Right? And at least within business, you can see that as rules become more and more niche. Um whether or not people are going to perform and whether or not people to be able to stay with you and it’s okay if it’s not, that’s the reason why you have the KPI s is to help guide that decision making process. So that is not as hard because at the end of the day, if somebody’s not cutting it’s not in their benefit and it’s not your benefit to keep them in the company.So as the Godfather say, “It’s not personal, it’s business” but I can’t remember but…

Jeffery:
I love it but you’re right, it is tough and uh from all the from in all the podcasts we’ve done and all these different interviews, everybody has a different perspective on everything of course. But what I love is that there’s always something that you can refine and take back from it. And I think that in a in the start up venture side and to take your KPIs and how you manage the data and how you manage the growth of your beehive.

Is that if I stick up five points on my wall today and I stick up another five of something different on my wall and maybe I’ve got three or four sheets. But it’s almost like just like when you’re queuing yourself up to go do a talk, you have certain things you want to do, your queuing up for golf, you know, its head up, shoulders back, but whatever it is, But you remember that five step process. The thing is that in business you’re always reactionary, you’re not planning, you’re always reacting. And the thing is that that overcomes all of those pages you have on the wall because you’re not looking at them anymore and you think, oh, intrinsically I know it, but you really don’t because you’re not walking through those five steps.

It’s not something that you do once every two weeks or two months, like golf. So you kind of have to go through that process every day. So it almost makes sense that you should have these cues up that are referencing, check your KPIs, make sure this is in line, do these things because it’s your business and if we make it too personal it may not be your business in the long run

Brandon:
Right. And I think you know you’ve been taking this step further, looking at all the notes, like just say like all the different advice, the five points you get from all your different advisors, but you’re also going to find is a trend in a pattern of certain concepts and theology that are aligned there. I think that’s what also is important for entrepreneurs to do is take all the bits and pieces that they get and assimilated down into their own thought process, right? And that will help guide them to make better decisions

Jeffery:
And then create some sort of reference point so that they can keep looking at it.

Brandon:
Exactly

Jeffery:
And check goes off. I love it. Well, we’re gonna jump into the rapid fire questions really quickly, but I’m going to have one last question for you. So I always like to kind of hear that one story where in the years that you’ve been doing this, and you kind of look at it and say, man, this story really touched me was, you know, this founder, she did this, or this founder did this, and they were on the brink of destruction, and they just took off from there, or they were running high and then they ran out of cash, just looking for something where the community can kind of learn from those types of good and bad and the ugly to kind of wrap their mind around, this is what entrepreneurship is like, and this is what the hustle is, and you’ve got to really put your effort in mind into it.

Brandon:
Yeah. I definitely have my dramatic startup stories of uh you know companies going belly under and busting for you know most of all human resource issues. But I’ll refrain from telling any of those.

Jeffery:
We want the glory stories, glory, we want the big ones?

Brandon:
Yeah. Well I think I like to focus in on one company is I think it’s a really I love this founder, like I think he him and his wife, it’s a duo, they’re exceptional um and they’re exceptional because their business was booming last year and then covid it and guess what their target target audience was for the ICP — Hospitality and catering. They went from growing you know, a couple 100 points a month over month to zero and very few times. Do you find founders that have the resilience that they have knowing that this is not forever, but we have to stay positive. And we know that we are their story of why they started this company. It’s a thorough wood and his wife, they started snap shift.

There’s no doubt that I believe that they are going to be successful once this thing turns around. But it’s, you know, one of those things that they’ve endured a lot and they’re now starting to come out of the, uh, you know, the dark place that they were at and their revenue started to creep back up to not necessarily where it was because we’re not out from COVID. But I think it’s, it’s a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit of if you really believe in your vision, uh, you know, look at the data, their data was strong and sound, pre covid that was a systemic, you know, catastrophic event outside of their outside of their control. But they stuck with it. And, you know, I think that their business will be more formidable now than it has ever been.

Because, you know, they’ve taken all the resources focusing on areas of the product that they needed a build up and I think they’ll be able to hit the market where everybody else is kind of a close up shop, maybe even more of a wild success. So I think in that sense, you know, a point to that as a high point and to covid, you know, in some areas it’s helped a lot of businesses out. I had this company this one group that I’m entered out of 500 startups called Butler. Uh They were focused on the vertical of retail for their IOT device that monitors foot traffic.

Covid completely killed her business. They pivoted into different vertical. They went from doing zero to my came and tell you the numbers, but it’s well north, let’s just put it this by $10 million dollars less than a year. And so, you know, it’s, you know, you have those success stories which I like to focus on the success and not the negatives. Because majority the negative, the majority of the negatives, I think quite honestly is comes down to the team not executing our gelling together and drama within the human resource component.

And so to that point before we get in rapid succession and we have a couple of tenants that we live that we listened to, which are the 3 Ts – team, traction, timing right. And most people have, you know, similar tenants. You know, we look at the team when we look at that they’re doing and then, you know, whether or not we’re we get excited about the space and it’s not all that different, right?

We really try and take a very again, kind of falling and more of a data model around this. What is it about the team that excites us? What is about the team that we feel like they’re coachable and can listen, not just from us because but from other people that they’re not going to have this ego that I got. I got myself to this, I’m gonna get to a billion dollars out and meet you mentality that sometimes can take a part of somebody’s personality.

Um, and then the traction, traction speaks for itself. It’s all about numbers, it’s all about the velocity. And then for us, what we look at is how we can impact that business and then, you know, the one that’s outside everybody’s point is why is it now, why is it this team’s time? Why is it this team for their traction? What’s happening ecosystem and are there going to be success as a result of that? I think that’s also another way of kind of approaching the question, the mentality on that

Jeffery:
I love it, and I love the fact that you said like taking that the best ones are the ones that take that negative outcome or the thing that was going to go wrong and they turned into a solution and they found a better way out. And I think those are the those are the founders that you want to get behind, that you want to get behind and invest, because they’re the ones that are resilient. They cover every word on the wall that you’re gonna write up there about entrepreneurship and those are the ones that we get the energy from and love to hear the stories on. So I appreciate that. And thank you for the share. Alright. Rapid fire questions.

Brandon:
Okay

Jeffery:
Why do you invest in start up companies?

Brandon:
I mean I just have been a part of the ecosystem for so long that I love the entrepreneur spirit. And I don’t think — I could I feed off of that energy just as my business partner feeds off the data side of it. I feel off of the entrepreneur spirit. I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life and I wouldn’t want to do anything else in the world. The investing part is just kind of the upside of it. But I love being working with different companies. Makes me feel fresh in terms of the new technologies comes out and also helps with the ADD. Working with multiple companies at once.

Jeffery:
I love it. I’m the same. Love it. What’s your favorite part of investing?

Brandon:
I think the success, right? You know I have a background in athletics and seeing all the effort and the sweat equity that you put into it or you know whatever you want to call it and then seeing the outcome of what you produced is I mean it’s out of the skin type of feelings sometimes especially when it’s the company’s first when the founder and team is the first time and when you’re working with them you can see the energy and then amount of appreciation that they have for the assistance.

For me it’s nothing I just love to see their success. It’s not nothing necessarily nothing. It’s what I like to give and give back. That’s the way I look at it. But when you see them, because it’s their baby and it’s their vision and when you see that being successful, that there’s nothing like it in the world,

Brandon:
always have the biggest cheerleader startup cheerleader. I just feel like I got uh I love this. That’s awesome. All right. How many companies do investment per year?

Brandon:
Uh aren’t fun right now is relatively small. We have a target of plus or minus15. Right now we’re on track to do five a year and we’re going to be accelerating that.

Um So, you know, we’re still on the emerging manager microfund on the scale of the venture. Uh So that’s how we approach it. Plus we can’t really bring on more organizations than that, just because of operational capacity of our team.

Jeffery:
Well, it makes sense how deep you guys get into a company would be pretty tough to have 50 of them at one time. So, but I still love it. It’s awesome. Alright. Any verticals you like to focus on?

BrandonL
We tend to gravitate more towards demonstrable ROI and what we consider our high frequency. Demonstrable ROI means that the value proposition is it uses software, you’re gonna get this as a result of it, whatever whatever that number is. But there’s very months, those are easy to sell. High frequency are ones that and consumer uses on a day to day or weekly basis or high touch point.

So this tend to be more BTB analytic uh BI. And we find ourselves that almost 80 of the company that we work with right now, excuse me, are within what we consider deep tech or machine learning AI and I think that’s just more of an evolution of SaAS that you know, again kind of going to the timing point I made earlier is that it’s not that time is now for that type of technology because you have all this big data repositories that people are sitting on, that people have been collecting for the last couple years and now they need to make sense of it.

So I think that’s where the evolution of the timing is for that. That’s where we’re really excited because lot of these companies are doing really unique things, but we tend to stay away from regulatory areas like bio health, you know, HIPAA style regulations. That’s not because we’re not bullish in those areas, but from where our impact is, those tend to have longer sales cycle and not more of a repetitive sale cycle because of the record scraper process around that. (inaudible)

Jeffery:
Do you lead rounds?

Brandon:
We do not lead rounds at the present time. We do have envisioned that as we grow our funds, you know, fund 2 and beyond that. We will be uh, going down more of a co lead or lead path for certain stage organizations. But right now we’re on the phone, what we’re doing okay.

Jeffery:
You do fund to fund investing?

Brandon:
We do not, we do not, but what we do do is from time to time when companies find companies that fall outside of our mandates that we don’t want to violate our mandates for LPS and our investment thesis that we will occasionally run an SPV for companies that fall outside of that.

Jeffery:
Yeah

Brandon:
that’s where, you know, again, we have to be very bullish and very excited about the space and mainly the entrepreneur for us to go to that level.

Jeffery:
Okay. Do you have any preferred terms like pref shares? Common shares, open to all of it?

Brandon:
We’re open to all of it. You know what I found with. If you get too stringent on opportunities, then opportunity to get lost because of certain things that are outside of your control, i.e, that the company doesn’t have preferred shares or, you know, whatever the mechanics are.

But what we do like to do is make sure that we stay as middle road as possible because we’re not the lead of most of the deals, um, that will follow on to most of the other carry on investors and just have the same terms that they have and they have usually already done some dictation on that or preferred whatnot.

Jeffery:
Okay. Um, do you do follow on investments?

Brandon:
We try to, especially for our, uh, and only that, but we also, for our peace, we’re pretty open friendly. We also allow for sidecar provisioning for our LPS so they can go direct to the company when they’re successful or even during the current round.

Jeffery:
love it. And last question you take board seats?

Bradon:
Do we take board seats? Um, We have, we don’t always dictate that. I think that’s more of a lead position. We’ve done everything from board observer or advisory. Um, I think our our role at this point, given at the amount of amount that we invest in the fact that we don’t lead, I think our role is more of a board observer and or advisory position versus taken a board seat.

Jeffery:
Okay, awesome. All right, well, we’re gonna jump into the little segment of personal questions

Brandon:
Please.

Jeffery:
All right, so favorite sports team.

Brandon:
Oh, goodness. So I’m gonna make a lot of people I grew up with upset. So, uh, you know, I try to why I don’t, I’m not an avid sports washer, watcher because you know, three kids be management and work. I say that some of that jokingly I don’t have that much free time, but I was born raised in Los Angeles, I grew up with the Dodgers. But now that I’ve been in the Bay Area for almost longer than my childhood lifetime, I’ve definitely moved to be in the Giants. Some a typical Bay Area patron of 49ers giants and the warriors. My father in law is appreciated or your fans, so, but I went against the grain and I don’t know if I and all of these would be the same.

Jeffery:
All fair enough. Well they’re all they’re all good organizations, so that’s cool. We’ll give you the three then the whole area of San Fran. All right, next question is your favorite movie And what character would you play in the movie?

Brandon:
Oh that is. There’s so many, I’m you know coming from Hollywood, you know third generation Los Angeles. You know we’re definitely movie buffs and there’s so many good movies that you but that’s a very hard question.

I think honestly that it’s going to be an obscure movie for some people but things to do in Denver when you’re dead with Andy Garcia. The reason why I liked it was because it was in unique movie at the time when it was released it was done by two UCLA. Graduate students that were coming out of film school. But I don’t know there’s probably probably a proper name for this but the lingo within and the way that the speed the script writing was was just so good. I remember watching when I was in college everything from, you know, the comment of boat drinks to give it a name or, you know, uh, buck buck weeds or whatever it was that I forget how they kill people. Obviously a gangster movie. But I really love that movie. And obviously Andy Garcia was, was great in that movie. So I probably wanted to, you know what, I think I would actually take Christopher Walken’s role just because he was just so scared…

Jeffery:
Christopher Walken’?

Brandon:
Yeah, he was, he was great in that panel.

Jeffery:
What’s called things to do when you’re dead? Is that right?

Brandon:
Things to do in Denver when you’re dead? Yeah. Has Christopher Walkens. It has, uh, Andy Garcia, Pam Anderson did a cameo in it. Uh, assholes. If you look at the Castillo, you’ll be like, you’d be pretty amazed to see who’s in that. It’s a great movie and definitely, I wanted to dig up out of the archive said you probably get up for free on amazon prime. But

Jeffery:
Yeah, I’m gonna dig it up. I haven’t, I haven’t seen the movie, but that’s on the list tonight. I’m gonna watch this, this, it makes it sound like I’m just trying to get movie, uh, things off everybody. Hey, I’m bored. It’s Covid. Can you find me a good movie watch? And uh,

Brandon:
no, I think, I think it’s a great movie.

And again, I think it’s a great movie because of it was during the time when it was released of like true romance, Reservoir Dogs, which were like, you know, Independent Reservoir Dogs. Yeah, it’s along that same class. But a lot of people have never heard of it, but I really like it because it was done by, you know, some grad students and the scripting of it was just, hello, it was kind of revolutionary, at least for me at that time.

Jeffery:
All right, well, I’ve taken my notes and I’m going to uh look up this movie for some reason, I can’t find it. I’m gonna send you a message so I could flag that down. Um and I’m gonna check out, well, who can’t check out? Christopher Walken’s, the guy’s a rockstar. So I’m gonna be excited to see this movie regardless. But I want to, I want to thank you very much today, Brandon for all your time. It was awesome. I think we went through a nice journey there. We learned a lot about the way you think, the way business runs and how startups actually can relate themselves to beekeeping, which I think is exciting.

Um and I love the analogies and and how you guys are working and functioning and helping startups. So thank you for your time and the way we like to run. And the show off is I want to give you the last word, so if there’s anything that you want to share to the investment community or to the start up, start ups, out there or to the entrepreneurs in general, I leave it to you, but I give you the last word again, thanks for your time today.

Brandon:
Yeah, I think the only motivational thing or it’s not even say motivational, the thing that I can say, uh you know, the most entrepreneurs is definitely follow your dreams of what, why you’re passionate around your business, right? If you stay true to that, everything else will fall into place, but mostly surround yourself with the right people.

And I think that that and out that that goes with anything in life, you know, me having three kids, I was raised with them, it’s out with the, you know, the fatherly, motherly statement of tell me who your friends are, I’ll tell you who you are if you want to be a strong entrepreneur, surround yourself from people that have been successful. I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am today if it wasn’t for the mentors that I had, um I got to learn off of them and also help them, help me not me really critical bad decisions, helped guide me along, but also just be very open to your own mistakes and learning from them. Nobody, I’m sorry if you read that somebody is, you know, first time, you know, first success right out of the Gates.

I always question that it’s usually a journey that they’ve gone through uh and everybody has their own story, know what your story is, know where your weaknesses are, mostly know where strengths are, and just be very open to uh, surrounding yourself. Again, surround yourself with the right people listen to what they have to say and making the right decisions from that so little bit much there.

But at the end of the day, it all comes down to, you know, we can only help lead a horse to water in terms of companies we work with at the end of the day is third company, um, and they have to make the right decisions were just there as guiding posts so that they can get closer to not making those mistakes and getting the and cool.

Jeffery:
I love it. Thank you, you’re doing great things. Brandon, keep it up and we appreciate all your time. I was brilliant. So I think overall, um pretty incredible Brandon was able to share and I know we used to be keeping an allergy, but man, is it so relevant to start ups?

Just the whole concept of being able to nurture and learn and build data, build patterns and understand more of what the high was going through and what your startups are going through, and with Brandon, what they’re doing with the data side is incredible.

I think it makes a huge difference to being able to understand at any stage of your business, even if you don’t have it, start working on it earlier so that you can start pushing that forward um in your organization so that you can start building Cape the eyes and really learning from the data, but outside that fantastic, I’m gonna check out that movie, especially because it’s got um walk ins in it um either way, thank you and man, did this light too bright today, Have an awesome day guys.