#Exceptions 8: How First Round Capital Bet on Brand to Change the VC Industry

Seeking Wisdom with David Cancel

Molly Sloan

Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2018

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

First Round Capital is one of the most widely loved venture capital firms in tech -- no small feat for a VC firm to claim. Through their platform (VC for brand marketing and value-add projects), they've built the Harvard Business Review-of-Startups, hold 80+ events per year for their portfolio companies, and even help founders pitch them through a program called Pitch Assist. Today, host Jay Acunzo talks to First Round partner Bill Trenchard and how and why FRC bets on brand (and how that changed the VC world for good). We also hear from the founder of a growth-stage startup, Lloyd Tabb of Looker, who describes his experience with Bill and the First Round brand. Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @davegerhardt, @dcancel and @seekingwisdomio. In This Episode: 1:00 - Overview of #Exceptions 2:02 - First Round Capital 4:40 - What do entrepreneurs think of First Round Capital? 7:30 - First Round’s alignment with entrepreneurs 9:00 - First Round’s programs & network of professionals 11:30 - Good behavior under stress: living out brand values 13:20 - Today’s big idea: Thinking long-term 15:11 - “What’s in it for the customer?” 19:20 - Shared experience & empathy 23:00 - Evaluating investment opportunities through empathy 24:33 - Companies with the best customer experience 27:28 - The ugly duckling vs. the swan 28:39 - Hacks vs. the long view 32:00 - Two tactics for handling the hard times in a VC 35:00 - Bill’s hard conversation with a founder 36:00 - Key learning points from this episode

Transcript

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0:00.0	The brand is really built over time. It's built as a series of interactions in my view over many, many years, where you're building trust with a customer and you're really building that trust based on what you offer to them and what you promise and what you deliver on.
0:18.6	Hey there and welcome to exceptions, the show about why brand matters more than ever in B2B.
0:24.5	I'm your host, Jay Akunzo, author of the book, Break the Wheel.
0:28.1	And I'm going inside some of the world's best B2B companies to understand both how and why
0:33.3	they're actually building better experiences than their competition.
0:39.1	See, in this world of infinite choice choice where the buyer has total control, our buyers expect and more importantly choose to spend
0:45.0	both time and money with good experiences. Brand makes or breaks how others feel about you. You're
0:51.3	either a forgettable commodity or an exception. To bring you this series,
0:56.6	I've partnered with Drift, which offers conversational marketing and sales software. Drift believes
1:01.6	that the way businesses buy from other businesses is broken, and they're trying to put the
1:05.9	human touch back into all this stuff. They too believe that brand is the differentiator today, the moat around your business.
1:15.0	Today, we're mixing things up again for this second straight episode after last time was so
1:20.2	well received.
1:21.2	So if you did listen to last one, thank you so much.
1:23.2	If you didn't go back and check out your podcast feed that you're listening in hopefully
1:27.1	right now. If not, head over to the Seeking out your podcast feed that you're listening in hopefully right now.
1:27.7	If not, head over to the Seeking Wisdom podcast feed from Drift and scroll to the exceptions episode about Grato Labs.
1:35.8	Because we went outside the B2B echo chamber to talk about a consumer business, an electronics company, and we went inside their recent rebrand.
1:46.2	Today, we're taking one step back into the B2B bubble, but we're still talking to an atypical type of B2B brand, a venture
1:52.4	capital firm. This firm funds many companies in the seed round, or the first round of fundraising.
1:58.7	Their name, appropriately, as many people know, is first round
2:02.3	capital. Not only does first round have one of the strongest and most modern brands in all of
	...

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