Recruiting From Zero to One with Nakul Mandan, Co-founder of Audacious Ventures
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2024
⏱️ 106 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nakul Mandan is the founder of Audacious Ventures. Prior to Audacious, he was a partner at Lightspeed, joining from Battery, which he joined in ‘09 in the middle of the financial crisis while living in India.
This conversation explores his journey immigrating to Silicon Valley and building an early stage venture firm from the ground up.
We get into why most VCs aren’t helpful with recruiting at the zero to one stage, his thesis on starting an early stage venture firm to help founders hire A+ teams, a crash course on early stage recruiting and building a sales team, and how COVID hit right after he left Lightspeed to raise Audacious Fund 1.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(03:43) Evolution of VC platform teams
(09:53) How Audacious runs in-house recruiting processes
(15:16) The reason large firms can’t help with Seed stage recruiting
(17:06) Immigrating from India to the US mid-financial crisis
(21:59) Silicon Valley's secret weapon
(25:59) The opportunity to start a recruiting-focused Seed firm
(30:14) Raising Audacious $90m Fund 1 in April of 2020
(36:58) The new guard of Seed firms
(39:23) Why $50-75m is the minimum viable institutional fund size
(41:48) How to work with the best founders
(45:30) Navigating deal dynamics, term sheets, and valuations
(52:24) The two hardest parts about starting your own fund
(54:32) Lessons applied raising Audacious $125m Fund 2 in 2023
(58:46) Evolving from a PMF-first to Founder-first investor
(01:02:09) Five traits of force of nature founders
(01:07:05) How to build an A+ team
(01:11:46) The importance of backchanneling
(01:13:54) Why everyone thinks they’re a good people reader
(01:14:35) Two most common mistakes in recruiting
(01:20:59) Determining urgency of a customer’s problem
(01:22:55) Hiring and scaling your first sales team
(01:25:55) Why marketing is the hardest role to hire for
(01:31:59) What good sales people look like
(01:35:43) How to move up market + how to do pilots
(01:43:40) Why Nakul admires Rafael Nadal
Referenced:
Audacious: https://www.audacious.co/
Nakul’s immigration journey: https://www.nakulmandan.com/blog/2024/an-immigrant-living-the-american-dream
Force of nature founders: https://www.nakulmandan.com/blog/2024/traits-i-look-for-in-founders
Early GTM hiring: https://www.nakulmandan.com/blog/2023/initial-gtm-hiring-for-saas-startups
Follow Nakul:
Twitter: https://x.com/nakul
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nakulmandan
Follow Turner:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | We believe that this is the place where we can have the maximum impact and then we get out of the way. |
| 0:05.6 | We believe our advice is only useful if there's a force of nature found at the center of the company |
| 0:12.1 | and if they can recruit an amazing team. |
| 0:14.8 | Then if those two things are true, maybe our advice might be 5% useful in the day journey. |
| 0:19.6 | If these two things are not true, |
| 0:22.7 | God can give you advice. It's not meant to happen. Kindly, advice in today's world in |
| 0:28.6 | 2024 versus 2010 is available online. Yeah, I mean, you're giving all your best insights in this |
| 0:33.3 | podcast anyway. So people want your advice. Yeah. Just keep listening. The world needs more doers. |
| 0:38.4 | And that is probably that is the summary of why we see 1.0 of talent offering didn't work. |
| 0:43.1 | That was advice. At audacious, we are doers on the team building side. |
| 0:46.9 | Welcome to the P. Hill. I'm your host Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. Today's guest |
| 0:51.2 | is Knuckle Manden, founder of audacious ventures, partnering with the world's most ambitious founders, helping them achieve their audacious |
| 0:58.0 | goals. There are fewer amazing founders who can will a great company into existence |
| 1:02.4 | than amazing market opportunities. We talk about why most VCs don't add value in recruiting. |
| 1:07.3 | Those talent teams and accordingly inherited the DNA of giving advice. |
| 1:11.6 | So where we see recruiting does not work is... |
| 1:14.6 | And the opportunity he saw to start audacious. |
| 1:17.6 | They're really asset managers at this scale and those are actually partners that you would |
| 1:22.6 | want on your journey. |
| 1:23.6 | But their mandate no longer is to do the $5 million seed investment and actually spend time. |
| 1:29.0 | Naclo's story is a perfect encapsulation of the American dream. |
| 1:32.1 | We talked through his journey immigrating from India to the U.S. during 2009 financial crisis. |
... |
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