Missing Perspectives’ readers, when we talk about high agency women – Maxine Minter is a name that flashes to the minds of many in her orbit from Matilda co-founder Niamh Mooney to Build Club founder Annie Liao.
Maxine is the first solo female GP in Australia, with her fund Co Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on emerging tech and automation. And a fact that makes her fund taste even sweeter? She has over 50 per cent women founders in her portfolio.
But let’s back up. Before entering the wild world of venture investing, Maxine started her career as a lawyer, building companies on the side as a way to solve cash flow for Europe trips. She furthered her studies in law and business at Stanford University, where upon graduation she cut her teeth as an angel investor, writing small cheques (she started with $2500, which was a financial stretch for her at the time) to back founders to get those reps to help set herself up for her current career in full-time investing.
We caught up with Maxine at Chloe’s Bondi, and covered the field discursively from what makes Silicon Valley so special to the emerging need for a feminine capitalist archetype in the vein of famous investors like Benchmark partner Bill Gurley and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant.
Let’s dive in.
Natasha Gillezeau: So Maxine. You’ve had a few iterations and identities. Lawyer, company builder, now investor…
Maxine Minter: I’ve never been able to just do one thing. And I always found in doing one thing, I was worse at that thing because I would get bored. So I have a few things going on in a way that they are synergistic. In the same way that in a healthy ecosystem, different things end up supporting each other.
It’s sort of like this idea that no living entity can survive by itself in the world.
Exactly.
And when you start to see the interconnectedness of everything, it’s kind of mind-blowing. I did one of these interviews last year with Stripe’s head of information Emily Glassberg Sands. And you think, okay, it’s a simple interview right? And it’s like well, Missing Perspectives paid for my flight from Byron to Sydney, Stripe had booked the ICC, Phoebe helped me prepare for the interview and Alex Little our podcast editor refined it. A younger version of myself might have thought “I did that interview”, but with greater maturity I truly see the level of interconnectedness to make it all happen.
Just think for a moment about the series of material sciences’ innovation required for this table [gestures to our table at Chloe’s Bondi]. Like the metal, the refinement of the metal, working out how they got that out of the ground. Let’s not even talk about your laptop. But this glass, if you’d gone to an old house and seen how glass was even in the 1950s, it wasn’t this. You couldn’t glaze like this.
The innovation in relation to ceramics and glaze and the compounded lifetimes of research for any one item on this table boggles the mind.
It’s like trying to comprehend space – it’s like nope.
She large.
She large. I’m going to end space with the categorisation of “large”.
And so, for me when I think about healthy, thriving systems when it comes to work. And obviously ecosystems and startups, it’s not any one company, or any one VC, or any one fund, or any one product… no one of those can create a healthy ecosystem. It’s why you need systems, and it’s why Silicon Valley is so un-competable.
Hot take, but no one place can become the Silicon Valley of X. Because they just can’t replicate it because they’re so different. And they shouldn’t. I think Australia has its own magic, and it should compound on its own magic, and there are lots of things to learn from that ecosystem. But it will never be that ecosystem.
I remember attending a conference and Nick Molnar from Afterpay [now owned by Block] was speaking on a panel, and he getting visibly frustrated at the idea that you have to go to Silicon Valley, and he was pushing back on that idea. He suggested that Silicon Valley is a “state of mind.” What do you think of that idea? How much is place-based, and how much is an attitude?
I think there is loads of amazing attitude that you can learn in the Valley, and take anywhere, and it will fundamentally change your life. I do think there is such a thing as a Silicon Valley “state of mind”. But do I think that that’s the only factor needed for company success? No.
For example, the principle of “knowledge spillover”. In economics there is this idea that within a particular geographic environment, say Wall Street, you have a set of knowledge that is being developed inside firms that spills out of those firms and grows the ecosystem around the firm, which then lifts the entire market. Wall Street isn’t special because there is something special about that wall, it’s special because there is a proximity of all those people doing trade, talking about the things that they’re learning with one another, talking about things they are experimenting with, and the time to implement those innovations is much shorter than waiting for a book to come out.
Knowledge spillover with AI – it’s a material advantage to know that OpenAI is planning on shipping a certain set of features four or five months before it’s publicly known, and that’s if you’re in Australia actively watching.
Really watching the market, what’s happening with generative AI.
Yep, even then you’re still 4-5 months behind what’s being talked about in the corridors in the Valley. One thing I observe there day in and day out is that it’s really an industry town. Almost everyone there is somehow related to tech.
My mind is already blown, and we’ve been at dinner for ten minutes. One of our contributors Cara Davies wrote an article a while back about how she started and sold a Gen Z fitness app. She recommended a book to our team called The Unfair Advantage – in it the authors contend that all entrepreneurs will have a unique set of unfair advantages. It could be connections, a particular ability, a gritty way of being in the world. So Maxine… what would you say is your unfair advantage?
I think one thing I’ve had an unfair advantage on is my Mum was a single Mum, and she spent a lot of time thinking about self development and how to be excellent in the world. And I was a lucky child and recipient of those insights. Probably three parts to this particular insight that she handed down that I wouldn’t have been able to name for you until very recently.
The first part was that she’s a deep believer in growth through tension. One grows by doing hard things, you build resilience by trying hard things struggling through it, and seeking to get to the end. In our family, we have this term called “adventures”, which is essentially you could not go on holiday with Mum without her forcing some kind of adventure. So for example, we went to Bali as a family and she insisted on all of us getting motorbikes and exploring the coast, there was a monsoon, our bike got bogged, we got stuck in a river. But she was a big believer in that this is what grows you as a person. I grew a good story.
You want that right amount of character building and resilience.
Yeah, I don’t want to die.
Let’s walk it back from that.
Totally.
Good example. A fragile parenting style would be like…
… Stay in the resort.
If she were here today, she would say that a life of those kinds of experiences means you can always figure things out. Nowadays, I’m inclined to agree, but at the time I’d be like, “I want to stay in the resort.” Also, being a single Mum raising two kids is so hard. She’s a high-functioning person.
The third part of that combination is that she was an entrepreneur. I watched her build companies my whole life. But she consciously taught me that grit was really valuable before we had the phrase of grit, she showed me that grit was really valuable in a bunch of situations and me learning that I was fine. My takeaway is I’m unflappable. If a monsoon in Bali didn’t kill me, this scary public speaking moment won’t.
And then lastly, she taught me that if I wanted to do things in the world, it’s better to build them for yourself, because you have creative direction of them, you have the ability to make an impact in who you hire, and it’s more fun and lucrative. If I look at my career, way before people were thinking about building businesses, I was building them as a cash-flow solve to go to Europe in the holidays, and Mum definitely wasn’t going to pay for that for me.
The combination of those things means that my unfair advantage was being early to grit, and early to entrepreneurship in the Australian context, purely because it was introduced to me by my very gritty, very entrepreneurial, slightly wild Mum.
Sounds like she had a good, wild soul. And that’s such nice thing to have proximity too, and if she’s your Mum, that’s in the DNA.
Talking about the Northern Rivers, my Mum made my grandparents buy a house up in Mullimbimby back when it was a bunch of dairy farmers and older hippies. Gorgeous part of the world. There used to be this constant fight between the old dairy farmers and the old hippies that the old hippies were the ones taking over. I went to Byron maybe four years ago and now it’s a fight between the new rich and the old hippies. And the old hippies are like: don’t take our land.
It’s a perennial Byron Bay/Northern Rivers stoush. It’s like guys, no one can really ‘own’ this place… it’s more of a fluid handover. I heard you say on a podcast that the business aspect for you was initially around generating cash flow. What did money mean to you growing up? And what does it mean to you now?
Money growing up for me was always about freedom. Money correlated to the ability to do the things that you wanted to do. I grew up in a part of Sydney where there was a lot of Old Money around. We lived in one of our grandparents houses around the corner from them, which was lovely. They were essentially as a pair, my other parenting unit. So it was this interesting mix of quite culturally conservative, very old worldly, not old school, and then my wild mother who was just on the cutting edge of everything.
She was like “Max: you’ve got to start meditating”. And I was like “… I’m six?”. And she’s like “you gotta get into it”. And I did, and it’s been really useful. She was also staunchly proud, and wanted to make her own way.
It was a situation where she was surrounded by wealth, but we were not wealthy at all. There were periods of time where we would have to get extremely creative with the kinds of meals that we would make with like, leftover old stuff out of the cupboard, because it was tight. I saw other people with that freedom – or what looked to me like freedom – and I had always been like great, I want that in my life. But I think what was really valuable is I also saw the version of money that is a cage.
What industry was the money associated with?
A lot of it was family money. Like old family money. So if you come from our family, you can only act in this way, you can only wear these things, and then you can only do these things at university. And that was the opposite of what I wanted. I could see if it was your money and you built it, you could have incredible impact. You could have independence, choices, whereas if it’s given money, then it’s a different set of rules. I still think that’s in my ethos. Also, because of that circumstance, I do think that constraints breed innovation.
A lot of my friends growing up would go shopping with their parents and spend a lot of money on clothes, and it was that kind of people cared about what you wore, what you looked like. There was no world where my family was going to pay for what I wear, so I would go to Kirribilli markets, which is a secondhand markets and go nuts, I loved op-shopping and finding the thing that was the scrappy way of achieving the same outcome. All of my friends are buying One Teaspoon. Is that still going?
It’s still kicking.
So instead, I would go to Kirribilii markets and buy clothes for a fraction of the price. And I got to the point where I started to feel really proud of my ability to go I’m going to do the exact same thing that you’re going to do, but I’m going to do it at a fraction of the price. Or, even better, I’m going to find interesting ways of…
You have to think about it a bit more right?
Yeah, absolutely. In my most generative moments, right. I definitely have moments of scarcity mindset that you’d see across the population. But there are still principles that guide how I think about money. I have no interest in having loads of money for money’s sake, none. I’m part of a goal accountability group, similar to Nick Crocker’s Elephants, and we were doing our yearly review last weekend, and my goals in relation to wealth are simply relative to the population. I want to sit in a certain band relative to the population because I think that is the band that gives you options to be able to create an impact. The thing for me at the end of the day is I want to feel like I made it possible for other people. And so the incremental level of wealth above that is completely useless to me. I have no interest in saving that for me, I’d rather pass that through to the next project.
That dovetails nicely with your role as an investor. The whole seeing 1000 to 2000 companies a year – do you have any investments that you’ve made where you feel “in my role here I’ve enabled this to happen?”
Yeah, I think it’s a big part of investing. It’s definitely a big part of angel investing. There is a degree to which you catalyse deals into existence, that happens a lot for us. Founders are struggling to raise, we meet them, build conviction, and we tell the world we’re investing. And that helps other angels to feel brave enough to follow. Last year, we met a founder who was struggling to raise capital, they were excellent, the company that they were building was truly incredible, they had struggled to get other investors to see the vision. We came onboard, we helped bring another major investor from the US, and a third one came in from South Korea. And then she significantly oversubscribed her round. It feels like a bit of an intellectual stretch to say “I brought that into being”. But contributed.
Kind of like catalysing?
Adding your yoke to the pile, ideally tipping the scales in their favour. And I think that is one of the great things about investing at pre-seed, right the difference between an idea and early development. Sometimes it’s part of the conviction a founder needs to quit their job and go all in because they have the financial coverage to go and chase it.
As an investor, my assumption would be that you’d need to have a positive outlook a lot of the time, but you’d also need to have a really clear “this is in, this is out”. Over time, have you gotten a sense of what is out for you? This person doesn’t have it, it’s not right?
Yeah, absolutely. The obvious thing to say is that there are a whole lot of things we can’t invest in because they’re not a thesis fit or structure fit. Venture is only appropriate for a tiny percentage of companies. So there is a lot that’s excluded by that. But then there are lots that would fit within that group that are still not a good fit for us. Everything you’re investing in at this very early stage is the founding team. And so, it takes a particular kind of person to want to build a company that big that quickly. And to have the ability to run through walls, and the tenacity to do it. On the other side of this though, I will say that I think as an industry we over index on like types of people.
My view is that a lot of success in founders is emergent.
What I mean by that is you can’t know it’s there until they are given an opportunity to show you. So, you’re looking for the inputs that increase the probability that they will show you that they’re that kind of person. It’s more like the grittiness and the degree to which they’re going to chase this goal to an unholy degree. Or the degree to which they are growth-minded. It hurts to grow that fast. You have to get so many things wrong publicly to grow that fast. The personal journey to grow that fast means you have to love learning. You see this all the time, people are at a high velocity company and they’re just not able to get there because they can’t move at the pace they need to.
And how can one move from a fixed mindset to that more growth mindset orientation?
One simple way you can tell if you’re in a fixed mindset is the degree to which you say things like: I’m the kind of person that does X, it’s the kind of person that is Y. A belief that someone is or isn’t the kind of person. We’re all capable of learning, it’s simply a question of effort against goal.
On the other hand, the mental model for a growth mindset is: “I don’t know how to do that yet, I’m not good at that yet, I haven’t learned how to do that yet.” I might not want to learn how to do that. But thinking of it as almost a continuum mindset.
Another indication is that you’re not hungrily seeking out feedback and seeking every single opportunity to grow. So you miss a target, or you set a goal and you don’t meet it. And you go to… I can’t do it. Instead of great, what did I learn. What did I learn, what did I learn, as much as it hurts. The skill of bravery is the single most important skill as you’re building a fast growth company. Because you constantly have to put yourself out there, you constantly have to stretch yourself to the next level. You have to ask people for feedback for stuff. That’s a sign of a more growth-oriented mindset.
As an investor, it’s pretty clear if someone is growth-oriented once you’ve known them for long enough. They will have sought opportunities to stretch and grow themselves, rather than sought opportunities for safety. It’s not a single diagnosis, there are a lot of reasons that people will choose a safer environment.
Just reflecting.
What does it bring up for you?
I think what it brings up for me is that your ceiling becomes the ceiling of the company. Or whatever enterprise you’re doing. It could be a marriage, right. A relationship. But let’s keep it on topic and related to early stage companies or fast growth companies for now.
I think what it brings up for me is honestly, I can feel this tension on a day-to-day basis of how much we have to push and grow at Missing Perspectives, and how real it is that you’re actually you’re building something in real time. And it’s so exciting, but it’s so scary… not like “oh I’m so scared”. It’s not something I’ve experienced before, this hyper attuned awareness that our team’s ceiling is the company’s ceiling. So we all need to be constantly moving that for the company’s sake. And for each other. And for our stakeholders. And customers. And readers. It’s just like this heightened awareness of that.
I would say every founder I’ve ever met comes to this awareness somewhere along the journey that their capacity for growth is the throttle on the company. Or once they get the company to a certain level of maturity, you start swapping other people in as the accelerant.
But I honestly think that building companies is some of the best professional and personal development you can ask for. I think it’s nearly impossible to do unless you go through a very intense process of professional and personal growth.
I’m yet to meet a founder who somewhere in building their first, second or third company hasn’t fundamentally changed.
You’ve coached Annie Liao?
I invested in Build Club.
Can you tell me about Annie Liao from your perspective?
Annie is grit personified, and throughput personified. She is such high velocity, it’s outrageous. Build Club I think is in a really interesting position. The reason that we got to a “hell yes” for that was Annie and her team are doing such an incredible job of bringing together the best engineers and helping them to build a really scarce resource, which is a deep understanding of how to build AI products, businesses etc, and then there is a whole lot of compounding value around their engaged community that is growing, that you then use to build enterprise value. She has some interesting theories around that, some of them are really playing out and some of them aren’t.
But I think at its fundamental for us, there is an interest in the most excellent engineers building great products, and either hiring those engineers or working with them on a contract basis, learning those skills, there’s a really interesting symbiosis across the ecosystem. Very few people could pull that off with the amount she has to do so early to build an excellent company.
But if anyone could do it, Annie can do it.
Do you feel an excitement when you meet people like Annie?
Yeah, she has a degree of energy and pace to her that is unavoidable. I actually tried to invest in her company early, and she very wisely didn’t let me. Meeting someone like Annie, it’s very clear she’s going to do amazing things, it’s just a question of what. And that’s the exciting thing about investing at pre-seed, the moment that the ‘what’ started to come into view, we were keen to go. We didn’t need to see traction, we didn’t need to see product in market, although I would argue she had a big part of the product already built i.e. community. It’s so exciting to get to work for those people.
I’m curious about your interest in Benchmark partner Bill Gurley and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant. Can you please tell me a little about who these guys are, and why they inspire you?
I think that they’re both deeply thoughtful. They spend an enormous amount of time sharing their thoughts back into the ecosystem. They’re generous about their time and thinking. And a topic you and I have talked about before is it makes me really sad that I struggle to think of two or three women that I’d put in that same group. Not because I don’t think there are really interesting women sharing interesting thoughts out into the ecosystem. But from that era, first of all, there weren’t that many women, and there was an interesting thing about the demographics of the ecosystem.
I would love if some female version of Naval would emerge and we could follow the way they thought about markets, the way they thought about teams, how markets are playing out. Bill is clearly an investor, Naval is more of a theorist trending to guru for the startup ecosystem. Most of the way he communicates with the ecosystem are small posts on X where he says something short and philosophical. Whereas Bill Gurley in his heyday was much more analytical thinking, academic approach to the market, incredibly well-informed, cross-industry informed in the way he thinks about venture.
And we’re still looking for the feminine form of that. Why do you think we need that kind of woman archetype for that kind of capitalist?
First of all, I think that we feel much more aligned to people we identify with. We’re more likely to listen to people we identity with, and see that it’s possible. Specifically in venture. You have to be optimistic to be in this business. You can’t be pessimistic. The thing I get really sad about is a lot of the voices that are female are either asked questions about the challenges of being a woman in this industry, or the challenges of holding family and work commitments. They don’t get to have public conversations about how fun it is to be an investor, especially when it goes well. Or even like how intellectually challenging it is to be good at it, the love of the craft, for a lot of the investors that I invest alongside that are women, we nerd out about this stuff.
There are friends of mine who will hang out on the weekend, and all we talk about is venture and company building. We’ve been working at this shit for an 80 hour week, and between hours and 85 and 90, we’re still like what about this, what about this. It seems to be missing in the public discourse. It’s rare that I listen to a panel and see two women getting elbows deep nerding out on venture or company building and visibility expressing their excitement. The best version of this is an academic debate about this topic, and I’d love to see more women getting visibly excited in public about a thing that I know they love.
I have a bit of a theory about this from the media side …
Oh yeah, hit me.
If you consider the history of women’s magazines, and women-coded topics, there’s been certain spaces whether it’s beauty, fashion, style, dating, relationships, in media discourse, they have been so femininely encoded that there’s this lacuna then it comes to company building, investing and venture. There’s like “women in business”, but that’s essentially a bromide, there’s nothing that deep there. As a result there’s this gap in the media space, academia is another thing, private spaces is another thing, but I still think that there is the baggage of the Cleo, Cosmo era. Things have moved, but it’s still felt.
I think that’s probably right. I’m really excited that the new version is coming into formation. It would be great to see more of those media brands that have a clearly feminine element to them but are very much high capability, markets, analysts, investment brand. Like All In, but for women.
Can you think of one that exists?
Ellevest. That’s a very social media-focused brand. Sky News are much better at getting coverage now.
I have friends who appear on Sky News all the time, and talk about markets. I think that the US is doing a much better job of this by bringing female voices into those spaces that are already trusted. I think the process of building standalone media particularly for this niche, you run the risk of it being an echo chamber.
I think you’re better off bringing female voices into trusted channels on this particular topic. But there are other spaces, like panels or small dinners, where this information is being shared.
Can you expand on that?
The dynamic you get from a female leader who is building her own company, who is an investor, that you get over say a dinner, even if it’s a big dinner is very different from the dynamic you’d get on stage.
It’s actually why Cheryl and I started our podcast First Cheque, because we were having so many interesting conversations over dinner with people and that’s not being open sourced in a format we’re happy with – that’s like fun, interesting, not having to have the perfect answer every single time. Being able to laugh about it. I actually don’t know if this episode is out yet, but unearthing after two years of ChatGPT being in market, Cheryl has been calling it ChatGTP the whole time. Like, on panels.
Oh my gosh. Hahaha.
And I was like time out. What did you just say? Apparently Claude now is the more beloved model, so at this stage she’s like, “I’m just throwing shade on ChatGPT. Like, I can’t even remember your name.”
Claude does go off.
It cranks.
On company building, to go into some depth on that, if you were to start a company today, what are the first few things that come to mind in terms of how you’d go about that?
Step one is test the idea actually works. I have a particular take on a recruitment firm that I think would be really fun. My fundamental thesis would be that certain kinds of people want to find certain kinds of jobs and they can’t find each other. And it’s like okay, find a bunch of people who fit the demographic who fit the people looking for jobs, then find a bunch of people that want to hire that kind of person, then test, is that really a need by talking to them. How are you solving it today. What feels like a hair on fire problem that you’ve been trying to solve in the last six months. How many ways have you tried to solve this problem, what ways, how much has it cost you, and how much would you pay me to solve this problem. On both sides.
Once I have a sense that okay, the person who I think is trying to hire this person would be really excited to meet them, and the person who wants to be hired by that company really wants to work for that company, then and only then be like great, I’m gonna test, will you actually pay me to make those introductions? Will you actually pay me to do the first round interview assessment of those people? And then once I’ve done the messy version of it, then you start to feel the market pull, right, once I build this group of companies, or this group of people that I want to place at these companies, then I would start thinking about how am I going to charge them, I’d start with an ABN, and build an actual company around it. But I’d only start building that infrastructure after I’ve done some early testings as to whether there is pull there from the market.
So, Step 1 is test your core hypothesis. You’d be amazed how cheap it is to test your core hypothesis sufficient to give you signal that there’s enough pull there that there’s something to be built. There are a lot of great ideas where you put them into market, and the market just doesn’t care.
The idea of the ‘rational market’ is absolute bunk, I don’t care what Chicago says, there are lots of things that people do in the market that are highly irrational. Talk to any founder who has put an insurance product into market, insurance should be a thing that you want to buy, but people don’t buy insurance. It’s really hard to convince people to buy insurance even though in most circumstances it’s the right economic, rational decisions.
Same thing with legal products. Buying risk protection is a really hard psychological thing to do, because by buying risk protection, if your risk never materialises, you never feel the risk. And so you never really get the benefit of the product.
It’s kind of like that Nassim Taleb thing of it being hard to prove that you’ve avoided a problem for someone.
Exactly.
With media right now, we have a lot of risks. Especially with our younger contributors… let me think carefully about what I’m going to say. It takes time to build critical awareness and discernment, and that’s a skill you need to continually develop. But one of the risks in the way that media is potentially being created now, is its more derivative, rather than going to sources. So at Missing Perspectives, how do you build a layer that is avoiding anything going public or live that’s like, false, or not fact-checked. This is pretty basic stuff, but in the media world today there is this pull to produce very quickly.
It’s a really tough economic thing when you’re building a business, where the value proposition is “risk”. Like here’s all my money to avoid these risks. Like, are we sure there are risks? It was very interesting, actually, when cybersecurity first started kicking off. A lot of them built cyber protection products first so they could visualise the risks before they could then sell insurance. Because their customers didn’t understand cyber risk, so they didn’t fully understand what you were protecting them against. So you’d hit them with a policy, and they’d be like, that is outrageously expensive for doing nothing. And it’s like, well okay, it’s not nothing. So there are lots of products that sound like a good idea, they go to market, and consumers don’t buy them.
So with the insurance example, is there anything if we were to invert that, there have been products that have done surprisingly well?
I mean, yeah. Like the first mass app on the iPhone was that app where you move your phone back and forward and it spills beers. Who thought people would pay that? People were like “oh my God, it spills, tectronics.” There’s a lot of consumer that fits that end, that’s not obvious from the outside. Lots of fashion pieces, it’s entirely unpredictable what pieces are going to go viral.
So you just hit them with a whole bunch, and then someone will pick one item, and that taste creation process will happen. And you’ll sell out of one dress and not everything else. There’s a degree to which you can’t predict what’s going to hit. You need a certain number of people to get excited about something and it becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Like jeggings for example – how did we end up with jeggings? I’m so glad the Overton window has moved beyond jeggings.
The Birkenstocks revival has also been interesting. There was a moment in time where there would be no way that Birkenstocks would be the staple shoe. That revival from a taste POV is fascinating.
I had a conversation with someone over the weekend about the fact she is buying a pair of black Birkenstocks, because those are her “professional” Birkenstocks. And I was like ummm… I’m not sure that professional and Birkenstocks are in the same sentence? That sounds like a bit of an oxymoron to me. And I was like girlfriend you do you, but I’m not sure.
I love this Instagram account @californiaistoocasual. She’s worked 40-50 years in fashion, she’s a beautiful woman. And that’s her whole thing – she’s like, we need to prevent the drift to casualness, which I absolutely love. Where do you see yourself in ten years? Something that strikes me is whether it’s the time working at a corporate law firm with side hustles, to company building, to investing, you’re moving, right. But we also started this conversation by saying that to be successful, you need to be focused as well. What direction are you headed in?
I will still probably be doing this – venture capital funds. VC funds are interesting because it’s the first time in my career where you lock in. So I’ve made a number of commitments that I’ll be doing this in 10-12 years time.
How many years are you into it?
We’re at the beginning of year 3. But I’m just about to raise my next one, which is another 10-12 years, and then you progressively do this, so you’re committing quite extended periods into the future. In venture, you get to intimately know, or to a certain degree know, 500 companies a year. We look at 1000-2000, we detail review 500ish, and actually doing like proper diligence on maybe 200 of those, may less, 100 of those over the course of a year. It’s so fun. My brain is just on fire with exciting things as people are building these companies. And so, it’s hard to get bored in this industry, I think, provided that you cross-train. But ultimately the craft is building value through building businesses, and helping other people realise their potential. That is the thing that I’m really interested in. And I think that that can be infinitely interesting if you approach it in the right way.
Why do you think that as you get older you become a better investor?
Just information saturation. You’ve seen more reps, you’ve seen more examples, you have better somatic memory of certain cycles. I’ll give you a wild stat.
Hit me.
So Warren Buffett. Widely touted as one of the most successful investors. He has been running Berkshire Hathaway for 56 years. And in his last Omaha Convention in 2023, so every year he does a convention, he brings a whole bunch of investors to Omaha to talk about investing, trends etc. In his last Omaha Convention, he estimated that his success could be boiled down to five decisions. That’s one every twelve years. But over the course of his life, operating that business, he has compounded a thousand per cent a year. That is outrageous.
And in the Warren Buffett example, are we offering that up and playing with the idea that he has seen cycles so he knows when to act in a way? We’re talking about acting and making an investment decision and deploying capital context. How are old are you?
34.
What is something at 34 that you can now identify that you wouldn’t have thought at say, 28?
Impatience. I wanted output, like, that year. I didn’t see the value in patience. Warren Buffett I think he stepped in or started Berkshire Hathaway at roughly my age. He was just starting.
And was Charlie Munger his business partner?
He was. He joined him maybe two years in. But similar age. Lots of older people had given me the sage words, like good things take time. You need to compound your way into success. Spend the time thinking about putting the right pieces in place so that you are ahead of the game, as opposed to trying to meet the game where it is.
Could you clarify that for me?
Sure. Good strategy is knowing – or making an accurate prediction on where the game is going. And putting positions in place so that when the game comes to you, you’re well set up. What would be an example in the market?
Okay, you’re not allowed to do this anymore, but you see this in grain buying all the time. If you have a lot of money in a moment where all the other farmers have nothing, you can buy up all the grain and put it in storehouses, knowing that the market will become contracted. There’ll be less and less, and you can sell your grain at a much higher price. At its most traditional.
In a more nuanced strategy perspective, it might be something like, if you had accurately predicted that the gentrification trend would continue, so as a population we are moving further and further up the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you might have predicted, well, as more people care more about leisure, they’re going to want to do things other than just work. So in the 1945 to 1960, you might have bought a whole bunch of coastal property, back when coastal property was considered the arsehole of anywhere because it was so far away from anywhere else, and people were spend more time on surviving.
So you’re seeing that trajectory from that vital, survival energy to this thriving way of being… that’s so interesting.
Yep, but you are wrong for the first ten years that you are doing that. For every single one of those property transactions, folks are like, why are you doing this, so if you short term invest in those feedback loops, you have to be comfortable being wrong back yourself for the long term to build that strategic position.
This is really challenging. It’s challenging because firstly it makes me regret past decisions – maybe not regret because you always learn things – but I do think there’s an element that you can’t have the mindset that comes with age and time on the board. You can’t get that early. The idea of setting those foundations is really challenging. It comes with an understanding that the decisions you’re making today are setting a direction or course in a way. Challenging good challenging. But challenging.
Totally. I mean, you’re talking to someone who did her law degree in four and a half years, because she was so desperate to get to the next stage, right, instead of spending say, half a year and becoming fluent in two languages. Imagine what that would have set me up for if I had chosen to do the slightly longer, deeper short term investment. Instead, I did it while I was doing other stuff, and spoke a little bit of Japanese, a bit of Danish, a bit of French, but now I’m not fluent in any of them. I know enough to be dangerous, and offend someone in a cab, but I was in such a hurry to get to certain milestones. And interestingly, in such a hurry to get to certain milestones that I took on a lot of short term risk to get a short term benefit.
For example, it was clearly economically inadvisable for me to write my first angel cheque just out of Stanford. I’d spent all of my money going to Stanford, I didn’t get a scholarship or anything, just one very valuable life-changing gift, actually two generous gifts, that’s how I got there.
I was working at a startup, I wasn’t making much money, it was economically inadvisable. But because I wanted to start getting reps, it served me in the long term. Could I just have focused on the task at hand? And operated a company? Maybe.
I think this is the tradeoff with the advice that you get given, the thing that I find challenging and the thing that I believe more and more as I get older, is the value of long-term compounding, the value of taking decisions with long-term time horizons. So that you’re right in the long-term without needing to be right in the short term.
I just realised, I have to run – I’m already very late for dinner. I’ll get this.
Of course. Thank you so much for your time Maxine.
