E22: Colin Greenspon on Private Boards, Business Model Innovation, Competent Founders and Narya

WTB Intro

Narya keeps a low profile so perhaps you might not see them pop up on your Twitter or Linkedin but they have quietly worked their way to having what is probably the best unicorn hit rate of any active fund that I know of since 2020. Now, I haven’t checked with the firm but from our last conversation I know they make 2-3 investments a year, if you go and check out their website and see the list of featured companies, a simple Google search on those companies and their publicly reported valuations reveals that at least 7 of them are likely unicorns, i.e have at least or close to a $1 billion valuation or have achieved a billion dollar market cap at least once if public. Some of this is based on public reporting and the rest is an estimate based on funding rounds.

Lets say they averaged 3 investments a year since founding in 2020 and maybe went over the average in a couple of years, assuming they have made around 18-20 investments, that is an insane ~35% unicorn hit rate. It is hard to know without knowing the total amount of investments made and private valuations are hardly reported on with the exception of any press releases from the company itself or a credible source like TechCrunch officially reporting on a round but based on publicly available information, it is safe to assume it is somewhere around that mark.

These companies include:

* Chapter

* Kriya Therapeutics

* True Anomaly

* Branch Insurance

* Hallow

* Strive Asset Management (public)

* Rumble (public)

For reference check out this graph below that Ilya Strebulaev posted 7 months ago on unicorn hit rates of venture firms since 2020, this is based on research from Stanford GSB (Link here). This graph only counts pre-unicorn investments in unicorns. Firebolt Ventures had the best hit rate at 10% (13 unicorns in 129 investments), Greenoaks is at number two with a hit rate of 9.4% (11 unicorns in 117 investments), IVP is number 3 with 9.2% (11 in 120 investments).

Narya is notably not in the list but it is perhaps because they lay low and quietly go about funding the next best companies. Perhaps why Colin had not done a long form podcast before I got him on the show last year but I am convinced other firms, LPs and founders can learn from their strategy and way of doing business.

This episode is a deep dive into topics I wanted to cover more from Episode 9 of We The Builders where he gave a masterclass on Thesis Driven Investing. Narya is unique in the sense that it is very concentrated for an early stage fund, their focus is Seed to Series A, they only do 2-3 high conviction investments in a year.

Colin brought up in our last conversation that the most interesting ideas die because of lack of business model innovation. In this episode we cover some examples of business model innovation and how the firm supports on that front, we cover framework for effective private company board meetings, what competent founders look like, Narya’s masterplan and more.

They are relatively new, with what is an elite team (easy to say in hindsight) but at the time it was a group of people making contrarian unpopular bets of their era. Whether that is investing outside Silicon Valley, betting on reindustrialization as a category in 2021, investing in religion as category when it was taboo, going against ESG before Blackrock followed or betting on a new free speech social platform before the Twitter acquisition by Elon. Narya has been what friend of the show Mike Maples would describe as contrarian and right.

In case you didn’t check out our last episode, I will do a reintroduction. Colin Greenspon cofounded Narya with JD Vance, now Vice President of the United States. The firm was founded with the thesis of addressing America’s most acute problems by investing in the frontiers of science & technology solving for the future. He now runs the firm with Falon Donohue (Cofounder of Reindustrialize) and Peter Thiel.

Watch On Youtube:

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction

02:58 - Mimeticism in venture

05:05 - Why Narya stays lean and nimble

08:26 - The apprenticeship model and changing team dynamics

13:32 - The best founders figure it out

16:35 - Diversity of thought on the cap table

24:19 - The true purpose of a board seat

27:18 - Conviction-based capital allocation

31:02 - Business model innovation

36:16 - Bespoke customer engagement

42:51 - How design partners prove product-market fit

47:42 - Discovering the exact problem

53:10 - Why showing up in person still matters

55:35 - Investing in need-to-solve problems

01:01:30 - The holding company structure

01:04:47 - Defining ambition

01:10:37 - Identifying competent founders

01:19:57 - True business leadership

01:29:11 - Building in public

01:35:20 - The right way to run a productive board meeting

01:52:49 - Network effects in enterprise

02:01:08 - The Narya Master Plan

02:08:17 - Closing thoughts