Jonathan Ehrlich on how to identify great founders

Transcript

Hey, I'm Jonathan Ehrlich. I'm the founder of Roar Ventures. Roar is a $25 million seed-focused fund based in Palo Alto, California. I spent 20 years as an operator building a few companies. I was Facebook's first marketing leader and spent the last ten years at Foundation Capital, which is a 26-year-old venture firm. And I just left in January to start Roar. It's my first fund; the focus for me is looking for outlier founders who focus on e-commerce infrastructure, supply chain logistics, marketplaces, and future of work. 

So let me tell you why venture. In 2007, I was living in Toronto, and I was re-bitten by the startup bug, so I moved my family from Toronto to Vancouver to restart this company, and I was wandering around looking for a product and engineering lead, and I found this young kid named Patrick, 19-year-old guy. I knew he was brilliant. Spent six months building a relationship with him. I eventually bought his company and moved him and his brother, and co-founders to work with me in Vancouver. And then, some personal stuff had me leave the company in early 2009, and Patrick soon followed and said, Jonathan, I'm going to go start a bank. And I said good luck. 

So I went to work for Mark, where I led marketing at Facebook and hosted Patrick for walks and talks, and strategy sessions over about a year and a half. And by the time I realized Patrick's Bank was Stripe, it was too late for me to get involved. And here I was. I really wasn't an investor. I didn't have any capital to deploy, but I had found myself surrounded by this brilliant young person and an ecosystem of equally talented folks. And I just became obsessed with what it means to be a great founder and to build the muscle as an investor, to be able to identify and work with them to build iconic and enduring companies. 

And so if you look at what I've done at Foundation, really the focus of my work has been to build that muscle and to figure out a way to build a strategic framework to help me identify and work with them. And there's been a lot of work in this area about how to identify special or outlier founders, as we call them here. What I'm really looking for is what I call a super learner, and that's somebody who has the capacity to learn really, really quickly and apply that learning to architecting their company at a very fast pace. When I think about the things that I've missed, it's really underestimating the founder's ability to learn quickly. And so while I, unfortunately, didn't invest in Stripe, sadly, I'm very pleased to say that over the last decade, I found, in particular, eight amazing founders who have built companies that have raised money north of $1,000,000,000. 

So there are a handful of things that I look for in a founder, for example, tenacity. This is an incredibly hard journey, and they need to not only get over whatever barrier is put in front of them but get energy from that to get them to the next barrier and through the next barrier. Raw intelligence, obviously, to be in Silicon Valley and to build a company, you need to be really bright. The ability to tell a story. Storytelling is super critical because you're trying to convince people of a vision for a future that pretty much only you hold, and your ability to articulate that and inspire not only investors but team members and the press is super critical, particularly early, because at the end of the day, you're selling a dream and for people to back you, they have to believe in the dream. They need to be data-driven. And for me, that means helping evaluate the decisions they're making by instinct. They also need to want to win really, really badly, and most of them have a competitive fire in them that defines who they are. And they just have a huge desire to want to win. And it drives them crazy when they don't. They need to have the ability to learn super, super fast because speed is a massive competitive advantage when you're trying to build a company.