Paige Finn Doherty is the Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures, a fund investing in early-stage product-led growth companies in the future of work & the future of play. Paige is also the author of Seed to Harvest, a book demystifying VC for children and adults. Until recently she was also a Developer Success Engineer at WorkOS.
We talk about her interest in VC, Seed to Harvest, founding a venture fund, Pallet and more!
NA: Thanks for joining me. I know we've been trying to schedule this for a bit. So, I'm excited to have you.
PFD: Of course. Yeah. It's an honour.
NA: I thought, you know, I'd love to start with essentially what sparked your interest in getting into venture capital?
PFD: Sure. I kind of fell into venture is the honest truth. I like to joke that I got into venture because managing rappers didn't work out. I spent a lot of time at school with artists and creators, and I really just enjoy being around people that had this spark and curiosity and creativity about how they viewed the world and what they wanted to create in it and that vision.
And I saw that shared by a lot of early-stage founders. And so junior year in school, I competed at a venture capital competition. I was just really interested in spending time with people that wanted to build stuff. It was really interesting to me and I never knew exactly what I wanted to build, but I felt an entrepreneurial spark myself.
And I think I found the answer to that when I talked to more and more emerging fund managers who are running their own funds. And you know, as much as investing is a very large part of what you do as an emerging fund manager, it's also about building the business and thinking long-term about building a firm.
And so that has kind of satiated my entrepreneurial longing, and I feel really lucky to be able to support early-stage entrepreneurs at kind of the intersection of the future of work and the future of play. I just love hanging out with really, really talented people, asking them questions and helping them grow businesses that I think will make the world a little bit better.
NA: For sure. Is that the reason you decided to start your own fund rather than joining a fund and working for a fund?
PFD: It was actually something that I really heavily considered. I applied for a bunch of funds, I got rejected from a bunch of funds, honestly as a state school kid with like, no, you know, it wasn't like, if you saw me on paper, it might not have been that I would have automatically stood out in like a resume reader.
But I was really passionate about it and I knew that that passion would shine through. And I got the opportunity to actually a partner track role at a firm in Boston, and obviously love the team. I did an on-site there but ultimately ended up deciding to stay in San Diego, to be with my family.
That's really important to me. I think through that decision, I realized that I would have to make venture work for me because of my passion for venture, but my value framework of staying close to my family, but I thought that they were conflicting, but they actually work very well together and harmony. I just had to listen a bit deeper to you know, what my intuition was telling me to do.
NA: For sure. You’ve launched Seed to Harvest which is a really cool book. I'd love for you to talk about, you know, why you decided to pursue that and thought you needed to write a book like that?
PFD: Yeah. So, Seed to Harvest is an illustrated guide to venture capital. Although it looks like a kid's book, it's definitely for adults as well. My main goal with Seed to Harvest started out as a way to explain to my parents across the dinner table, what I was like nerding out about, cause I would spend all this time on Twitter when I was in my senior year during COVID learning about all this interesting venture stuff and telling my parents.
My mom's an artist, my dad's an engineer. We didn't really come from a big tech family. I'd have to explain all of these interesting, overarching concepts. And I realized that there wasn't a great way to do that already. I started writing Seed to Harvest just as a guide with really terrible stick drawings and I spent about three months writing it and then with the encouragement of a few well-placed and loving comments about my drawing ability ended up hiring my younger brother, Owen to illustrate the book and his drawings just took it to, like, I would say the highest level of the vision that I had for the project.
It kind of catapulted my start into venture as well. It's how I met my business partner, Josh for Behind Genius Ventures. That’s how I met the founder that I made, my first syndicate investment in. I met a bunch of syndicate LPs from it. So, it was really an incredible experience that I grew a lot over that book, but it started as a way to explain things. And I think the final goal started to become more, a goal of representing diversity in an industry that traditionally hasn't had a lot of diversity.
So, for some context, 11% of venture capitalist with check writing power are women. Less than 5% are people of colour. I think that this has also reflected in the disparity of companies, getting funded. I didn't like write publicly about this, but I just made all of the drawings in the book really diverse.
And so it didn't matter who was going to get the book, they would see themselves represented in this industry and see that as a future for them. And that was really important to me. So, it's been inspiring to hear about venture capitalists that have reached out to me and said, you know, Hey, I never had a way to explain to my daughter what I did before.
And I'm really excited that you provided me with that avenue to speak with her. So yeah, it's, it's been cool to see that grow as well.
NA: For sure. And so yeah, you mentioned Behind Genius Ventures. I'd love to hear the story on how that formed, how you decided to pursue you know, raising that fund alongside Josh and coming up with this interesting thesis.
PFD: Absolutely. So, Josh and I met through Seed to Harvest. We were introduced by a fellow Twitter mutual of both of ours, who's now an LP in our fund and he just said one day like, Hey, you should really meet this guy, he's working on syndicates. He's interested in same types of companies. So, we set up a weekly deal flow call and that turned into like daily text messages.
We've bounced different ideas off each other. At the time, he was recruiting for startups, and so he's seeing like a lot of really interesting early-stage startups. Got to know each other on cap tables as well and teamed up late last year to work through the vision of building the next generation venture firm.
I'm 22. Josh is 24. You don't often as a founder, get to see your peers across the table. And for us, that's a position of honour and one that we think through with a lot of intentionality. And so, Behind Genius Ventures is an early-stage venture firm. We invest at the intersection of the future of work and the future of play.
I think one thing that's funny to me is my dad always said like, you know, work hard, play hard, but that's kind of become more like our firm motto is we want to invest in, you know, not only dev tools in the creator ecosystem but also media, gaming and entertainment. We think that there's this return to a really like holistic life seeing a lot of the effects of burnout.
And so, we also invest in like wellness as well. And. So, yeah it's been a pretty incredible journey. I can't, unfortunately, speak on an open fundraise, but it's been an incredible journey so far, and we're so lucky to be supported by, both tenured investors, and first time LPs, I think that's been one of my favorite parts of the process is working with folks who you know, didn't come from generational wealth and didn't, you know, this wasn't an opportunity that they thought that they would get to have is like investing in a venture fund.
And it's a very like educational process for both of us. So that, yeah, it's just been a joy and I went full time on the fund a week ago. Yeah, it's been pretty crazy.
NA: Yeah. That, that flows really well into my next question. And in terms of how, how did you manage to work your full-time job, do Seed to Harvest, do these syndicates, start raising the fund? How'd you do all of that?
PFD: Yeah. So for some context I started at WorkOS as a developer success engineer, in May of 2020. I started writing Seed to Harvest in July of 2020. I started doing syndicates in November. I deployed a little over $300 in early-stage syndicate deals.
So, I think I'd done six deals in a very short amount of time. So, lots of nights and weekends and it was definitely a lot. And I'm still kind of refactoring my life to not work that many hours and have like a more healthy work-life balance. I think one of the things that came out of me working so hard on nights and weekends was that I needed to make time to prioritize myself because I can't support founders or, you know, collaborate with other investors, fundraise, you know help others like go through the like fundraising process with founders well if I'm not a hundred per cent and so that became a lot more important to me.
So yeah it kind of just like falls into place as you do more things. And I've just sacrificed a lot of sleep.
NA: Yeah. Fair enough., I've seen you grow your Twitter following over the past year. How did you know Twitter play a part in your journey? How big of a part did it play?
PFD: Twitter played an enormous part in my journey. I think I wouldn't have been able to express my passion for venture and get to democratize a lot of the opaque terms and things like that in venture without it.
And I also wouldn't have met you know, my best friend, Josh, who I'm now building Behind Genius Ventures with. I wouldn't have met a bunch of our LPs. Wouldn't have met a lot of the founders that we've invested in and it's really given me the opportunity to participate in the Silicon Valley-style business without being in Silicon Valley.
And to me, that was one of the biggest concerns when I had this growing passion for venture is you know, I want to be with my family in San Diego and I want to live there, but I also want to like participate in this economy and being online and being on Twitter has allowed me to do so. And now I feel lucky to be able to invest alongside the folks that I once looked up to a couple of years ago, just not knowing much about the industry.
NA: For sure. I met you through Twitter as well, so that was interesting. Would you be able to talk about the most challenging thing you faced as you've started doing your syndicates and investing?
PFD: Okay so, this is a big difference between managing a fund and making angel investments or syndicate investments is when you're doing syndicate investments, you're finding folks who have an incredible idea awesome background, charisma, storytelling, ability, grit, hustle.
All of those things, and you're not really considering like fund construction, which is really important when you're running a fund, because then it kind of is more a conversation of, okay, how does this company play into our overall thesis and strategy? How does it fit the stage we invest in when you're running a syndicate or you're angel investing, it's much more of a personal decision.
And so I think one of the challenges has been, an exciting challenge to go through, is you know how that investment process shifts as a fund manager versus a syndicate lead or an angel investor. And I think it's added a constraint that has brought richness to my decision-making, which has been really exciting, but definitely, I would say you know, a big transition to make in a small amount of time.
NA: Yeah. That's, that's very interesting point. I like to also talk about a secret obsession of yours that not many people know about?
PFD: So I'm pretty obsessed with plants. Like really obsessed. My mom loves variegated plants, which are like these, they have different colors on the leaves. It goes on with listening to my intuition. I used to kill a lot of plants, like there are a lot of dead plants in my backyard from me not taking good care of them. And this year I really started investing time into learning and like listening to how plants were growing and taking care of them. And a lot of it was just like listening to my intuition and being like, “Hey, you know, you only can a little dehydrated today, you need some water.” And it honestly made me take that again myself. Cause I was like, oh, if that plant is dehydrated, like I should probably take a drink of water as well. So, I'd say plants, I have at least six plants and then also spatial audio has been a topic that I've nerded out on over the past year.
One of my favorite classes in college is speech processing, I'm really interested in how you know, communication works as a whole, but also the physical logistics of transferring sound. Audio is always been really cool to me. I've loved music. I've loved everything about audio. So that's, I think that's one of the only textbooks from college.
I go back and re-read
NA: I love it. Those are very interesting obsessions. Is there a specific investor or, you know, a couple of investors that you really look up to?
PFD: There are a couple. Andy Weissman at USV in his thoughtfulness and holistic approach has always really inspired me. I felt really lucky that he became an LP in Behind Genius Ventures. Feel really lucky to, you know, he'll respond to an update and be like, Hey, How did you make this decision? And what do you think about that?
And it's not coming from a judging place, it's more honest, curious, and interested perspective, which I really appreciate. And I think he's made some incredible investing decisions before.
I also have really enjoyed getting to know Brianne Kimmel. Bri more recently she's been a role model for me, both as a solo GP. I'm full-time on the fund and Josh's, part-time so semi-solo GP, but we make decisions 50:50. So she's been really instrumental in that, how to carry myself in the investing world and thinking through building a firm, also in investing in great companies, defining the future of work and the future of play, she's been great to like jam on thesis with.
I think that Eric Bahn and the team at Hustle Fund has been really interesting to watch and see how they've been able to sort of go about a very different portfolio construction route you know, writing smaller checks and then following on later and supporting a wide variety of founders and focusing really heavily on that like hustle aspect of how people run their business and execute. I really look up to Eric and admire him and couldn't be more grateful for his continued support in our journey Behind Genius Ventures as well.
NA: Yeah. Those are some great investors for sure. Finally, are you able to talk about a publicly announced investment that you've recently made? And why did you make it?
PFD: I'm not going to announce anything publicly quite yet, but I will talk about them in more depth in a future podcast episode.
NA: Okay. Sure. Are you able to talk about any of your syndicate deals?
PFD: Yes. I can talk about those. Sure, I'll talk about Pallet, which is an incredible company. It was my first syndicate deal and I met Kai when he texted my community number and was asking some questions around community and content based on my experience on Twitter.
And I was like, Hey, do you have any like allocation left? And he was kind of like the angel part of the round is closed. Like we're taking like selective checks, we’re pretty oversubscribed. So, I ended up raising like $60K in two weeks when I had never raised this syndicate before, and it was really scary.
But Pallet is this incredible platform that allows content, creators and community builders to build job boards and help their communities hire great people. One thing that's really separate via LinkedIn is that the job search is traditionally very one dimensional.
You go on LinkedIn and you apply for a job, you like, never hear back. You're like, okay, do you guys just forget about me? Or, and then as a recruiter and you're sorting through all of these different applications, no one really like, you know, it's a bit harder to pull out people who stand out that might be from non-traditional backgrounds.
Pallet really offers the opportunity to have a community curated both like talent pool and then also jobless. So it's like, oh, Hey, like I follow Packy McCormick, and I really enjoy his writing, I think he'd have a great curation of different companies to work for. He has a Pallet board, so I can go and apply for those different jobs sorted by like my interests and my level of experience.
And so I think they've been obviously crushing it and allowing creators to monetize in a way where they used to have to pay like $300 a month to like host job boards. And I speak for my fellow community builders, when I say you don't often make a ton of money, or any money at all for that matter in the beginning days of growing a community.
So it's providing a really valuable stream of income for a lot of these, I would have to say like medium-sized creators as well. They have some large creators on the platform, but I think the income stream is really, really, really important for kind of like that middle class of creator folks that might be able to go like full-time if they can monetize that community.
NA: For sure Pallet is definitely an interesting company. That's all the questions I had Paige, thanks so much for joining me. I enjoyed the chat.
PFD: Yeah, me too. Thanks so much for having me
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Paige Finn Doherty - Behind Genius Ventures