Arthur Patterson, the founder of venture capital firm Accel, sits down for a fireside chat with super{set} founding partner Tom Chavez as part of our biweekly super{set} Community Call.

Tom and Vivek sit back and review the tape - analyzing Arthur’s insight into company building across the dimensions of identifying the right talent, doing experiments, what the common thread is across the hits and misses, and a first-hand perspective on the demonic energy that helped keep Tom from being fired as CEO of his first venture.

Twice a month, the super{set} community comes together for a weekly call - often featuring fireside chats with outside speakers and friends of the super{set} Hive. On one such call, we were pleased to welcome Arthur Patterson - founder of the venture capital firm Accel and an investor in Tom and Vivek’s previous companies, Rapt and Krux.

Arthur Patterson is one of the greatest VCs of all time, founding Accel as an upstart in 1983 and building out the firm to become the powerhouse it is today. He’s an investor - not an operator himself - but he’s stood shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the world’s finest entrepreneurs and has plenty of insight into building successful software companies.

From digging into the Nietzschean energy and other qualities required to be a successful entrepreneur to Accel’s philosophy of “the prepared mind,” to identifying the homegrown unknowns that can become the core of your early team, and to what makes or breaks a successful company idea, Arthur has insights for us all.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to The Closed Session, How to Get Paid in Silicon Valley. With your host, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya.

Tom Chavez: Hello, everybody. And welcome to Episode 10, Season Three, of The Closed Session. My name is Tom Chavez.

Vivek Vaidya: And I am Vivek Vaidya.

Tom Chavez: For our listeners, this is going to be part two of a two-part podcast. So if you haven't listened to the last podcast, stop, kick yourself out of this one. Go back, take a listen there.

Because what we're doing is taking the best hit snippets from a really rich and interesting conversation we were lucky to have with Arthur Patterson, the founder of Accel, in a community call that we have at super{set}.

As Vivek mentioned, we have these community calls. It's one of the coolest... So many cool things about working at a super{set} company, but one of them is you get to participate in these community calls where we learn from each other, we bring in luminaries like Arthur. So that's what we're doing here.

Vivek Vaidya: For a moment there, Tom, I thought you would go all Vanilla Ice and say, "All right, stop, rewind and listen."

Tom Chavez: Keep going.

Vivek Vaidya: But you didn't.

Tom Chavez: No, but come on. Drop it like it's hot.

Vivek Vaidya:  "All right stop, collaborate and listen. Ice is back with a brand new invention. Something grabs a hold of me tightly. Flow like a harpoon daily and nightly. Will it ever stop? Yo, I don't know."

Tom Chavez: Bang. People, that just happened. Can we have-

Vivek Vaidya: I could go on.

Tom Chavez: Can we have a moment of silence? That was all the way live, nothing rehearsed here. And that's Vivek Vaidya on the mic, yo.

Vivek Vaidya: That's right.

Tom Chavez: Literally on the mic here in the studio.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah. Woo.

Tom Chavez: All right, let's press on.

Vivek Vaidya: We've got more important things to talk about.

Tom Chavez: So for part one, we reviewed Arthur's questions. And they had much more to do with the venture industry and the origins of venture capital in Silicon Valley. Great stories there. By the way, if you haven't read The Power Law-

Vivek Vaidya: Oh yeah, let's put a plug for Power Law.

Tom Chavez: We like that book a lot. Totally unpaid-for plug. We haven't done one of those in a while.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah. And here we are.

Tom Chavez: Here we are doing a totally unpaid-for plug for The Power Law. It is a wonderful history of the origins of Silicon Valley. And, predictably, Arthur shows up in that book, as he needs to be, as one of the lions of venture capital, one of the inventors of the whole field.

Vivek Vaidya: And if you are going to buy the book, I would recommend buying the printed version of the book as opposed to the digital version, on a Kindle or whatever. Because there are some very interesting pictures, old pictures of these stalwarts of Silicon Valley, that I find very interesting.

Tom Chavez: Absolutely. It's such a great... We insisted that everybody, the super{set} management team, read that book this last year. We all learned a lot from it.

So Vivek, let's jump right in to one of the key topics we took up with Arthur. And we had some really useful advice around hiring key executives during the early stages of the company. Let's go take a listen.

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On Early Stage Hiring

‍(Start Interview Clip)

Tom Chavez: Listen, we see that all day long, right, ego really is the enemy of progress in company building. And it's a strange paradox, right? Because to will accompany into existence, you have to have this kind of crazy Nietzsche-ian energy to do something that everybody says can't be done. So is that ego? I don't know.

But then at the same time, as you point out, the people who let their ego overtake them, they always feel like they have the answer, "I don't need these pesky helpers. I've got it all right up here." It's remarkable, then as now. If that was the bug bear that you were fighting off 25 years ago, I can tell you we're still at it today.

Arthur Patterson: Yeah. Well, I mean, at some firms it's very tempting to go out and hire, quote, executives that have been notably successful in successful companies. And Kleiner Perkins made a religion of that.

But the early successful guys at the firm actually didn't, that wasn't their background. They were much more apprentice, up the ranks. And they lost all their really good guys, Kevin Compton and others, and kept hiring these guys. That were Ray Lane who'd run Oracle and whatnot. And these guys, when you get to be really good at being an executive-

Tom Chavez: Yeah. It's not the same skillset.

Arthur Patterson: ... you hold on the steering wheel, you're not good venture guys.

And so learning it from the ground up, we found, to be by far the best model in terms of making successful guys. But you got to be curious, you don't need to be a genius. 

You got to be looking for people smarter than you, rather than being the expert yourself.

But curiosity, sustainability and personal sustainability, I think, are really important. So in the venture business, luck and initiative looked like all there is. I mean, he really out hustled everybody else and he got the deal. And by the way, it turned out to be lucky. And third deal in he, it made a jillion.

Tom Chavez: Or to your point, he just didn't quit delayed gratification and then eventually got lucky. Whoever it is, right?

Arthur Patterson: Yeah, yeah. And so those are factors. And you have to have them, but they're not, in our view, enough. And that's why we believe in this, in the top-down thinking it through, sort of our look before you... Prepared Mind is look before you leap. 

And look as hard as you can, because you may be in this thing for a long time and you're not going to discard it on its first hiccup.

(End Clip)

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Tom Chavez: Well, a lot of good stuff there. Right? And I think the comment, certainly for the venture capital industry, but it applies everywhere in terms of hiring for early stages. You can hire the fancy pants, the luminaries, the guys, the Ray Lanes and the others who've achieved great success in a certain context.

It's always been fascinating to me how much people index on that. And also how convinced and ineffective the fancy pants become, right? It goes to their heads. And it intertwines with the point about ego, once you've had some success, and we see this all day long, it just goes to these people's heads.

Vivek Vaidya: Because they think it's all about them. They made it happen.

Tom Chavez: Right. And they've also lost track of the luck. So wait a minute... And by the way, you and I have the strong feelings also about people carry on with this really wrong idea, that if you've made a bunch of money you must be a genius. It's such a poisonous, terrible idea that I think infects too much of our social discourse.

Once you've been in... Yeah, I mean, listen, you and I hustled for decades and you keep at it. But yeah, when it comes to hiring, you recognize humbly there has to be a little bit of luck, you do it long enough to get a little bit lucky. But whether you're a venture capitalist or an executive, you can't let it go to your head. And that's why we prefer the homegrown unknowns. What do we mean by that?

Vivek Vaidya: Which means that we believe in, just like Arthur was saying, we believe in company first. Company building is a learnable craft, and we have our playbooks, and we bring in people who can learn the art of company building from super{set}.

And we have our own methodology, our own version of the Prepared Mind, which is what we do where we write the solution memo and the staging and sequencing and all of that. That is our version of the Prepared Mind when it comes to a particular company.

Tom Chavez: Right. And the homegrown unknowns, though, are the people who don't have all of the luster and the press releases. They're not yet famous, but we believe they've got the stuff. They've got the grit, the humility, the clock speed, the ambition to go and get the job done.

Sometimes you find people who've had some success who still want to throw their hat in the ring and work hard and go build. The odds are not with you, though, if you're trying to bring those people particularly into the early stage.

Vivek Vaidya: We've had a lot more success with the homegrown unknowns than with the people who've actually been there, done that and want to do it all over again.

Tom Chavez: That's right.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah.

Tom Chavez: All right. Well, let's move on to the next clip. Arthur has this idea of company building as an experiment or as a set of experiments. It's a fascinating notion. Let's dive into it now.

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On Company-Building as an Experiment

‍(Start Interview Clip)

Tom Chavez: Hey, let's switch gears here and talk about company building now today relative to before. Because I think it's safe to say today there's more capital.

Arthur Patterson: No, no.

Tom Chavez: Well, there has been, maybe we can come back to that. There has been a lot more capital than 1983, when it's just two or three firms. And a lot more infrastructure, cloud systems like Amazon and Azure and others.

So I remember when we were starting Krux, it was a really risky thing. And this sounds adorable today, but at the time AWS, before, right at that juncture, entrepreneurs would go off and raise an extra 20 to 30 because you had to build your own data systems, like taking equity capital to build a data center was just what was done. So at the beginning of Krux, we took this crazy gamble like, "All right, let's try this AWS thing and see if we can make it work."

The point is, there's a lot more tooling, more opportunities to start companies. Which in part explains the velocity and volume of companies that are now out there and continuing to get built.

So I'm just wondering if you could say a little bit about what do those changes mean for management teams and company builders here at super{set}? What are the kinds of habits and capabilities you need? How do you do your 100 pushups? What are the main things that you need to do to be successful when things seem to move so fast? The things that used to unfold in nine months now, in our shop, it seems can just unfold in nine days. Like competitors move so much more quickly, investors are pouncing. What does a company builder do?

Arthur Patterson: Yeah. Well, while the clock speed in a very ebullient financial market picks up, I don't think the fundamentals in the business pick up. And what is generally not recognized, certainly by the press, is that it's all a supply question.

Venture guys think they're important, the entrepreneurs think they're important. But, by the way, you're just cogs in the wheel. And there'll be X number of new opportunities created by the technology and the changes in social norms or something. And that's it. And you're just cogs. Now, there are better cogs and worse cogs, but you can't change that number.

Now, if it was in the Soviet Union, the Apple phone would've been invented, it just would've taken another 50 years. So this incredible process of entrepreneurism in the United States that so accelerates the exploitation of these opportunities is just one of the most powerful things in the world. You see some of these big companies working on these projects and nothing gets done despite a billion dollars spent. And you put an entrepreneur with a few engineers on it and they have it and in six months. It's an incredible process. So the fundamentals really haven't changed.

And the later stage has completely changed, completely changed. The amounts of money these companies are able to raise and the players that are in them. That's really public market investing, moving back into being greedy enough to get closer and cheaper prices. And the people that are doing that aren't venture guys, they're basically public investors who you write down into your growth funds. At Sequoia they probably have 10% of the guys there now are early stage investors.

But in the early stage, when we were talking about the opportunities here, at an early stage the challenge the entrepreneurs have is these are experiments and you're trying to find supply of these new ideas. And so the key thing is to treat them like experiments, understand they're experiments, and have extremely fast learning processes.

Now, if you go in and throw a lot of money at it, you'll probably be unsuccessful because the whole process of getting all those people and the money muddies the evidence and you're not able to learn. You're administering sales forces instead of learning what they're doing out in the field. So I said, "Well, only put one sales team out in the field. Try it out, the product out, on the customers. And see how to make the model work." Because it's going to change. And if you put 10 out in the field, you can't tell what's working, what's not.

And so the care of the experiment at the beginning, I say, hasn't changed one iota in terms of the lessons of doing that. The later stage and the ability to fund these things is a totally new phenomenon. And the different people, more money. But they're just plain different.

I was just looking at a fund, it's called [---]. And they had established 23 offices in the last four or five years around the world. But they were basically doing copycat deals in all these markets, Nairobi and whatnot, copycats of US deals. So they'd solve the supply problem, they didn't have a supply problem, they created.

And so they actually have a lot less risk than doing it in Silicon Valley where you really are conducting an experiment to feel out where the next supply is. And it's much riskier.

(End Clip)

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Tom Chavez: A lot of good stuff there. Vivek, what are your reactions?

Vivek Vaidya: Well, I think the first reaction is, he's spot on. Early stage company building is an experiment, and the experiments are conducted at various levels. There are product experiments that you conduct. "Hey, how about..." Because you have a broad... At least at super{set}, if we've done our jobs well in framing the solution [inaudible 00:15:50] and the staging sequencing, there are lots of options.

We're trying to find, as we've said in this show once before, once or maybe twice before, that it's like a heist, right? Company building is like a heist. So we have to figure out how to get in, and there are multiple ways to get in. And so you have to now run these experiments as you're talking to customers, and talking to the industry, and even your own feasibility, do the backwards and forwards thing. To figure out what's the most effective and efficient way to get in? That's an experiment. And so that kind of analogy is just apt, from my perspective.

Tom Chavez: Absolutely. Yeah. Look, and along those lines... I've been working with Arthur for a long time, I have seen him evolve his thinking. I wasn't going to sort of take him to task in the Q&A there, but I think that Arthur 20 years ago had much more passion for planning.

And of course I had a lot to learn, and there was too much zigging and zagging going on at Rapt. But I think what we've all collectively come to understand a lot more sharply now is that if you're not course correcting, if you're not conducting an experiment and then taking what you learn from it and then doing something different better immediately, you're not doing it.

The companies and the entrepreneurs that scare me the most are the ones who have a plan... By the way, always have a plan, as we've discussed in prior podcasts. But then revision can strike at any time, get ready to pivot and move.

The other thing I just appreciate about Arthur, and this is classic Arthur Patterson from the balcony aerial perspective. Entrepreneurs think they're important. Venture capitalists think they're important. You're all just cogs in a machine.

Vivek Vaidya: Exactly, exactly.

Tom Chavez: That is vintage Arthur Patterson right there.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah. And it is, like you said, it's the view from the balcony. And also he's extremely self-aware, right? That no one person, regardless of how important they think they are, can change, alter the course of anything that's going on by themselves.

Tom Chavez: That's right. Hey, so the next clip was a doozy. You were there for it. And I had wanted to ask Arthur for 20 plus years, and I finally marshaled the courage, I suppose, to ask why wasn't I fired at Rapt? Which was the first company.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah. So for our listeners, Rapt went through a few tumultuous phases. And it's all to Tom's credit that we kind of pivoted and got out in the way we did. But there were some nerve-wracking moments, for Tom in particular, that-

Tom Chavez: Gently put.

Vivek Vaidya: And again, like I said, to his credit, of course the rank and file like us, we were affected by it, but not that much. And he did a very good job of shielding us from all of that. And so he asked Arthur in this fireside chat, why wasn't he fired? Because things weren't going that well. So take a listen.

Tom Chavez: Here we go.

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On Why Tom Wasn’t Fired as CEO of Rapt

‍(Start Interview Clip)

Tom Chavez: So I've wanted to ask you a question now for about 25 years. So finally, I'm just going to blurt it out, Arthur. Early on at Rapt, I remember you used to tease me, we'd go into board meetings and he'd say, "Well, what's the business plan this time?" Because there was this zigging and zagging. I was a puppy, didn't know what... I had a lot to learn. Why didn't you fire me?

Arthur Patterson: Well, this goes back to this whole idea of persistent investing. And if we fire you or close the company... In that case you were the company, and we weren't about to get somebody else. There wasn't enough business there to attract anybody else to. If there had been you would have in trouble. But you make sure you got rid of all the good guys.

Tom Chavez: Well, that's a survival strategy of a sort. I didn't even think about that.

Arthur Patterson: So I think, though, that was an example where you were making progress. You were taking the same software base, you were repositioning it. And you were making enough progress that you could keep raising a little money and keep going. And the alternative is firing you, writing off the investment, and then having to go find some other experiment to climb in on.

Tom Chavez: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Arthur Patterson: So lousy choices.

Tom Chavez: He made the decision that sucked a little less, sounds like.

Arthur Patterson: Yeah.

Tom Chavez: So years later, at the beginning of Krux, we were trying to figure out a thing. And I'm grateful and psyched that you got involved a little bit later, but not at the beginning. And we were angling trying to figure something out, and it didn't work.

When all of that was buttoned up, and I think I was very conscious of wanting to write a polite email thanking you and your partners for the time that you spent looking at it. But it was a little... We didn't get where we wanted to go, at least at that moment.

And I remember you wrote me back a short email, which I have still, where I said, "Sayonara, best of luck. We'll see you all later." And then you wrote back, "Tom, your demonic energy is welcome at Accel anytime." What was that about, the demonic energy?

Because I will tell you, that's become a term of art around here. And we can talk about that in a minute. I'm looking at Jeremy as I say this, demonic energy. But what did you have in mind by demonic energy? And what did you mean by that? Because it was at a time when things hadn't worked. I thought it was a strange thing to write.

Arthur Patterson: This was in Krux?

Tom Chavez: Yeah. I don't even know if you remember.

Arthur Patterson: And this is the beginning of Krux?

Tom Chavez: Yeah.

Arthur Patterson: Well, at the beginning of Krux, I remember just supporting you initially. But the partner, who was our sort of consumer partner and who was in Yahoo, just didn't click with you that well. And so I was trying to pass it on to a younger partner, the relationship onto a younger partner. But I think I ended up doing it for the firm, at that point in time anyway.

But it's back to this question of some cogs are better than other cogs in this process of demonic energy is really important. But I think it's a little bit like the way they rate diving, that they characterize the dive with one number and then how you did it with another. And as a venture guy, you want to pick off a seven or eight dive and have it done at 10, as opposed to the 10 dive done at five.

And demonic energy can get you up to the 10 on the doing. And you demonstrated, in Rapt's case, by virtually reinventing the company, I don't know how many times, that incredible intensity to the guy taking responsibility and figuring it out. And it's the entrepreneur and his team that's going to do that, it's not going to be the venture guy, for sure.

Tom Chavez: Phew. Finally, 25 years later, I get some clarity.

Arthur Patterson: I don't know, was it worse than I thought?

Tom Chavez: No, no, no. It's just good to talk about this stuff, finally.

Arthur Patterson: There was a demon living in there that I didn't even know about.

(End Clip)

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Tom Chavez: Oh, that was funny. I hadn't listened to that since we had the conversation. But I guess two cheers for demonic energy. And then when he says that, and this is something that we carry forward, it's like, "Look, you are going to get kicked in the head and you are going to wobble. And if you think you're not, go home."

We're looking for steady progress, a little bit of progress, reasons to believe. It doesn't have to be tectonic and it rarely will be. Right? I guess that's one of the things I heard Arthur talking about. And I think that we were achieving it steadily.

Vivek Vaidya: Look, actually before I go there, how did you feel when you got the answer finally?

Tom Chavez: It felt a little bit like closure. It was helpful, it was clear. And yeah, I mean, there was no ill will or bad feeling hanging over my head, I've just always been curious. And now with the distance maybe, the distance that we have from all of that, it just makes an awful lot of sense. By the way, in our context at super{set}, given what you and I do at super{set}, it makes a lot of sense, especially against that backdrop.

Vivek Vaidya: Mm-hm. No, I think from the other side, there's no way that the people that we had... And we went through, what, three rounds of layoffs between 2001 and the end of 2002, or thereabouts. There was no way that the people who were working at the time, whenever it was, would've hung around if you weren't there.

Because the latitude and the demonic energy, the fact that we're still building something interesting... What did not happen at Rapt was that we did not let up on the innovation. We kept building, right? There was always new problems to solve. 

There is, again, that curiosity aspect that comes in, or that came in at the time. So we didn't lack for challenging problems to solve. And I think that's what they saw.

Tom Chavez: Well, and listen, as things get tumultuous in the outer economic environment right now, we had a community call in fact earlier today. Where it felt really important to note for people, "Hey, you might be a little freaked out and it's okay. But this is the good stuff. This is the best moment to lean in and build, because we're starting at a bottom."

And it's just an opportunity for continuous steady progress, managing your own psychology and not imagining that you're going to slay the dragon every single day. Steady up and to the right, with intensity.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah.

Tom Chavez: Okay, the last little clip here is we asked Arthur, what's the common thread across big hits and misses? Really useful insights here. Let's go take a listen.

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On the Common Thread across Big Hits and Misses

‍(Start Interview Clip)

Arthur Patterson: Well, the good ones were good ideas. And depending... But as I was talking before, about these are experiments, and you're groping around, and everything's highly ambiguous. And frequently the founders, the best founders, are controversial individuals to say the least.

And so if I knew exactly how to tell you which are the good ones and the bad ones... I mean, I think I've gotten better at it over the years and can recognize good ones. I mean, really good ideas don't necessarily have to begin with the best individuals, because really the best individuals are attracted to the best ideas. And if you get a second rate idea, then good guys don't get attracted to it, or the good guys drift off and go find something better.

And in really hyped marketplaces, like we've had over the last eight years or so, you'll find multiple people executing around the same opportunity. And sometimes that works. I mean, Google came in after all the other search engines with a fairly minor differentiation and captured it. Facebook came in after some other guys, and with a fairly minor trick on who could use their URLs, blew everybody else out the market.

And, I mean, by the time we invested in Facebook, it was obvious it was a good idea. It was obvious to me, because I'd done media deals before. And so I can't give you an exact formula, but make sure it's a good idea and figure out why it's a good idea. Some of my disappointments in the '99, 2000 period where some of it is that just the market wasn't ready for.

Tom Chavez: Yeah.

Arthur Patterson: They were great ideas, but only in my head, not in terms of market acceptance.

‍(End Clip)

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Tom Chavez: Well, and that's true for us too. Right? We have a lot of ideas around here. And I think you mentioned it in the last podcast, that it's not just the quality of the idea, but the timing. Is it time for it right now? We ask ourselves that question a lot these days.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah. This is one where I slightly disagree on the fact that it's all about the idea. And the fact that something is a good idea is only realized in retrospect. You go, "Oh, it was successful. So it was a good idea."

As Arthur was saying, there are lots of ideas that appear to be good, but they don't work out. Why? Because maybe they were not a good idea at the time. And so timing, as you were saying, becomes super, super critical.

Tom Chavez: Yeah. Arthur is kind of maybe talking out of both sides of his mouth, because he uses Google as an example. Well, there was nothing new or novel about the idea. It wasn't any worse of an idea than the prior eight search engines that came before. That a good idea? Or was it just the quality of the execution? Was it a minor adjustment? I think he's being uncharitable to the Google guys, it was a breakthrough kind of improvement in the algorithm and-

Vivek Vaidya: And also it's a business model.

Tom Chavez: And the business model. Well, that's where good old Bill Gross from Overture in Southern California doesn't get enough credit for pioneering the business model. But Google, to their credit, cloned and expanded on it.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah. And they executed much better on that great idea.

Tom Chavez: Yeah. So if guys like you and me sit around and talk about this stuff, yes, great ideas. That's the necessary condition. The sufficient condition is strong execution. Always.

Vivek Vaidya: Execution. Yeah, exactly.

Tom Chavez: And that's where we aim to earn our keep over here at super{set}. Well, listen, man, that was a fun little hang.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah. It was good to listen to the snippets again and then reflect.

Tom Chavez: Always good to take in scraps from Arthur's table. His partners have referred to him as the Riddler, so there's a lot of good stuff there if you're patiently able to take it in and learn from it, as we've been lucky to do over so many years.

Vivek Vaidya: Yeah.

Tom Chavez: Well, that's a wrap everybody. Thanks for listening to this edition. We hope you're learning from Arthur, as we have. And we'll see you on the next sesh.

Vivek Vaidya: Thank you, everyone.

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