Obsessive intensity. Pack animal nature. Homegrown hero vibes. Unyielding grit. A chip on the shoulder. That's who we look for to join exceptional teams.
Eight years ago, I had the opportunity to interview Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s. Beane was a professional baseball player who transitioned into the A’s front office and made a name for himself by using data to identify and recruit undervalued players – transforming the A’s roster in spite of its famously low player payroll. If this sounds familiar, it might be because his story is chronicled in the Oscar-nominated film, Moneyball, where Beane is played by Brad Pitt.
My conversation with Beane focused less on the data-driven decision making that drove his success and more on the not-so data-driven decision making behind his early career. He was drafted in the first round of the MLB as a coveted pick. But Beane turned out not to be nearly as good a player as coaches and club owners thought he would be.
To hear him tell it, his appeal to recruiters had almost everything to do with looking the part. All-American looks. Chiseled jaw. Square shoulders. Successful college performance. He walked and talked like a successful baseball player. But as he explained in very personal terms, his career as a player didn’t pan out as expected. The coaches, recruiters, and owners were wrong.
Baseball recruiters aren’t the only professionals who over-index on pedigree. The VC community does it too. In the case of tech, pedigree takes the form of the schools you went to and the companies where you worked.. Much like baseball, in tech it often comes down to whether or not you look the part.
One of our superpowers at super{set} is that we don’t get caught up in our knickers on matters of pedigree. If anything, fancy schools and inflated professional claims usually send us running in the opposite direction.
I’ve sat in classes at Harvard and boardrooms with Stanford fancypants, whom everyone mythologizes, and I can tell you firsthand that, with a few notable exceptions, they’re just not all they’re cracked up to be.
If we flush the traditional markers of a strong hire, how do we think about talent? How do we discern it? How do we stay out of the wrong-headed patterns that trapped Billy Beane’s early boosters?
There are necessary conditions for success. You need a certain level of training and experience. You need context in the relevant space. You have to have done your 100 push-ups. But from there, we’re making sense of a sea of noisy, frequently conflicting, highly subjective signals.
We’ve been at this a while and we think we’ve gotten pretty good at picking up on the qualities that translate to success in an early stage startup.
VCs love winners. When you think about it, that’s a perfectly reasonable risk management strategy. The trouble is that winners have frequently made big money, and it’s hard to not let that go to your head. Everyone who has been in entrepreneurship long enough has seen it many times before – the CEO with an exit who becomes intolerably arrogant and much too certain of his own infallibility. He doesn't know what he doesn't know. They become 100% certain of every one of their opinions and lose sight of the fact that success in entrepreneurship always entails at least a little luck.
Here’s what gets us excited: a person with an entrepreneurial mindset who has maybe taken a swing or two, but not yet hit a homerun. Why? It shows the right risk attitude if you’re raising your hand to have another go, and it shows you’re open-eyed and persistent enough to take another shot. You’ve faced adversity but you’ve dusted yourself off and gotten back in the game.
Speaking of adversity, at super{set}, we’re always looking for grit. I’m a little bit interested in the schools you attended; I’m much more interested in your back story. Were you born on third base and convinced you hit a homerun, or did you lift yourself by your bootstraps?
One of the reasons we love immigrants so much is that immigrants’ family story usually entails a commitment to hard work and the American Dream. They’ve got a point to prove. We’re looking for people who can take a punch and don’t turn their tails and flee when the going gets rough, as it always does in a startup.
Two decades ago it was Oracle. These days it’s Google. I’m talking about the golden employer that everybody wants on their resume. It’s good training, depending on your role, but it’s not a reliable indicator of performance in a startup. Why? Your number one job when you’re working at one of those huge companies is to not f&*k up what’s already been built by other people. You’re usually not making big moves that materially change the product, revenue, or customer trajectory.
The difference between working at an already established tech company and working for an early-stage startup is the difference between knowing how to drive a professional Formula 1 race vs. knowing how to build a Formula 1 racecar’s engine. They’re not the same. In many cases, there are not-yet-famous people hiding in plain sight who can step into larger roles. They’ll do it with more institutional knowledge, more support from their co-workers, a higher capacity to learn fast, and much less ego.
The era of the lone-wolf entrepreneur is over. The problems got too complicated and the clock-speed required to solve them much too steep for any one brain to do it alone. Your hard skills are important, but they don’t mean much if you can’t play well with others.
There are a lot of factors that go into what makes a good collaborator, but I think the most important one is this: can you suppress your own ego in the service of a broader cause? Do you need to take the winning shot, or do you see your team’s success as your own? If you can, you’re in a better position to actively discern what other people are good at and then enroll them in your solution.
My co-founder Vivek is one of the smartest people I know. The man can go deep, he can go broad, but what makes him uniquely good is his ability to #BeHumble. He is comfortable enough with himself to realize when somebody else in the room knows more than he does. He never sees this as a threat – in fact he’s giddy whenever it happens. He rightly identifies it as an opportunity to ask smart questions and learn from somebody else. Company-building is, at its core, a team sport.
Einstein never took an IQ test. Estimates of his IQ are as high as 160 and as low as 135, which are above average for sure , but they hardly correspond to the searing brilliance of his work. What gives? Einstein’s intelligence, it turns out, was in his ability to latch onto a problem and obsess over it.
Calm persistence, verging on obsessiveness, is also exactly what’s required to succeed at an early-stage startup. Being fast and smart is useful, but it matters less if you don’t have the sticktoitiveness and attention-focusing required to solve the hardest, coolest problems. If your first waking thought in the morning and the last conscious one you have before going to sleep at night center on a single company-building puzzle, and you obsess over it for weeks or months, I’ll bet on your odds of success over 30 minutes from a supergenius every time.
If you’ve read this far and this sounds like you or someone you know, super{set} is hiring.
Transcript
In the first episode of The Closed Session, meet Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, serial entrepreneurs and podcast hosts.
read moreIn the second episode of The Closed Session, Tom and Vivek discuss the framework for starting your own company from scratch, and the three dimensions that should be taken into account.
read moreYou’ve decided to launch a business, but before you hurtle blindly into the breach, you need a bulletproof plan and a perfect pitch deck to persuade your co-founders, investors, partners, and employees to follow you into the unknown.
read moreIn this episode of The Closed Session, Tom and Vivek talk about dilution, methods, mindset, benchmarks and best practices for raising investment capital for a new tech startup.
read moreNow that you've written the business plan and raised money, it's time to recruit your early team. In this episode, Tom and Vivek cover the do's and dont's of building a high-output team - who to hire, how to build chemistry and throughput, how to think about talent when your company is a toddler versus when it's an adolescent.
read moreWelcome to Season 2 of The Closed Session! In this first episode of 2020, Tom and Vivek talk about the five companies super{set} launched in 2019 and the lessons they’re learning as they go.
read more
Tom and Vivek talk about inclusion and reflect on their personal experiences as brown guys in tech. Inclusion feels like a moral imperative, but does it really make for stronger, better companies? Are there unintended consequences of acting on good intentions to 'fix' an inclusion problem at a company? Why is tech so lacking in diversity, and what can we do to get it right?
read moreWe are living in a time of extraordinary concern about the negative consequences of online platforms and social media. We worry about the damage interactive technologies cause to society; about the impact to our mental health; and about the way that these platforms and their practices play to our most destructive impulses. Too often, the experiences we have online serve only to polarize, divide, and amplify the worst of human nature.
read more
This post was written by Habu software engineer, Martín Vargas-Vega, as part of our new #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Developer Advocate, Ryan Overton, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Data Privacy & Compliance Specialist, Jocelyn Brunson, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Sales Director, Sheridan Rice, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read more
The super{set} studio model for early-stage venture It is still early days for the startup studio model. We know this because at super{set} we still get questions from experienced operators and investors. One investor that we’ve known for years recently asked us: “you have a fund — aren’t you just a venture capital firm with a different label?”
read more
This post was written by MarkovML Co-Founder, Lindsey Meyl, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreWhere do the ideas come from? How do we build companies from scratch at super{set}?
read more
Coming up with new company ideas is easy: we take the day off, go to the park, and let the thoughts arrive like butterflies. Maybe we grab a coconut from that guy for a little buzz. While this describes a pleasant day in San Francisco, it couldn’t be further from the truth of what we do at super{set}. If only we could pull great ideas out of thin air. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.
read more
The wheel. Electricity. The automobile. These are technologies that had a disproportionate impact on the merits of their first practical use-case; but beyond that, because they enabled so much in terms of subsequent innovation, economic historians call them “general-purpose technologies” or GPTs...
read more
In our last post, we discussed how data is the new general-purpose technology and that is why at super{set} we form data-driven companies from scratch. But new technologies are a promise, not a sudden phase change.
read moreWhen a VC decides to invest in a company, they write up a document called the “Investment Memo” to convince their partners that the decision is sound. This document is a thorough analysis of the startup...
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Solutions Engineer, Sahiti Surapaneni, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreWhat does it mean to be a super{set} co-founder and who do we look for? Why is the Head of Product the first co-founder we bring on board?
read more
Considered by some to be “America’s Second Independence Day,” Juneteenth has only recently entered the national zeitgeist. Celebrated on the third Saturday in June, it became a federal holiday just last year under President Joe Biden. Many companies are left wondering how to acknowledge the holiday. We sat down with Eskalera’s co-founder Dr. Tolonda Tolbert to get her take.
read more
Has someone looking to make a key hire ever told you that they are after “coachability”? Take a look at the Google ngram for “coachability” — off like a rocket ship since the Dot Com bubble, and it’s not even a real word! Coaching is everywhere in Silicon Valley...
read more
At super{set}, we stand side-by-side and pick up the shovel with our co-founders. Our first outside co-founder at a super{set} company is usually a Head of Product. Let’s unpack each portion of that title....
read more
Pankaj Rajan, co-founder at MarkovML, describes his Big Tech and startup experience and his journey to starting a company at super{set}.
read more
The decision to start a company – or to join an early stage one – is an act of the gut. On good days, I see it as a quasi-spiritual commitment. On bad days, I see it as sheer irrationality. Whichever it is, you’ll be happier if you acknowledge and calmly accept the lunacy of it all...
read moreTom and Vivek describe how building the best product is like planning the perfect heist: just like Danny Ocean, spend the time upfront to blueprint and stage, get into the casino with the insertion product, then drill into the safe and make your escape with the perfect product roadmap.
read more
Tom and Vivek discuss what the very first customers of a startup must look and act like, the staging and sequencing of setting up a sales operation with a feedback loop to product, and end with special guest Matt Kilmartin, CEO of Habu and former Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Krux, for his advice on effective entrepreneurial selling.
read more
Reflections after a summer as an engineering intern at super{set}
read more
Gal Vered of Checksum explains his rationale for leaving Google to co-found a super{set} company.
read more
The era of easy money - or at least, easy returns for VCs - is over. Tom Chavez is calling for VCs to show up in-person at August board meetings, get off the sidelines, and start adding real value and hands-on support for founders.
read more
Tom and Vivek describe what the ideal CEO looks like in the early stage, why great product people aren’t necessarily going to make great CEOs, and what the division of labor looks like between the CEO and the rest of the early team. They then bring on special guest Dane E. Holmes from super{set} company Eskalera to hear about his decision to join a super{set} company and his lessons for early-stage leadership.
read more
o11y - What is it? Why is it important? What are the tools you need? More importantly - how can you adopt an observability mindset? Habu Software Architect Siddharth Sharma reports from his session at super{summit} 2022.
read more
Othmane Rifki, Principal Applied Scientist at super{set} company Spectrum Labs, reports from the session he led at super{summit} 2022: "When Inference Meets Engineering." Using super{set} companies as examples, Othmane reveals the 3 ways that data science can benefit from engineering workflows to deliver business value.
read more
Head of Infrastructure at Ketch, and Kapstan Advisor, Anton Winter explains a few of the infrastructure and DevOps headaches he encounters every day.
read moreTom and Vivek jump on the pod for a special bonus episode to call BULLSHIT on VCs, CEOs, the “categorical shit,” and more. So strap yourselves in because the takes are HOT.
read more
The Move Accelerates the Rapidly Growing Startup Studio’s Mission to Lead the Next Generation of AI and Data-Driven Market Innovation and Success
read more
Announcing Jon Suarez-Davis (jsd) as super{set}’s Chief Commercial Officer: jsd tells us in his own words why he's joining super{set}
read moreTom and Vivek describe the lessons learned from fundraising at Rapt in 1999 - the height of the first internet bubble - through their experience at Krux - amid the most recent tech bubble. After sharing war stories, they describe how super{set} melds funding with hands-on entrepreneurship to set the soil conditions for long-term success.
read more
Tom and Vivek have come full circle: in this episode they’re talking about closed session board meetings in The {Closed} Session. They discuss their experience in board meetings - even some tense ones - as serial founders and how they approach board meetings today as both co-founders and seed investors of the companies coming out of the super{set} startup studio.
read more
Arthur Patterson, 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. Arthur and Tom cover venture investing, company-building, and even some personal stories from their history together.
read moreArthur 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.
read more
This month we pass the mic to Sagar Gaur, Software Engineer at super{set} MLOps company MarkovML, who shares with us his tips for working within a global startup with teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, India
read more
Arthur Patterson, legendary VC and founder of Accel Partners, sits down with Tom Chavez to discuss insights into company building. Tom and Vivek review the tape on the latest episode of The {Closed} Session.
read more
Chris Fellowes, super{set} interned turned full time employee at super{set} portfolio company Kapstan, gives his 7 recommendations for how to turn an internship into a job at a startup.
read more
Kicking off the fourth season of the {Closed} Session podcast with a great topic and guest: Frida Polli, CEO and co-founder of pymetrics, which was recently acquired by Harver, joins us to talk about the critical role that technology and specifically AI and neuroscience can play in eliminating bias in hiring and beyond.
read moreObsessive intensity. Pack animal nature. Homegrown hero vibes. Unyielding grit. A chip on the shoulder. That's who we look for to join exceptional teams.
read more
Go-to-market has entered a new operating environment. Enter: RevOps. We dig into the next solution space for super{set}, analyzing the paradigm shift in GTM and the data challenges a new class of company must solve.
read more.jpg)
We are delighted to share our new episode of the {Closed} Session podcast with guest Alyssa Hutnik. Alyssa looms large in the privacy world, and she’s been thinking deeply about the intersections of data, technology and the law for nearly two decades. She’s also the Chief Privacy and Data Security Architect at Ketch, a super{set} company, as well as a lawyer. Hope you enjoy the episode!
read more
super{set} startup studio portfolio company’s seed funding round was led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from Ulu Ventures Raise will enable boombox.io to accelerate product development on the way to becoming the winning creator platform for musicians globally
read more
On the heels of boombox.io's $7M seed fundraise led by Forerunner, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya sit down with boombox co-founders India Lossman and Max Mathieu for a special episode straight from super{summit} 2023 in New Orleans!
read moreWe are living in a time of extraordinary concern about the negative consequences of online platforms and social media. We worry about the damage interactive technologies cause to society; about the impact to our mental health; and about the way that these platforms and their practices play to our most destructive impulses. Too often, the experiences we have online serve only to polarize, divide, and amplify the worst of human nature.
read moreAnnouncing Jon Suarez-Davis (jsd) as super{set}’s Chief Commercial Officer: jsd tells us in his own words why he's joining super{set}
read moreComing up with new company ideas is easy: we take the day off, go to the park, and let the thoughts arrive like butterflies. Maybe we grab a coconut from that guy for a little buzz. While this describes a pleasant day in San Francisco, it couldn’t be further from the truth of what we do at super{set}. If only we could pull great ideas out of thin air. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.
read moreThis month we pass the mic to Sagar Gaur, Software Engineer at super{set} MLOps company MarkovML, who shares with us his tips for working within a global startup with teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, India
read moreThe decision to start a company – or to join an early stage one – is an act of the gut. On good days, I see it as a quasi-spiritual commitment. On bad days, I see it as sheer irrationality. Whichever it is, you’ll be happier if you acknowledge and calmly accept the lunacy of it all...
read moreIn our last post, we discussed how data is the new general-purpose technology and that is why at super{set} we form data-driven companies from scratch. But new technologies are a promise, not a sudden phase change.
read moreWhen a VC decides to invest in a company, they write up a document called the “Investment Memo” to convince their partners that the decision is sound. This document is a thorough analysis of the startup...
read morePankaj Rajan, co-founder at MarkovML, describes his Big Tech and startup experience and his journey to starting a company at super{set}.
read moreThe Move Accelerates the Rapidly Growing Startup Studio’s Mission to Lead the Next Generation of AI and Data-Driven Market Innovation and Success
read moreAt super{set}, we stand side-by-side and pick up the shovel with our co-founders. Our first outside co-founder at a super{set} company is usually a Head of Product. Let’s unpack each portion of that title....
read moreHead of Infrastructure at Ketch, and Kapstan Advisor, Anton Winter explains a few of the infrastructure and DevOps headaches he encounters every day.
read moreThe super{set} studio model for early-stage venture It is still early days for the startup studio model. We know this because at super{set} we still get questions from experienced operators and investors. One investor that we’ve known for years recently asked us: “you have a fund — aren’t you just a venture capital firm with a different label?”
read moreThe era of easy money - or at least, easy returns for VCs - is over. Tom Chavez is calling for VCs to show up in-person at August board meetings, get off the sidelines, and start adding real value and hands-on support for founders.
read moreo11y - What is it? Why is it important? What are the tools you need? More importantly - how can you adopt an observability mindset? Habu Software Architect Siddharth Sharma reports from his session at super{summit} 2022.
read moreHas someone looking to make a key hire ever told you that they are after “coachability”? Take a look at the Google ngram for “coachability” — off like a rocket ship since the Dot Com bubble, and it’s not even a real word! Coaching is everywhere in Silicon Valley...
read moreObsessive intensity. Pack animal nature. Homegrown hero vibes. Unyielding grit. A chip on the shoulder. That's who we look for to join exceptional teams.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Developer Advocate, Ryan Overton, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Solutions Engineer, Sahiti Surapaneni, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Habu software engineer, Martín Vargas-Vega, as part of our new #PassTheMic series.
read moreOthmane Rifki, Principal Applied Scientist at super{set} company Spectrum Labs, reports from the session he led at super{summit} 2022: "When Inference Meets Engineering." Using super{set} companies as examples, Othmane reveals the 3 ways that data science can benefit from engineering workflows to deliver business value.
read moreGal Vered of Checksum explains his rationale for leaving Google to co-found a super{set} company.
read moreArthur Patterson, 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. Arthur and Tom cover venture investing, company-building, and even some personal stories from their history together.
read moresuper{set} startup studio portfolio company’s seed funding round was led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from Ulu Ventures Raise will enable boombox.io to accelerate product development on the way to becoming the winning creator platform for musicians globally
read moreConsidered by some to be “America’s Second Independence Day,” Juneteenth has only recently entered the national zeitgeist. Celebrated on the third Saturday in June, it became a federal holiday just last year under President Joe Biden. Many companies are left wondering how to acknowledge the holiday. We sat down with Eskalera’s co-founder Dr. Tolonda Tolbert to get her take.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Data Privacy & Compliance Specialist, Jocelyn Brunson, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThis post was written by Ketch Sales Director, Sheridan Rice, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreThe wheel. Electricity. The automobile. These are technologies that had a disproportionate impact on the merits of their first practical use-case; but beyond that, because they enabled so much in terms of subsequent innovation, economic historians call them “general-purpose technologies” or GPTs...
read moreThis post was written by MarkovML Co-Founder, Lindsey Meyl, as part of our #PassTheMic series.
read moreChris Fellowes, super{set} interned turned full time employee at super{set} portfolio company Kapstan, gives his 7 recommendations for how to turn an internship into a job at a startup.
read moreGo-to-market has entered a new operating environment. Enter: RevOps. We dig into the next solution space for super{set}, analyzing the paradigm shift in GTM and the data challenges a new class of company must solve.
read moreReflections after a summer as an engineering intern at super{set}
read more
