🔨 Issue #67: Company & Fund Building
Managing Partner at Argonautic Ventures Viken Douzdijan shares his experiences in building startup companies and venture firms
💬 Welcome to issue #67 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. While Netflix and Disney+ may start feeding you ads next month, the good news is that BTL will remain ad-free…it’s the little things! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This week, Claremont alumnus Viken Douzdijan shares how he started his career in cannabis technology, which industries he thinks have the highest potential for growth, what to focus on when building a company, and what’s happening in the Armenian technology scene right now.👇
~ Josh & Miles
👤 Community Spotlight: Viken Douzdijian
Viken is the Managing Partner of Argonautic and oversees their venture and growth investing, where he focuses on B2B and machine learning technologies. Before Argonautic Ventures, he served as co-founder and COO at VC-backed cannabis compliance software startup, Trellis. Before Trellis, he was an investor at Marlin Equity, a technology-focused private equity firm. Viken is based out of Seattle, WA, and in his free time, he enjoys exploring the nearby mountain ranges.
You had the unique opportunity of not only starting and running a VC-backed startup as an early employee but also being one of the founders and managing partners at a micro-VC. Any interesting similarities or differences between company building and VC firm building?
I approach the key areas of company building and fund building the same way: (1) Obsess over your customer; (2) Build a culture on relationships with the best people who know their domain inside and out; and (3) Measure the efficiency of your business functions and then begin to systemize them.
Obsess over your customer: While company building, especially in the early days, you need to be able to think like your customer to fully understand the problem you aim to solve. This means speaking with them daily / weekly and meeting them as often as possible. As you scale and your ideal customer profile expands in scope, you need to double down on these customer interactions. On the fund side, my customers are my founders. My goal is to understand their pain points and gaps and work alongside them to fill these operational or strategic holes. In the early days, it’s hiring and fundraising support, and as they grow, it can be assisting with various financial or operational analyses, such as a cohort analysis template or budgeting workshop.
Hire and build relationships with the best people who know their domain inside and out: When building an early-stage business, you live and die by your early hires, so it is important to identify teammates who are passionate about the problem(s) being solved. There is not a linear path to building a best-in-class team; this is where hustle and creativity are needed to leverage your personal and professional network to build the team. When building a fund, you must build value-add relationships with your founders. I believe early-stage venture funds have a responsibility to work closely alongside their founders to execute the short- and long-term vision. Every member of the cap table is part of the team, and a culture of teamwork among investors is a helpful part of taking a business to the next level.
Measure the efficiency of your business functions and then begin to systemize them: As an early-stage business, you can get lost in a sea of priorities. It can be difficult to know if your work is working, so you need to think through how to measure success. In the early days, founders may not have paying customers; however, if they have beta users, they can look at usage data, such as where users are spending the most time, are they using the product as expected, and how often are they using the product. Hopefully, you will grow faster than you can keep up with given current resources, so you need to think through systemizing your business functions to improve efficiency. An easy example is implementing a CRM, which forces you to categorize your pipeline to better manage potential customers and measure conversion rates at each stage. Pipeline management is similar in venture, I have an active CRM where I track and stage prospective and active portfolio companies.
One notable difference between building a company versus a fund is that company building is more tactical. You are focused on executing short-term goals that align with the business’s long-term vision. As an investor, I’m less involved in the day-to-day execution and more focused on 1–2 priorities that will drive impact.👇
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Jake Schual-Berke
Jake Schual-Berke graduated from the Claremont Colleges in 2011, where he discovered that the secret to winning intramural sports was to get deceptively athletic professors on his team. Jake has spent his career working in operations at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and social/environmental impact, including remote monitoring of vaccine cold chains in India and artificial intelligence in East Africa.
He recently wrapped up a 398-day, 33,452-mile motorcycle ride from Zagreb, Croatia, to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Now he's recharged and ready to get back to work, ideally as a project manager or customer success manager for a company using technology for good. He’s based in Southeast Asia and looking for remote positions supporting teams in Asia, Africa, or Europe. If you want to learn more or think Jake could be a fit with your team, check out his website or reach out.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Shadiah Sigala
Shadiah Sigala is a Claremont graduate and a two-time tech founder. She previously co-founded HoneyBook, a startup that reached unicorn status and provides client management software to over 100,000 freelancers running their small businesses. Her experience as a first-time founder and first-time mother inspired her to start her second venture, Kinside. Kinside is a modern childcare benefit for today’s working parents. It makes the process easier by providing a marketplace of verified carers and helping parents tap into their flexible spending accounts (FSA) and other benefits to afford care. Shadiah was recently recognized by Entrepreneur Media as one of the top 100 Women of Influence. Techcrunch also has more on their recent Series A raise.
After I had my daughter, I had an incredibly difficult time finding childcare. I couldn't believe the standard for enrolling in daycare was going on Yelp and calling down the search results. By the end of a few weeks, I was on multiple waitlists but still hadn't found a spot. So I started Kinside to make childcare accessible and affordable to all families. True success will have us solving childcare deserts and affordability deltas nationwide by bringing all the stakeholders, parents, employers, childcare providers, and the government together.
💼 Who’s Hiring?:
Living Carbon, co-founded by Claremont graduate and CEO Maddie Hall, is a public benefit corporation with a mission to responsibly rebalance the planet’s carbon cycle using the inherent power of plants. The team is backed by top investors and continues to scale its swiftly-growing partnership base of sustainability leaders. Following a $15M capital raise this past year, Living Carbon was featured by Forbes, CNN, and The Business Journals as one of the top startups to watch in 2022. Now, Maddie is looking for an Executive Assistant to support her and other executives at Living Carbon. Learn more about their team and their open positions:
Claremont alumnus Dan Shapiro is the co-founder and CEO of Glowforge, a 3D laser printer manufacturer based in Seattle. Glowforge is a user-friendly 3D printer that sits on your desk. The company’s printers utilize software and sensors, laser cutter, and engraver technology to cut, engrave, and shape designs from various materials, enabling users to print and decorate any materials.
Early this year, the company reported more than $100M in revenue for 2021 and announced a $43M Series E investment led by DFJ Growth. If you’re interested in joining this remote-first company, check out their open positions:
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s Claremont financings 💸
StandardC, co-founded by Claremont graduate and CEO Robert Mann, is helping businesses better manage risk and compliance. StandardC creates and maintains digital identities to simplify risk assessment, automate customer onboarding, and monitor ongoing compliance for businesses. They recently raised a $4.75M Series A from Hard Yaka and are planning to launch their StandardC Monitoring Center to automate the KYC process for vendors.
Congratulations to Claremont alumnus Amanda Chanin and Cherry Street Energy on their $40M raise led by EBSCO Industries Inc. Cherry Street Energy develops, operates, and maintains solar photovoltaic (PV) systems to deliver predictably priced electricity to customers. The solar energy startup, which sells power to the City of Atlanta and Emory University, is set to double its workforce and expand research and development following this recent investment.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Julia Stiglitz, Claremont alumnus and co-founder of CoRise, recently joined Ish Baid to chat about her newly founded company and how she transitioned from being a top investor to becoming one of the most promising startup founders. CoRise is an EdTech startup that works with organizations looking to arm their tech and data teams with the latest skills and best practices.
Everything else you need to know💡
Jennifer Doudna is a Claremont graduate and co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences (along with Scribe Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, Caribou Biosciences, and Intellia Therapeutics). She was awarded the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the CRISPR gene-editing technology, a breakthrough that has led to innovations in medicine, evolution, and agriculture.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🏛️ Keeping Physical and Digital Doors Open….. Despite having their physical doors closed for over two years, museums and cultural institutions have done incredible things to advance their organizations’ missions. These programs prompted Claremont graduate Rob Urstein to found Gather – a digital experience platform that allows leading universities, museums, and cultural institutions to connect easily with a community of lifelong learners. Gather enables users to find and book on-demand classes that fuel their curiosity. Last year, they also raised a $3.5M Seed round led by Owl Ventures.
✨ Your Life Uniform With Zero Uniformity….. VoyageLA recently featured Claremont alumnus Megan Kum as she shared her inspiring story of how she taught herself about a new industry and launched her very own clothing brand. Megan is a versatile global marketer whose career spans from working with startups to Fortune 50 companies like Frito-Lay. She is the founder and CEO of Romparound – an apparel company that’s on a mission to bring pieces of clothing to the world that can cut out the thinking and the need for multiple outfits without sacrificing style and fun.
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