Primary Venture Partners Jason Shuman on integrating partners into an established partnership, KPI's on measuring value to founders, and views on portfolio construction.

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.

Today, I’m excited to bring you my conversation with Jason Shuman, a partner at NY based Primary Venture Partners. The firm leads seed rounds for companies in NY and has previously invested in companies such as Jet, Mirror, and Latch. The firm recently raised two funds totaling $200MM.

Prior to joining Primary, he spent time as Chief Of Staff for GLG founder Mark Gerson, was an associate at Corigin Venture, and founded and ran a company called Category Five from 2011-2015. 

We chatted with Jason about the importance of culture in building lasting teams, KPI’s for delivering founder success from their internal portfolio services team, and how he views both NY and the entire venture market today. 

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In this episode we discuss:

01:44 Jason’s journey into the startup world

04:37 What he learned in working with GLG founder Mark Gerson

07:05 The decision to join Primary versus starting his own firm

11:42 How Primary was able to seamlessly integrate him into the partnership

14:37 Jason’s advice to someone who is joining a successful venture firm

17:42 Why being selective and keeping a smaller portfolio is important to Primary

21:23 Primary’s philosophy on building a team

24:31 The KPIs Primary uses to assess whether they are delivering value to founders

27:21 Why Primary has decided to remain geo-focused on New York instead of expand

29:41 How Jason views speed versus diligence when investing in today’s marketplace

33:41 Thoughts on the seed market in 2021

37:15 The most counterintuitive lesson he’s learned as an investor

38:03 The investment miss that he’s learned from

39:54 The investor that inspires him

Mentioned in this episodePrimary Partners

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Jason. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.

Transcript:

Samir Kaji:

I am Samir Kaji, your host of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes a behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. On this week's episode, I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Jason Shuman, a Partner with New York based Primary Venture Partners. The firm leads seed rounds for companies in New York, and previously invested in companies such as Jet, Mirror and Latch. Earlier this year, the company raised two funds totaling $200 million. Before joining Primary in 2018, he spent time as Chief of Staff for GLG founder Mark Gerson, was an Associate at Corigin Ventures and founded and ran a company called Category Five from 2011 to 2015. I found Jason to be really thoughtful and we had a great conversation on things like finding alignment when you join a firm, the tangible KPIs they use to measure success and what type of value they're providing founders and his view of New York and the market as a whole. Now let's get into the episode to hear all of that and more.

Samir Kaji:

Jason, it's so great to have you on the show and thanks for joining us.

Jason Shuman:

Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.

Samir Kaji:

Let's go back a little bit. I know you're now investing out of fund three, but what led you into becoming a venture investor and getting interested in startups?

Jason Shuman:

Yeah, so I'm from Boston originally and I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad was running his own company, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, it felt like everybody was running their own thing. So I became obsessed with startups when I was pretty young, like literally in middle school, I was writing business plans for mobile payments on flip phones. And in high school I went to work at this identity theft protection company that was run by my aunt and uncle. And they had a former VC from SoftBank working over there at the time and I just learned a ton from them about A/B testing and customer acquisition and LTV. And I just became a total nerd around startups more broadly, which ended up taking me down to the University of Miami for college, where I studied entrepreneurship and marketing and launched my first company, which was direct-to-consumer footwear company back in 2011.

Jason Shuman:

It was good timing, but pretty bad execution if I could say so myself. So when you can't operate, go ahead and invest, is sometimes that I joke about, but literally about a year out of school we had gotten the thing around profitability, but co-founder breakups, cashflow issues with that company, I just decided to wind it down. I couldn't imagine myself really doing it for the next 10 years. And sitting there as a 23 year old in Boston at the time at home, I was like, "What do I want to do next?" And I didn't have the confidence to start a new company and I didn't know if I really wanted to go operate at a friend's company, but this thing called venture capital became super interesting. Really at the beginning, it was for four reasons. The first one was I could learn about different industries nonstop and I'm a huge nerd and so doing that was great.

Jason Shuman:

Number two, is I wanted to be able to fundraise easier and number three was really that I could meet a better team for the next time around. And you only know an A-player when you've seen it. And I felt like the VC would put me at the forefront of meeting some of the best operators really in the world. And lastly, venture really aligns with my why in life. And I'm sure we'll get more into this, but the idea of being able to go help others, give them the confidence, the skill set, the tools, the relationships to live a more successful fulfilling life, venture really aligns with that. So I drove for Uber at night and sourced deals during the day for free and eventually found myself getting a 90 day trial offer from the guys over at Corigin Ventures to be their first hire and the rest has been history.

Samir Kaji:

So you started at Corigin which at the time was the venture arm of the parent company. Ultimately did that for a while and worked then I think with Mark Gerson of GLG. You and I have talked about that offline. That was an interesting experience where you got exposure to a lot of different things. It wasn't just traditional venture. Tell us a little bit about the experience with Mark.

Jason Shuman:

Mark Gerson's an incredible guy. He did an incredible job building GLG to the behemoth that it is. I would say the quiet behemoth that it is actually in New York City being a billion dollar plus market place business. But he's also an incredible philanthropist and he has his hands in so many buckets. So when I came over there to really get the family office stood up, I was doing a slew of different activities. One, was venture capital investing, the second was we were working on incubating companies. The next was LP investing. We had some philanthropic efforts that I was involved in, in Israel and Africa. And …