Base10's TJ Nahigian on using automation and research within the firm as a competitive advantage, ways to optimize outcomes in the current investing climate, and thoughts on crossover investing.

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

Our guest today is TJ Nahigian, co-founder and managing partner of Base10 Partners, a SF based early stage firm focusing on investing in companies that help automate the real economy. They currently manage over $600MM in AUM and have invested in companies such as Figma, Notion, Brex, and Plaid.

Prior to Base10, TJ was the founder and CEO of Jobr, which he led to a successful acquisition by Monster in 2016. Before that, he worked in investment roles at Accel, Summit Partners, and Coatue, where helped launch the private investing efforts of the firm.

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In this episode we discuss:

01:17 TJ’s path to VC

03:16 How past experiences at Accel, Coatue, and Jobr contributed to his view on the type of firm he wanted Base10 to be.

06:47 An inside view on the early conversations he and his partner Ade had to chart a common vision.

10:07 The decision to start a new firm for the first time rather than joining another well-established firm.

11:28 What they got right and what went wrong with their first fundraise

15:22 The benefits and potential risks of having large anchor LP funds as early investors

18:10 The ingredients an emerging manager needs to thrive in today’s market

22:37 How the firm leverages research and automation to source and win deals.

25:31 How their research helps them find non-obvious deals in lesser trafficked geographies.

29:54 Why purpose and diversity is central to Base10’s investment thesis

37:47 How the long time to liquidity has changed the investing market

41:46 Reflecting back when he helped start Coatue’s private investments focus

43:17 The biggest myth about investing

44:11 The investor that’s had the biggest impact on his career

46:07 The experience that helped define him as an investor

Mentioned in this episode:Base10 Partners

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with TJ. 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:

Hi, I'm Samir Kaji. And welcome back to another episode of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. Our guest today is TJ Nahigian, co-founder of Base10 Partners, a San Francisco based early stage firm focused on investing in companies that help automate the real economy. The firm currently has over 600 million in assets under management, and has invested in companies such as Figma, Notion, Brex, and Plaid.

Samir Kaji:

Prior to starting Base10, with his partner, Ade, TJ was the founder and CEO of Jobr. And prior to that he worked in investment roles at Accel, and Summit Partners, as well as Coatue where he helped launch the private investing efforts of the firm. Having known TJ since the early days of Base10, it was so fun to go back in time to hear the origin story of the firm, how they've evolved using automation to drive better outcomes, and how they think about navigating the current markets to drive alpha for their investors. Without further ado, let's get into the episode to hear all of that and more. TJ, it's so great to have you on the show. Thanks for being on.

TJ Nahigian:

Thanks so much for having me, Samir.

Samir Kaji:

There's so many threads I'm going to pull on during this entirety of this conversation. But let's actually start from the beginning. You've worked at a number of firms, including some iconic ones like Coatue and Summit, and others, but how did you first get into investing?

TJ Nahigian:

I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, which is what got me into business in the first place, and then graduated with a finance degree in the middle of the financial crisis, which many would say it was just awful timing. But it ended up being probably the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me because it actually brought me out to Summit Partners in the Bay Area in early 2009 just as the world was starting to emerge from that financial crisis, and venture led on a significant change starting then. In '09 there were 20 to 30 different venture firms all cobbled around Sand Hill Road and Palo Alto. I was at one of them. So, I was lucky. And if you look at the landscape today, it's meaningfully different. And there's a number of reasons why but platform shifts like mobile, social, etc. have enabled so many companies just to grow to be so much larger than I think anybody had ever expected.

Samir Kaji:

Yeah, it's interesting you started your career right after that global financial crisis, which actually turned out to be one of the best times to start investing. It also came several years after AWS redefined what it meant to develop software and certainly via the iPhone the year after. I look at your career, and you've been at firms that are both later stage and early stage. And I was thinking about when people start firms it's like a blank sheet of paper that you're staring at. And you have to figure out an ethos, an operating model, an investment thesis. If you have a partner, you have to have a shared vision of what the firm is going to be. But looking back at your experiences, whether it was Accel , Coatue, Summit, oftentimes there's things that you want to pull from those firms, and there's things that you don't want to pull for them, those firms. What exactly was that mental model for you as you were sitting with Ade in the early days of saying, "This is the type of firm we're going to build together."

TJ Nahigian:

First of all, I feel so lucky and fortunate to have gotten to work at Summit, Accel, Coatue, and then later actually become an entrepreneur and start a business called Jobr, because those all as you mentioned totally shaped my experience. Each of those firms is great in their own right, and will be long standing firms. When I look back on it, what we've done with Base10, is we've tried to pull the best of those places for the opportunity that we feel like we're going after. Base10 just for those in the audience that don't know, we're focused on automation for the real economy or problems for the 99%. And we started out in 2017 setup to invest the early stage and now at the late stage into some of the largest trends that are shaping the real economy, leveraging technology.

TJ Nahigian:

When Ade, and I sat down to start Base10, that was really the most important thing was figuring out that what. What are we going to do and what are we going to be? How was also really important and I would say that's where experience at those different investment firms, and being an entrepreneur has helped us significantly. And so, we've invested from the early days in building out a research process that we think is unique and differentiated and really helps to win both in the real economy, but also in this new venture landscape that is markedly different than the 2009 venture landscape.

TJ Nahigian:

The way that works is we summarize it by saying we do very much trend based research, like a hedge fund. So, very similar to what Coatue will do. We do outbound and we're proactively reaching out the best companies in a given trend. Very much like gr…