496. How Model Progress Shifts the Goalposts, Why The Death of Software Is Overstated, and How to Diligence Hypergrowth Without Getting Burned (Jacob Effron)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Jacob Efron joins us today from New York City. He's an MD at Redpoint, an early and mid stage firm focused on AI enterprise software and health care. Before Redpoint, Jacob spent time at Flatiron Health, OffGrid Electric, companies including Abridge, Logura, Augment, Physical Intelligence, Ramp, and Garner to mention a few. Jacob, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Nick. Really excited to be here. Yeah. Excited to have you. So tell us a bit about your backstory and your path to becoming a VC. Yeah. Well, I I think you got the the the kind of basics there. You know, essentially, started my career working at a a few startups post consulting. I was over at Flatiron Health, on the product side. Flatiron got acquired and I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my life post acquisition. Had always been curious about venture and had had exposure to a bunch of different VCs and and tech companies through that startup work and had the good fortune of meeting the Redpoint folks. Ended up joining five and a half years ago as a as a vice president initially, and it's been a pretty amazing ride since then. Awesome. And tell us more about the thesis at Redpoint. We've featured some folks in the past, but would love to hear the update. Yeah. So we have two funds at Redpoint, an early stage fund and then what we call our early growth fund. I sit on the early growth side. It sounds like an oxymoron, but what it basically means is series b is kind of the majority of what we do. And the way we think of it is we wanna be investing post product market fit, but at the earliest signs of inflection possible. So the goal is to to be a half step before something becomes obvious in the numbers. We're obviously looking for iconic independent companies that will be the big names of tomorrow. You know, over the years, we've led rounds in companies like Snowflake and Stripe and Twilio and HashiCorp, Abridge, Legora, some of the other ones you mentioned. But we're pretty broad in the in the mandate we have and and trying to find those n of one special companies before …