497. Investing in Outsiders, Why Extreme Personalities Win, Weighing Timing versus Trends, and Rethinking Liquidity and Option Exercise Windows (Ethan Austin)

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. Ethan Austin joins us today from Santa Barbara. He's the founding partner at Outside VC, a pre seed venture firm backing outsider founders building financial inclusion and equitable systems. Ethan is the former MD of Techstars in Denver, helped launch Techstars LA, and cofounded Give Forward, the first medical crowdfunding platform acquired by GoFundMe. Ethan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Nick. Yeah. It's good to see you again. So tell us a bit about your backstory and your path to venture. Yeah. I was a founder for eight years in Chicago, and we built a company called Give Forward. It was one of the very first crowdfunding platforms. We did that for eight years. In year eight, Facebook decided they were gonna build the same thing and kinda took us out within a year, which was a a pretty brutal ending to eight years of work. Tried to recruit us to join their team and be the first product managers building out what they were starting an impact team, built our product the next year. You know? So we saw something die overnight, basically, which was pretty hard. We ultimately, you know, sold to GoFundMe, but it wasn't it was one it wasn't one of those acquisitions where the the price was named. Right? So, one of our one of our angel investors, a guy David Cohen founded Techstars, and he pulled me into Techstars. I launched Techstars LA with, Anna Barber 2017, 2018, and then went to Denver to do, another Techstars program we're in with Western Union around fintech. And I did that for a couple years, and I wasn't sure if I was gonna start another company or not. And, after a while, I just I just realized I loved I loved what I was doing. And I always had that that founder itch still a little bit, and so I wanted to start my own thing as opposed to joining a venture firm. And so in, you know, 2022, And then, spring twenty twenty two, I went out to start raising for outside VC and really tried to build the the firm I wish existed when I was a founder. And that was really what the, you know, the idea was about. Like, we we were founders …