Investor Stories 414: Key Advice (Seides, Patil, Stevens)

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. Welcome back to TFR. On today's special segment, we ask guests for the most important piece of advice that they'd share with folks early in their venture career. Here's the segment called key advice. On today's special segment, we have Ted Sides of Capital Allocators. Ted, if you could share one piece of advice with a young new investor, what would you tell them? Figure out investing is so broad, and you can express it in so many different ways. Try to figure out what aspect of it you love. Some people don't really care about businesses and they just wanna trade, you know, like a video game trade. That's okay. Like, you can go be a trader. You know, some people think that they or I used to say back in the day, if if you woke up on the wrong side of bed every morning, you should probably be a hedge fund manager because you have to short stocks. And, you know, I guess as you went through, Nick, like, some people love buying businesses that exist and making them better. Some people get more excited by the new thing, at least the venture capital. And so there's so many different ways of expressing this idea of investing capital to try to understand at a at a beyond, like, oh, I wanna get rich. I wanna be an investor. I think the way to do that is to be a venture capitalist in AI. Well, do you love new technologies? Do you love experimenting with, like, the future? Or are you someone who likes trying to analyze what is? And maybe you're gonna be a credit manager. So learning a little more about what actually goes into the success in that field and attaching that to what resonates most for you. It's tricky. Right? Because young people today, it takes a while for them to discover their true interests and passions, and then they get thrust into an industry, you know, out of college. And sometimes you can kinda get pigeonholed or, you know, on a path that may not be consistent with what your true kinda professional life's purpose is. Yeah. On today's special segment, we have Rusty Ralston and Jay Patel of Swell VC. Rusty and Jay, if you could …