Investor Stories 429. Focus and Discipline in Growth, The Dangers of Rules of Thumb, and Fighting Cynicism in Venture (Stevens, Patel, Shapiro)

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 to tell the most important lesson that they've learned in their career. Here's the segment called lessons learned. On today's special segment, we have Kevin Stevens of Energize. Kevin, can you tell us a story highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you invest? Yeah. So kind of tying into the the company we missed. We missed the investments that we struggled with the most in our first couple of funds were hardware. And what we learned is that we really need to take one leap at a time. And so if you're going into, so we were going from venture to growth. And so instead of doing hardware growth equity, we should have just done software growth equity because we were already software investors. And so instead of, you know, trying to make the venture to growth leap and software to hardware leap, we should just make one, like go later stage, keep doing what you're doing, do what you understand. And that informs a lot of what we're doing. And we're thinking about how do we expand our thesis or how do we, you know, do investments that maybe we're not comfortable with. We ask ourselves a lot, are we making more than one leap here? Because often if you're making more than one leap, you're increasing the risk and you're increasing your blind spots. I mean, isn't there an argument that venture is about, you know, leaning into to risk as much as possible? Yeah. I think that's true. We we get a lot of comments that we look more even on the venture side, look more like a growth equity firm. I think if you're a generalist, it is about increasing risk for return. But for us, it's more, you know, being focused. It's it's more, you know, making sure we're staying in our lane. On today's special segment, we have Manish Patel of Nava Ventures. Manish, can you tell us a story highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you invest? Yeah. I would say one of the most critical lessons I've learned over the years as an investor is think from first principles. Like, the Snapchat story, don't follow rules of thumb. Really …