Investor Stories 449: Exceptional Founders Up Close: Listening Over Posturing, Integrity Over Ease, and Deliberate Execution from Day One (Hsieh, Delk, Maples Jr.)

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 Welcome back to TFR. On today's special segment, we ask guests to discuss the most visionary founder that they've worked with and what makes them so special. Here's the segment called visionary founders. Today's special segment, we have Vince Shea of Cypress. Vince, tell us about an exceptional founder you've worked with and what specific thing they do that's unique. So we had an entrepreneur that we invested in about eighteen months ago that just exited us a few months ago to a strategic acquirer right around Christmas time. It was a great Christmas present for him and us. The best thing he did is that he was a listener. He was a learner and a listener. He listened to his executive team a lot. He listened to his customers and obviously iterate the product based on their feedback. He listened to investors like us. A lot of our entrepreneurs, they tend to when we have conversations with them, they tend to kind of, I'm gonna call it, present to us information that we could probably read in a report or an email about, you know, the customers, the numbers, all that kind of stuff. He would send us information ahead of time and assume we read it and we're smart on it, we'll spend most of the time in our conversations asking questions about product strategy, about capital strategy, about sales hires, things like that, and learned a lot from those things, which I think is what allowed him to to grow so quickly in the first eighteen months after we invested. So I think, honestly, the best thing he did was he learned to listen quite a bit, and that allowed him to to build enormous team around him and and scale quickly. On today's special segment, we have Ryan Delk of Primer. Ryan, if you had to choose one visionary founder or leader that has inspired you most, who is it? He's not probably not visionary or or it's definitely not known by the rest of the world. But my dad taught me a lot about what working with integrity looks like and making making unpopular or hard decisions. Be being willing to make unpopular and hard decisions when your integrity is on the line, basically regardless of what the …