Investor Stories 450. How to Succeed Early in VC: Slow Down, Commit to Relationships, and Become an Active Listener (Niehenke, York, Hilaly)

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 Alex Nihanky of Scale. If you could share one piece of advice with a young new investor, what would you tell them? I mean, just just like everything in life, like, slow down. I don't know. This is a great job. It's fun. You know, if you if you're if you're a nerd for business, if you love technology like I do, like, you just gotta pinch yourself some days because, like, sure, like, there's a bunch of pictures that don't get you excited or that don't fit your interest or you don't know what they're talking about, but a week doesn't go by where, like, I walk out of the pitch and I'm super jazzed about the future or something. And a lot of the times, it doesn't go anywhere. I'm wrong all the time. But, like, enjoy those moments. Understand the math. Like, I I'm I'm 42. Alright? That's a data point. I don't know. Maybe I write checks for twenty more years? About, like, sixty two? If you're writing a check at 62, that means you're still on the board at 72. Like, it starts getting up there. Right? And I write maybe one and a half to two deals a year. You kinda start doing that math, and you're like, oh, I have 25, thirty, thirty five, at max 40 deals left in my life, and it could just be 20. You know, you start looking at those numbers and you're like, oh, that that's pretty daunting. And so, like, enjoy the investing that you have, the opportunity to do this, the the chance to work with these people, and have have fun with it. I I spent too much time early in my career title chasing and comparing myself to what a peer at another venture firm had achieved. And you very quickly discover, like, this industry is littered with some of the best of the best, and there are certain people who just seem to walk on water. And and if you compare yourself to them all the time, you'll be depressed. Other people just get lucky. If you compare yourself to them, you'll be depressed. And if you just show up every day and you try to do a really freaking hard job, you sometimes wake up ten years later and you're like, wow, I did some pretty darn cool stuff. I'm proud of that. Maybe somebody else is comparing themselves to me and and feeling cruddy. And so, you know, like, lift them up, but, you know, also feel good …