In this week’s episode of Next Gen Builders, Francois is joined by Drew Glover, Co-Founder and General Partner at Fiat Ventures, a VC firm focusing on the next generation of early-stage fintech startups. Drew shares his unconventional path that led him to start Fiat Ventures, advice for founders looking to raise capital, and how he strategically builds his team to complement his own strengths and weaknesses.
In this week’s episode of Next Gen Builders, Francois is joined by Drew Glover, Co-Founder and General Partner at Fiat Ventures, a VC firm focusing on the next generation of early-stage fintech startups.
Drew shares his unconventional path that led him to start Fiat Ventures, advice for founders looking to raise capital, and how he strategically builds his team to complement his own strengths and weaknesses.
Throughout the interview, Drew highlights the importance of understanding business models and being able to quickly identify and adapt to market conditions. He advises aspiring founders to ensure their ventures have a generational impact and stresses the critical role of resilience and adaptability in overcoming market challenges.
You’ll hear Drew delve into the vital role of data in their operations, using both qualitative and quantitative insights to make informed decisions. He discusses how Fiat Growth and Fiat Ventures work perfectly together to evaluate potential investments, ensuring they back companies that are not only innovative but also scalable and sustainable. This episode is filled with valuable advice for anyone looking to elevate their career and navigate the complexities of venture capital and entrepreneurship.
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Guest Bio
Drew Glover is Founding Partner of Fiat Growth and General Partner at Fiat Ventures. After taking a backdoor into the VC ecosystem, Drew is no stranger to the world of growth, technology, and marketing. From his time at Steady where he led marketplace development and growth to Namely, Fjord, and Portal A, he navigated the ins and outs of Go-to-Market strategies and user acquisition. Today Drew works closely with companies like Bestow Life Insurance, Copper Bank and Lemonade on how to provide award winning products, services and acquisition strategies.
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Guest Quote
“You need to show up every day with the same amount of energy. And you need to know that no matter how bad the moment is, as long as you're resilient, there's a way for you to crawl out of that.” – Drew Glover
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Time Stamps
*(01:11) What inspired Fiat Growth and Fiat Ventures
*(05:52) Drew's unconventional path into venture
*(08:46) Why you need to understand every business model out there
*(10:27) Lessons Drew still takes away from his sports background
*(13:53) Staying relentless
*(19:13) The art of persuasion
*(22:41) How to determine what's real vs. hype
*(25:38) Don't underestimate the power of team
*(31:19) Where Drew relies on data for Fiat Growth and Fiat Ventures
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Links
0:00:00.0 Drew Glover: Things that worked for you in the past aren't gonna work for you forever. And if you don't consistently test and stay curious and treat everything you do as a data-driven science, then you will get left behind. Outside of just being relentless, it's also just like your will to continue being creative and iterate and test and learn, test and learn, test and learn.
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0:00:28.0 Francois Ajenstat: This is Next-Gen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. And I'm your host, Francois Ajenstat. Navigating the unconventional path is today's topic. And joining me is Drew Glover, the co-founder and general partner at Fiat Ventures, a VC firm supporting the next generation of early stage FinTech startups. Drew is no stranger to the world of growth, tech, and marketing with his time at Steady and Namely before his transition to venture. Welcome, Drew. Welcome to the podcast.
0:01:04.9 Drew Glover: Thanks for having me.
0:01:07.9 Francois Ajenstat: Well, so first, can you tell us a little bit about Fiat Ventures and Fiat Growth?
0:01:13.7 Drew Glover: Yeah, definitely. Fiat Growth was very much the inspiration behind Fiat Ventures and very, very proud that I had a very unconventional path into venture. Fiat Growth is a growth consultancy. So think of us as a full stack agency. We've been around for five and a half years, very specific to the FinTech space. Prior to starting Fiat Growth, my co-founder and I, we were working in the FinTech space. He was at Chime. Alex Harris oversaw growth and partnerships from Series A to Series D. I oversaw growth and partnerships at a company called Steady, Series C company based out of Atlanta, but they were both consumer FinTech companies. And we had this really interesting role at both businesses where we were building out their marketplaces. They had millions of users and we were kind of the gatekeepers behind a lot of partners getting in front of these users.
0:02:02.3 Drew Glover: So Alex and myself, we were kind of inbounding 20 to 30 different businesses a week, trying to get in front of the users that we had in our ecosystem. And we saw this really interesting opportunity 'cause we kept talking to these founders that weren't scaling their business in the most efficient ways, both around efficiency, but also cost efficiency during a market where it was kind of growth by any means necessary. So to make a long story short, we started co-advising a number of businesses together around five years ago. And what that's turned in today is just two of us building to a team of a little over 30 and us working with now over 200 companies driving over a couple billion dollars in revenue. But the thing that made us really unique from day one is, is we got the contractual right to invest in every single business that we worked with. That gave us the ability to really build access to invest in businesses.
0:02:56.2 Drew Glover: And I always jokingly say like we didn't, me and Alex didn't have the money to invest in these businesses by ourselves at the time, but we knew we wanted to get into venture. So around two and a half years into it, we decided that we wanted to build a venture fund and we brought on our close friend, Marcos Fernandez, who's our managing partner at Fiat Ventures. And we basically built a deck, a deck saying if we had invested in all the businesses that we worked with from day one, when we got the right to invest, this is what our portfolio would look like. And it was one of the more compelling stories in FinTech. We only work with companies that we thought were investable. And because we had that contractual right to invest, it was a very compelling story as we walked around really raising money.
0:03:38.0 Drew Glover: Raising money in venture is one of the toughest things anybody can do. We built a really compelling story, a very unique one where around really taking a backdoor into venture, the output was us raising a fund in early 2021, closing a $25 million fund at the end of 2022 and melding together what we call reverse engineering venture, where we actually get to work with businesses in the trenches, running all their marketing efforts prior to investing. So we get to see Fiat Growth, our consultancy as this really great infrastructure where we help companies scale, but it doubles as one of the better early stage due diligence arms in the FinTech space. And Fiat Growth, when we see the magic happening on the Fiat Growth side, on Fiat Ventures, we get to lean in with an investment when the time is perfect. So Fiat Growth, our consultancy and our due diligence arm, and then Fiat Ventures where we get to invest in companies that we just, we deeply believe in because we've done the work with them prior to actually investing.
0:04:37.8 Francois Ajenstat: That's amazing. So you get like a sneak peek into the businesses, you can help them be successful and then really, if they are, you can actually invest in those companies.
0:04:46.6 Drew Glover: That's a 100% right.
0:04:48.2 Francois Ajenstat: That's incredible. Now, I have to ask the name. I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but where does the name Fiat Ventures come from? Were you guys like big Italian car fans or?
0:05:00.9 Drew Glover: We don't fortunately get that question far too often. And I'm telling you, we've actually gotten calls in from people asking about their warranty before. Alex and I, we went to UC Berkeley and Fiat Lux is the school motto and Fiat Lux means let there be light. So Fiat in Latin means let there be, but also Fiat is just like the universal currency of the world. So we thought it'd be very fun to have like really the double meeting of Fiat Growth. So let there be growth, but also this background in FinTech in general. It doesn't bode very well within the crypto space, although we do work in that space, Fiat, the name and the term is kind of an ixnay on all things, crypto, but we're big believers.
0:05:41.0 Francois Ajenstat: I love it, but not true. Your background isn't in finance or venture, right? You had an unconventional path to where you are today.
0:05:51.5 Drew Glover: So I grew up in Oakland, California, East Oakland to be specific, grew up in a family that is very civic minded civic oriented constantly community driven around giving back to Oakland specifically. And I kind of always grew up thinking to myself, Oh man, I wanna be able to, of course like monetarily make the money I want to live the life I live, but also be able to give back in a meaningful way. I was lucky enough to actually out of high school and went to Bishop O'Dowd high school, go to UC Berkeley where I play football. I was a walk on at UC Berkeley and just so happened to play with probably one of the best cohorts of football players of all time at the school.
0:06:29.8 Drew Glover: My freshman year of Aaron Rogers was my quarterback, same year as Marshawn Lynch to Sean Jackson was like one of the receivers there but coming out of college I, just like everyone, I didn't know what I wanted to do. My first job was in commercial business insurance. I was a cooking category manager at a startup. I ultimately landed at a company called Namely and was an AE there and quickly realized the power of just sales and storytelling, and I became one of the superstars of that business and the HR tech space and realized I had this superpower that I really wanted to make sure that I was able to lift up in the ways that I thought would be most impactful to the world. That's where I joined Steady. But again, going back to the story I told earlier Alex and myself, I wish we could say that we had a whiteboard where we said, Hey, we were gonna become a VC. This is where we're gonna start. This is where we're gonna end.
0:07:19.6 Drew Glover: We built a business. It was a very focused business in the FinTech space. And really what we were is we were just consistently curious with our antennas up to understand where the different opportunities lied. And we wanted to make sure that we built the foundation where the direction we wanted to navigate gave us the most opportunity. So again, that moment where we decided to get the contractual right to invest in businesses gave us the ability at a later date to say, we're doing a venture fund because within a venture fund access is wildly important. Someone saying, how do I know you can actually lead this round? And the founder is gonna choose you. Also how are you doing due diligence? A lot of founders just go to a coffee with a founder a couple of times and get a well manicured data room. And that's that. We get to work with them for three to six months prior to investment. So we truly had a backdoor into it 'cause it was through our agency. Typically people are working 10 to 12 years at Andreessen or a16z and then saying they're gonna start their fund. So a little different, but very exciting for us.
0:08:24.9 Francois Ajenstat: That's amazing. And I love that the learning mindset or continuously learning because you're learning about these businesses, but you're also learning about the industry 'cause you're, you don't have a finance background per se. So how do you learn venture and learn about all of FinTech while building a business?
0:08:44.3 Drew Glover: Yeah, I think a common misconception is, is if you're in finance, you need to like have a degree in like quant from Stanford or Cal like it's just not true. What you really need to understand is how business models are made, how they're designed, and you need to understand this is how I do it. Really every possible business model, because at Fiat Ventures, we talk to almost 2000 companies a year. And then like there's an extra hundred, a couple hundred that we're talking to and like meaningfully engaging with. With Fiat Growth, I just have so much exposure to different types of business and their general structures that instantly when someone tells me what their idea is, I know six other businesses that tried it before some failed, some were successful. I know why they failed. I know why they were successful and I can make sense of these moments very fast.
0:09:39.9 Drew Glover: But again like it's not because I aced my pre-cal class in high school. It is because I just have general exposure to business. And my point is, is it could be FinTech, it could be e-commerce, it could be health tech, it could be climate tech or prop tech, because I have that general business infrastructure knowledge. I can plug it into any industry. It just so happens that I believe FinTech is the space that can drive the most generational impact on the world in a positive way.
0:10:10.4 Francois Ajenstat: That's incredible. Were there some learnings from your sports years that you're bringing forward today in the business world?
0:10:18.9 Drew Glover: A 100% Yes. I'll say it a million times. One is competition. Competition is again like your journey to win, but also the pain of loss and being able to distill that into everything that you do really drives from my standpoint like this entrepreneurship that I have and to my own kind of personal being also this ability to take an assignment, but know there are a million different audibles to be called dependent on how you kind of walk into a room or walk onto a field or walk onto a play. And I'm so thankful. Like I remember at the time in college, our head coach, Jeff Tedford, we had around 250 plays in our playbook and every single one of those plays at anywhere between 2 and 10 different audibles you could call from the moment you walk out of the huddle to the moment you line up against the defense.
0:11:19.8 Drew Glover: And I used to think that that was overkill. But I'm so thankful for it because literally that is life. The amount of audibles I call on a day-to-day basis on a moment by moment basis in the biggest meeting and the smallest meeting internally for Fiat Growth, externally for a partnership or an investment, it's endless. And like there's so many other things, locker room culture like I remember in college like that locker room was just as great as like being on the field, but I also had so much exposure to so many different types of people with different backgrounds like linemen and DBs, they came from different locations, they had different approaches to life, but we had to like find a way to like walk on the field together and play as one. And regardless if there were disagreements or not like we found a way to co-exist together. And that is something you can get without playing sports, but sports is a force function because you're working towards a North star of, I wanna win a championship or I want to win this game or come console me when I lose, and that is more powerful than any difference that you might engage with, with that individual on the team, those people on the team.
0:12:34.9 Drew Glover: And so sports from a very early age gave me the force function to feel comfortable in very uncomfortable moments, but it was also the force function for me to really be able to navigate the world, regardless of the room I walk in, social economic class whatever sport it was, whatever topic it was, even changing the way I speak, depending on the room I'm in but it gives you this flexibility that, and this ability to navigate the world in a very powerful way.
0:13:07.2 Francois Ajenstat: There's so much unpacking here. There's diversity, diversity of experiences, culture. There's alignment of ensuring that you're all playing your part towards a common goal, there's resilience, right. And forging through the hard moments when not everything goes right. There's coaching and leadership. There's so much that's packed in there. So when I think about how you're dealing with highs and lows of running a business, starting a new venture how do you deal with like resilience and tell yourself that you can move forward and it's not gonna be always sunny days every day.
0:13:53.1 Drew Glover: Yeah. Well, the good thing is the good and bad thing is life. Well, you can't run away from just like life. You can't run away from the public markets. You can't run away from the private markets. You can't run away from banks failing. You can't run away from venture capital drying up for anyone that's raising a seed round series A or series B. And so very similar to even like sports as we were just talking about like they're just audibles that have to be called. And sometimes those audibles are painful like sometimes they're like they're really great moments. 'Cause you're like I see an opportunity or like I gotta find a way to make it so like we just don't lose any yards on this play. And so I'll stick, I'll step away from all the sports analogies here, but being relentless is really the word. You have to know that you need to show up every day with the same amount of energy and you need to know that no matter how bad the moment is, as long as you're resilient, there's a way for you to crawl out of that.
0:15:06.3 Drew Glover: I always like say, I was like you need to stay around as long enough to get lucky. And so I'm constantly telling myself that on my worst days. I'm like it's fine like we're gonna push through this and we're gonna keep living and we're gonna keep shooting our shot and something is going to fall. But this is also something, this is why I just love building my businesses with a team because constantly bringing people around me and I'm someone that's optimistic to a fault. I'm someone that is constantly shooting my shot. I'm a little bit more risk tolerant than a lot of different folks. And I'm constantly building my team around me of people that are not that. 'Cause I want people to be able to fill my gaps and I want people to know when I'm down, their superpower is a reason to look up. And we all compliment each other in this very harmonious way.
0:16:03.3 Drew Glover: But as we're working through really tough times, and again like the last year and a half in FinTech, it has some small bright spots, but from a macro standpoint, it's been a big, tough market. We've had multiple banks fail. We've seen the stock market drop on a lot of businesses that the world believes were overvalued and running a FinTech fund and running a FinTech agency, we've had to think about, do we change our story? Do we change our go-to-market story when we're working with companies? What are the four different things they need to be doing different that worked two years ago that don't work now? And the last thing I'll say just around relentlessness is also just being curious and being able to iterate quickly. You have to be willing to test new things that things that work for you in the past, aren't gonna work for you forever. And if you don't consistently test and stay curious and treat everything you do as a data-driven science, then you will get left behind.
0:17:02.4 Drew Glover: Outside of just being relentless, it's also just like your will to continue being creative and iterate and test and learn, test and learn, test and learn.
0:17:11.8 Francois Ajenstat: That's such great advice. One of my favorite expressions is to say we haven't come this far to only come this far. I'm not a runner naturally, but when I'm running and I'm pushing and I'm pushing, I know I have to just keep going. And so you're never done. You're always trying to do a little bit better, a little bit further. Or at the same time, when you think about the goals you're trying to accomplish not resting on your laurels, but when you hit the top of a mountain, you find a bigger mountain, a bigger goal to go climb. And those two things to me helped me push through and enable me to push even further than I thought was possible for myself.
0:17:54.9 Drew Glover: And I always say to myself, I always ask myself, what do I want? And my answer is always more. And like that is just something that's like instilled in my brain. 'Cause I know that like muscle memory is very real. And as long as you keep telling yourself certain things and you envision certain things and you keep showing up when it's time for reaction time, that thing that you've been doing is what's gonna show up.
0:18:19.2 Francois Ajenstat: Now, you're in the VC world, which means you hear a lot of pitches. You have to say no to a lot of founders and a lot of builders. And you've learned to negotiate as well through this process give us a perspective of first being on the receiving end of that, no. What kind of advice could you give that person that maybe isn't getting their project funded and then vice versa, you're pitching for companies. And you're not always getting the yes to invest in those companies. How do you deal with that and kind of work through the puts and takes that come along the way?
0:19:01.8 Drew Glover: Yeah. So specifically for founders, one of the biggest things that they really need to keep in mind is they need to understand what that VC is looking for in investment. 90% of the time that is public knowledge. And so I would just make sure, any founder pitching a company, do your homework to understand who your marketing term ICP is. Who's your ideal customer profile? Who's your ideal VC profile? Most VCs are investing in billion dollar ideas. They are power law investors. So when you hear yourself pitching to yourself, if it doesn't sound like a billion dollar opportunity, then you need to rethink your story. Because investors like myself, I am a power law investor. I'm investing an idea that it's generationally, going to shift how we do business that in the specific industry or space that you're building in. The amount of times that I get on the phone and I say, cool idea, not a generational business, not a billion dollar idea.
0:20:13.3 Drew Glover: And I don't wanna put a number to it, just call it a generational business. It's not generational. That sounds like a really great go-to market strategy for a very specific community that could potentially value that product. And so, the amount of times I hear really great ideas that just don't have the vision of generational, I give that hard feedback and that typically is like my initial filter out.
0:20:38.9 Francois Ajenstat: But you're giving feedback, which is good.
0:20:41.8 Drew Glover: I'm giving feedback. I will also say it's the thing I hate about the VC space the most. I believe, the business like the tech infrastructure we have in this world right now makes it so you can stand up a business overnight. And there is a lot to be said for the 10 and $20 million a year businesses that exist in this world that are not venture-backed businesses.
0:21:04.7 Drew Glover: One shift that is happening right now is one, there's just more businesses out there and everyone believes because of how romanticized Silicon Valley is that like the first thing they need to do is go fundraise money. The amount of times I tell someone, I say, ask yourself this question, would you rather make a million dollars a year with a $20 million business or make $10 million in 10 years after giving up all this equity of your business to someone? And it's a fair question, that everyone should ask themselves. There are some people that are built to build multi-billion dollar businesses and there are some people that just aren't. And sometimes because of their idea, sometimes because like the outcome they want, sometimes it's because of all these other things. But a lot of times I'm giving that feedback. I'm also trying to triage through it. Even if they gimme a billion dollar vision, I'm still asking that question, 'cause I almost want them to opt out of it. I want a founder that's gonna enter this thing saying, I don't give a shit what happens with the market. I don't give a shit what happens with my industry regardless. I am going to lean in regardless of the conditions and make it so I follow through with the promise that I made, the people that backed me when I just had an idea on paper.
0:22:18.5 Francois Ajenstat: That's amazing. As you're evaluating these companies, how do you parse through the height versus the reality and know that there's something really there because we're all pitching ideas, and sometimes they're good ideas on paper, but there's not really a lot of substance to them. How do you parse through all that noise yourself?
0:22:37.7 Drew Glover: The first thing I'll say is we don't invest in the idea stage. And frankly in this market that we're in today, I doubt anyone will, unless you've sold two companies for a couple hundred million bucks and you just have a track record, that's undeniable, which very much happens. But we don't have a lot of those folks sitting in the market today. In terms of how I do it, I built it into my model. I talk about these business models. One thing I'm so thankful for is the business model we build at Fiat because, if we really love a trend or a thesis we see in the market that we think is worth exploring, the first thing I do is I go to the Fiat Growth side and I say, let's go get some clients in this space and let's learn by building with the team.
0:23:19.3 Drew Glover: If we then prove out that that thesis is something special, then we start looking at the space and we say, let's go get some clients of businesses that we want to invest in, and let's go work with them. And then we are in the trenches with the founders. We see founder dynamics, we see this is how, it's how the market's responding from putting marketing dollars up against this. And then from that standpoint, we have a couple clients that we're already working with that we have the right to invest in that we're doing diligence on while we're also doing diligence in the space. And then sometimes we're even going outside of our client base and saying, here here's some companies that are also doing it, although they're not clients, they're companies we just can't ignore. And so by the end of that process, we've proven out our excitement around the space that they're in.
0:24:08.5 Drew Glover: We've underwritten it from a risk standpoint of how they can drive revenue to the business. And then we're leaning in from the venture side of either investing in existing clients or clients that are doing very interesting things in the space that we've already diligenced, that excite us the most. Again, the other side of that coin is most VCs, especially in the earlier stage where it's the hardest place to de-risk investment, they're sitting down with a founder a couple times. They're getting as much data as they can possibly get from that founder. But let's be honest, unless you're doing the work with that founder, a pre-seed or seed company doesn't have enough data for you to properly diligence it unless you have context for that data and then they're making a call on the investment. So what again, we believe that the model we built is one. Again, from an outsider looking in that knows nothing about VC, they're like this doesn't sound that innovative, but while you're in here, it is one of the more innovative models that you'll see today.
0:25:06.9 Francois Ajenstat: It's definitely very unique. Now when that means that when you're exploring a thesis exploring a company, clearly there are gonna be some early ideas where it didn't pan out. How do you deal with that failure or how do you deal with the learning of this great idea that turns into dud?
0:25:26.7 Drew Glover: Short answer. It's very tough. And we all know what it's like as leaders, some of the biggest struggles and challenges we have is admitting that our instinct wasn't right. It really goes back to just the team that you build around you. I am someone where I have very, very strong beliefs and opinions and my superpower of those instincts and opinions has gotten stronger because I brought other people around me to tell me when my instincts are wrong. And they know that the only way I'll believe that is if they bring data both qualitative and quantitative to tell me why it's wrong. And again, we're not living in a world at fiat where I'm the only one with like instincts. We're all sharing our instincts and opinions, but data is the answer.
0:26:20.1 Drew Glover: I and the rest of my team, we get paid to be able to spot trends and jump on trends before the rest of the world sees them. And we are constantly trying to underwrite those trends to the best of our ability. But many times we are throwing those trends out the door in the trash because we're realizing the most important piece of the business isn't able to thrive, which is revenue. If from a marketing perspective, we cannot find a way to drive meaningful revenue that is cost efficient to that business. We are calling that a dud and we're getting out of the way. A lot of folks will invest in a business because, they believe the founders will just make it work. And don't get me wrong, team is by far the most important piece of the underwriting model. But if we as what we believe are the best marketers in the business, can't find a way to scale the business in an effective way, we're backing out every time.
0:27:36.0 Francois Ajenstat: How do you know when it's the idea, the people or the timing? 'Cause you think about the current macro environment that we're in, it's really hard to parse out what is you versus the external factors and it's easy to blame other people than yourself. How do you navigate through that?
0:27:54.6 Drew Glover: Yeah, well, sometimes again, it goes back to the team. Other times, don't get me wrong. There are some businesses that have become, that have gone public 20 years ago that would never go public today. That's part of being a really great founder, seeing an opportunity, but also understanding when that window of opportunity is closing. You think about Airbnb is a business that today because of all the different like regulatory things that have changed, Airbnb created a problem, which is great 'cause they created a market, they also created a problem. But because nothing of the sort had ever existed in that space, they had a huge window to be first to market and only in market, for a very long time. But again, if any of those businesses started today based on the regulatory, climate that we have within residential real estate, it wouldn't even get off the ground.
0:28:50.2 Drew Glover: But this happens all the time with B2B companies, B2B2C companies where the window closes quickly. I've seen some of the best founders fail because something changed completely outside of their power that made their business go under. That could be debt facility market. That could be the fact that the public markets have completely tanked. And so all these early stage investors are looking at the comps in the public market saying, if you guys went public today, you guys would be worth nothing when we need to be looking 15, 20 years out. And so again, when it goes back to this team, it's the team saying, I'm noticing my window closing a lot quicker than I thought. We got a million dollars in the bank. How do we still make this a billion dollars by doing a very thoughtful shift or pivot to my business.
0:29:37.1 Drew Glover: And that, again, that's where the team comes in because it's not on the VCs to come back and say, here's the pivot. It's on the founder to come back and say, I'm not giving up. I'm relentless. I will not lose. And also that they've inspired and recruited team members around them that have the same mindset. But again like the biggest shifts that I've ever seen in a portfolio, for the worse, it's not the idea, it's the market and some crazy thing's happening, some thing's happening that are a little inorganic, but that founder having to respond the right way.
0:30:14.0 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah. It's really, you need adaptability with resilience and you take that and you have leadership and teamwork and all of a sudden you can actually make it through anything.
0:30:28.3 Drew Glover: That's right. That's right. Especially when you're investing in an early stage. Our assumption is there's gonna be two to three pivots, maybe not massive pivots, but two to three moments that are gonna make or break the company that aren't going to be planned. And so when we're talking to a founder, when we're talking to a founding team, we're like judging them on that. And frankly, when we're working with them at Fiat Growth and we get to see those founder dynamics, we have a front row seat to if we believe they can handle that type of turbulence.
0:30:55.7 Francois Ajenstat: Now, earlier you talked about the power of data and I'm a data person, so I love that. Thank you to speaking to me. But how do you look at those data signals to help make sure that you're heading in the right direction and that data doesn't steer you in the wrong direction by having overreliance on that data?
0:31:15.6 Drew Glover: Yeah, so there's two different ways that we kinda look at data. One is through just like the growth arm to make so our clients can continue to scale. And the other one is being able to transfer that knowledge over to Ventures, to make it so we can do proper diligence on a potential investment. On the Fiat Growth side, we also look at it two ways. One is we want to have macro data of like what all of our clients are telling us, and then we want to have customer specific data. One thing is, it's generally we need to understand the customer journey at every single point of the customer's experience. And that is literally the moment they walk into the party versus outta the party where maybe the cocktail at the party tasted nasty.
0:32:01.5 Drew Glover: But a lot of times comparing it to physical experiences like when you walk into a hotel and you're there for three days and you leave like what were the highs? What were the lows? What makes it so you wanna come back 10 times over? What makes it so you never wanna come back again and everything in between. But we're constantly doing that, and we're visualizing that, 'cause one of our biggest, one of the biggest challenges we have on the Fiat Growth side of the business is literacy of understanding the customer experience. And I know we, I jokingly said, I was like we use platforms like Amplitude, we use a number of different platforms to make it so we're properly visualizing that through dashboards and making sure that we have that understanding.
0:32:41.0 Drew Glover: 'Cause the second we have that visualized is the second we can start scaling up a business, or when we run into problems. But being able to properly have alignment, specifically executive alignment, around why things are working and what's not working, and being able to properly document that we take that infrastructure, specifically the MarTech infrastructure, and that is our foundation in terms of how we want to bring our data within Fiat Growth and also transfer it over to Fiat Ventures. And so we have our own company dashboarding data where we have an anonymized journeys for different types of industries and then we transfer that over to Fiat Ventures. We use that in a number of ways. It could be thought pieces around what we're seeing in the market all the way over to, we're seeing a really exciting trend where in many cases at Fiat Ventures we say, we're going to preempt the next round because we don't want them to say, Hey, now it's time to go fundraise. Let's bring a hundred different VCs in the room. We wanna say no, we see a trend, you're like two months before when you should be fundraising, but we know you're gonna be there sooner. We wanna lead the round and we wanna bring five or six other investors around that are strategic money for us to then get this fundraise closed quickly. You keep working on the things that are gonna bring the company to the next level.
0:33:58.1 Francois Ajenstat: Love it. You're building a team of champions. You are creating companies of champions that are gonna be winning. And so I have to end with the posters you have on the wall of championship winners and incredible athletes. Any story you wanna share about them? Your favorite athlete, your favorite quote, your favorite story?
0:34:22.3 Drew Glover: Oh man. Probably won't come as surprise, but my favorite athlete's always been Michael Jordan. Keep in mind there's a huge nostalgia component to it. But also I'll just state, we don't talk about this enough. Michael Jordan to me is the best athlete of all time, but it was during an era where we built up our athletes and we didn't try to tear them down. And I thought that was such a healthier way of growing up and seeing athletes where, I was looking up to a myth that embodied everything I want to be. And it was very empowering for me regardless of what was going on in my life. I could look to that individual and be like no, but like that's the superhero North star that I'm leaning towards. And so, I'm thankful to Michael Jordan, but I'm also thankful that it was the time when Nike was getting off the ground and ESPN was first getting off the ground and we only had around like 35 channels to choose from where like my hero was in this vacuum to where there was enough going on in life for me to see the challenges in real life. But to have that north star of someone I could look up to was incredible.
0:35:34.1 Francois Ajenstat: As a perfect way of closing this podcast together. That's an amazing inspirational story and I'm really thankful for your time for what you have built. And I cannot wait to see the incredible companies that you're gonna help thrive and see the general success that you're gonna drive. It's gonna be amazing.
0:35:58.4 Drew Glover: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure and, yeah, excited to continue partnering together.
0:36:03.8 Francois Ajenstat: Amazing. Well, Drew, thank you so much for joining us and thanks everyone for listening to NextGen Builders. Look out for next episode wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to subscribe.
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