Princeton Spark

The Princeton Spark went to Thrive: Celebrating and Empowering Princeton’s Black Alumni in search of number #1 tips for networking for startup founders. Entrepreneurial alums Carla Vernón ’92, Kareem Maddox ’11, Hank Boyd ’86, Ian Thomson ’09, Theola DeBose ’96 and Kwanza Jones ’93 gave us some tremendous networking advice.  

For more Princeton Spark, follow us on Twitter @PrincetonSpark and Instagram @PrincetonSpark, and check us out on the web at princetonspark.com. 

SHOW NOTES

Carla Vernón was the subject of an excellent profile by The Alumni Society in 2018. Fun fact: her mother Cynthia was one of NASA’s “Hidden Figures” in 1963. Carla is @CarlaInspired on Twitter and the creator of Tiger Sisters. 

Kareem Maddox is a producer at The Pitch, an entrepreneurship podcast by Spotify/Gimlet Media. In his spare time, he’s only just a gold medal-winning Team USA 3x3 basketball player. Check him out on Twitter at @kareemmaddox. 

Dr. Hank Boyd, Esq. is a clinical professor of marketing at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business, attorney, writer, and consultant for clients such as the NFL, Verizon, and Stanley Black and Decker.  

Ian Thomson has been all around the world and then some – you’ll just have to read this profile in “the Prince” to take it all in. Get in touch with him for his bespoke executive search services at OneBridge Partners. 

Theola DeBose once went from the Metro desk directly to Iraq, all covered in this recent Washingtonian profile about her life after journalism. You can get in touch with Theola on Twitter at @myjskills or @theolita10.

Kwanza Jones, a self-professed catalyst, is the Founder and CEO of SUPERCHARGED, a lifestyle brand and development app. You can find her on Twitter at @thekwanzajones. 

Read more about Thrive: Celebrating and Empowering Princeton’s Black Alumni at thrive.princeton.edu and our recap of the entrepreneurially-focused programming at the PEC website. 

CREDITS

Produced by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. Music by Wright Seneres. Theme music by the Treadmills (Wright Seneres, electric guitar and electric bass; John Damond, Jr., drums). Engineered by Dan Kearns and Dan Quiyu at the Princeton Broadcast Center, and Wright Seneres on location at the Thrive conference. Edited and mixed by Wright Seneres. Promotional readings by Megan Donahey '20.

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Persisting Through Failure with Stuart Ahlum '13, Vaidhy Murti '15 and Pilar Castro-Kiltz '10

SHOW NOTES:

Check out Thousand Fell's circular and sustainable sneakers at thousandfell.com. Early mailing list subscribers will have access to Thousand Fell's first 1000 pairs!

Check out Friendsy at friendsyapp.com and Wit at getwit.app.

Check out Princeton Arts Alumni at ptonartsalumni.org and More Canvas Consulting at morecanvas.com.

CREDITS:

Produced by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. Music by Wright Seneres. Theme music by the Treadmills (Wright Seneres, electric guitar and electric bass; John Damond, Jr., drums). Engineered by Dan Kearns and Dan Quiyu at the Princeton Broadcast Center. Edited and mixed by Wright Seneres. Promotional readings by Megan Donahey '20.

TRANSCRIPT:

From the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council, this is the Princeton Spark. I’m Wright Seneres. 

The various people that make up the Princeton entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem have long been at work, taking risks to bring transformational ideas and companies to the world, in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity. These are the stories of Entrepreneurship the Princeton Way. 

At PEC, we support Princeton-connected startups and help to build the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem in New Jersey and beyond. 

In our series-opening three episodes, we are exploring three important aspects of entrepreneurship. If you haven’t heard the first episode on taking risks, or the second episode on thriving under uncertainty, they are available now at princetonspark.com or wherever you get your podcasts, so please check them out. 

It’s a widely held notion that most startups fail. Depending on whom you ask, it’s somewhere between 50 to 90 percent. That’s a lot. 

But it’s also a common phrase that investors like to back the jockey, not the horse. That is to say, the person and team executing the idea can be more important than the idea itself.

In this episode of the Princeton Spark, we will talk to entrepreneurs who quote-unquote failed in their first startups. They got back on the entrepreneurial horse, and now are on to their next startups and endeavors. We’ll explore how they persisted through failure, on their way to success.

Our first one today is Stuart Ahlum. 

My name is Stuart Ahlum, I’m Princeton class of 2013. I’m an entrepreneur, and I run a company called Thousand Fell. 

Stuart is the co-founder of Thousand Fell, a completely circular and sustainable sneaker company. His first startup, a sneaker company called House of Future, received an investment from the Princeton Alumni Entrepreneurs Fund in 2017. Normally, after funding from Princeton in the form of AEF, a company would be on their way.  

Fast forward a year, and Stuart wound up leaving House of Future. During our interview, he wasn’t able to get into the specifics of why he left. But more importantly, he could talk about what he learned from the process. 

I think when you're in it, and when things aren't going well, it feels like an epic failure. And it's hard to separate yourself, you're so close to these projects, you're pouring all of your time and energy into it. And it's hard to take a step back. I think what I've learned is when I've kind of cleared those hurdles, and finished with projects, we've finished with companies, and had an opportunity to sort of really decompress and figure out what I've learned. It's just fantastic learning opportunities. And you're able to kind of pick up a really important set of skills along the way and really build or rather fill, sort of, gaps in your professional skill set. And a lot of those failures help you realize what you didn't know and help you realize what you need next time around, what you immediately need to get off the ground.

That next time around, he was ready. 

When I went to start this current company that I'm running, the first thing I did was I went out and I pinged the best of the best that I knew. I built a board of advisors very early on, that knew a lot more about certain parts of either retail or footwear-making or fundraising that I did. So I surrounded myself with the smartest people that I knew, the most capable to help us build this company. And so I sort of was able to hedge my bets and where I wasn't quite as strong. I think in the startup world failure is kind of like a badge of honor in many ways. And so many great, t here's there are some fantastic and super successful first time founders. And there are some men and women that hit it out of the park the first time around. But a lot of really big successful companies and great founders have had previous failures. And I think it's how you learn from them. I can't stress this enough. And I feel like I'm parroting what a lot of people say in the industry. But startups are about constantly putting out fires and things that aren't going well. It’s an incredible emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows. And I think oftentimes more lows and highs when you first start out. And it's people telling you no, all the time, especially when it comes to fundraising. It's exhausting. But if you can get through that, and you can change your mindset, where it's another, like data point, another bit of feedback that allows you to then sort of better inform what you're doing go forward. It's incredibly valuable. And it can’t be taken personally.

How did he actually persist through it? 

I took about four weeks off, or maybe six weeks off, and was really trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I think I mentioned I was initially just going to jump right into something, going to business school. And the idea being I had given it given it a good try with startups, and maybe jumping into business school would allow me to pivot to something bigger, or provide me sort of, again, those gaps, you know, professional skill set that I needed. But I had this idea that drew on a lot of the experience that I had from the previous company, but was again, like completely different and very new. And was really excited by the idea.

Not letting go of an idea. Another spark that can ignite an entrepreneurial journey.  

Kind of through that process, stepping away from the company took me about three months to wind things down financially, to hand over responsibility and, and kind of conditionally left at the end of May. And then 

WS: May of 2018?

Yes, May of 2018. And during that time, I was working pretty closely with my current co-founder, also my girlfriend, Chloe, who’s co-founder here on Thousand Fell with me. If she was here, she could jump in and give you her background a little bit better than I could. But a lot of those conversations stemmed from what Gap was doing with Aro, their innovation lab. And we realize that we're really on the precipice of biofabrication, cellular agriculture, chemical recycling, there's just so much that's happening, kind of at the forefront there. And we realized, we think that there's enough material innovation out there now, to really apply this to the product that we know best, which is footwear. We should give this a shot, we should try to really make this something circular and something that's sustainable.

 Stuart and Chloe built the best network of product designers, branding agencies, sales production teams they could find, brought them together, and now, Thousand Fell is launching in October of 2019. You can read about the completely circular and sustainable life cycle of the Thousand Fell sneaker at thousandfell.com. 

After the break, we return to our conversation with Vaidhy Murti. Vaidhy co-founded Friendsy, which occupied some dizzying heights in the matchmaking space. You can hear him in Episode 1, so if you haven’t had a chance to listen, we’ll wait here while you do that. When we come back after this short break, we’ll learn how he felt when it was time to say goodbye to Friendsy. 

Welcome back to the Princeton Spark. Failure is a rich topic for discussion in the startup world. Right this second, somewhere in the world, a startup has failed. Probably. Here is what Vaidhy Murti thinks of what the end of Friendsy was like.

WS: And the term itself could be a loaded term. Do you characterize the end of Friendsy a failure?

What a great question. What a great loaded question. 

WS: Yeah, take that as you will. 

Okay, so if you would ask me, In the first year, or a year and a half, if I characterize it as failure, I would have said yes. And that's probably because society conventionally defines, what happened to us as failure, right? The media writes about all these companies, specifically founders who've managed to, like, you know, build, like this huge viral success overnight, or, like, hit it out of the park, and like, sell their company at like a 10x, 100x multiple of what, you know, they were invested in at. And when you like, look at it in that frame of mind, that's how I was looking at it when it happened. I definitely felt, you know, really, really bad about it. And I felt, you know, super upset that like, I wasn't able to return money on investment. We weren't able to return money on like our investment. So in a financial sense, yeah, it was a financial failure. 

And I think, you know, I worked, I talked to a lot of people over that time period, who tried to get me to change my perspective. Really, I think what, what changed it was when I was writing, about towards the end of December, I think in December of 2017, I was writing detailed investor updates for like every person who's ever put money into the company. And that is, we had a bunch of angel investors in the beginning, We had institutional investors like Slow Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and even Princeton, right? It was an institutional investor, in that round. And I wrote them a – I would say – it was a five to ten page essay. It was a detailed analysis on what I think went wrong, just looking back and areas where that were in our control that maybe we could have done a little bit better. And areas that were out of our control that really hurt our ability to grow into, what we wanted to grow into. 

And I was so anxious, as I was sending these, I actually remember, along with that I sent out an email to all of our users then basically saying, we were shutting down. I finally sent that out at around the same time. 

So Vaidhy writes this long missive, sends it out by email to his investors, and then doesn’t check his email for two weeks. 

And so, as all these emails were going out, this was during the holidays of 2017. And I was just, I was sobbing, as it was happening. I remember, I was just crying my eyes out, my mom was sitting there, trying to comfort me, my sister was there, not understanding really what was happening, but also trying to comfort me, because I don’t think she knew what kind of emails I’m sending out. She just saw me sitting there, like a big sad lump. And I actually didn't check my email for the next two weeks. I was like, “I don't even want to see like what these investors write back to me.” Like, that's how scared and sad I was that they would be “oh, you took our money and didn't deliver us a return.” 

WS: You’re dead to us.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought, like, “You're dead to us.” Right? I felt dead to them.

When does finally open his email after two weeks...

And I started to read through the responses. And literally, across the board, like every single person wrote back, a super nice response basically, commending us on everything we did, and telling us that, they think that we gave this like the best shot that was possible. And they're like, super impressed by how hard we worked, how much we were able to stretch our runway and keep this going despite like all these other roadblocks, that came up that we had to face. And that this was the big thing, like multiple investors basically said that they were so proud of their investment and the impact that it made on the world. And that when, I start another company, to let them know, because they want to invest.

DJ, play that back: 

When I start another company, to let them know, because they want to invest.

They. Want. To. Invest. They want to invest!

Vaidhy got back on the entrepreneurial horse, and his investors are along for his newest ride: Wit, a video contest platform. You can download the Wit app from the Apple App Store and play along. 

After the break, we’ll return to our conversation with Pilar Castro-Kiltz from Episode 2. When we left off with Pilar, we established that arts and entrepreneurship are so closely related in many ways, they’re the same thing. 

And I think, more often than we understand, we’re saying the same things. We’re just saying it differently.

Welcome back to the Princeton Spark. We talked to Pilar Castro-Kiltz, an artist, dancer, choreographer, playwright, producer, artistic director - suffice it to say, she’s an entrepreneur. Artist and entrepreneur, one in the same. 

Moving between the arts and culture world and the startup world, there is a bit of code-switching involved. But the word “failure” - it’s the same in the arts as it is in the startup world. 

First, deeming something a failure? I think this is something I certainly struggle with. What is a failure and what is a success? And things that at the time felt like a failure, when I look back on them? They were just another, kind of, rep in my exercise. It was, you know, sit ups hurt.

WS: Yes. 

Are they a failure? No.

WS: Right.

Yeah, I think that, as I look back, the way in which today, I feel like I have failed, often is when I had an expectation of how something would turn out. And it didn't. And at the time, it felt like, I didn't achieve that thing. I didn't, you know, I didn't get that grant to get that residency. I didn't, you know, I'm not getting the awards that my friends are getting are my peers and my colleagues, no one’s interviewing me at Forbes, whatever that whatever are those benchmarks. And when I, when I look back on that, what I try to work on, is that failure is something that we define, when we fall short of either our expectations or the expectations of others. If I want to get philosophical about it. 

WS: Please do. 

I don't always succeed at doing this.

WS: Wow, this is very meta now. 

Yeah, this is very meta. It’s always meta. I don't always succeed at doing this. But rather than judging something as a failure, but judging something as feedback, this is if I didn't get that award, if I didn't land that client, if I didn't get the residency or the grant or the accolade either. Yeah, failure is feedback. I really think actually, it's not a failure. It's feedback, it's information of how you can improve, how you can pivot, how you can change, or how you just need to keep on keeping on and ignore it. And sometimes, you know, I think a failure is when we do not meet expectations. And sometimes we shouldn't have had that expectation in the first place.

I think sometimes it's when we, when we label something a failure, that it actually results in true failure, because we let it get us down. And we let it define us. And when you're in the mindset of “I have failed,” especially sometimes for the Princeton alumni community are so accustomed to not failing. It's when you use language like “I have failed,” that it sometimes brings about greater failure because you get negative and you get down on yourself.

WS: Right? 

And if instead you view it as, “Here's some more data, here's some more information.”

WS: Right. 

“What do I do with what just happened? And how do I adjust? How do I be agile and nimble and adaptive?” I think adaptive is my new favorite word.

Adapt. Add to your professional skill set, like Stuart said. And...

What’s next for Pilar? I would say synthesis is, the big thing right now of bringing together my experiences as an artist, my experiences as an entrepreneur, and now the added information from business school, to put it all in the crucible and let it come together. And so that's going back to producing my art. And being more active as an artist, that's building More Canvas, because part of More Canvas is providing income opportunities for artists, a way for them to have flexible work that teaches them industry skills, in case they ever have to pivot down the road. And I'd like to see that expand.

Synthesize. Persist. Succeed. 

In our show notes for this episode at princetonspark.com, you can find links to More Canvas Consulting and Princeton Arts Alumni. 

Many thanks to Stuart Ahlum, Vaidhy Murti and Pilar Castro-Kiltz. 

The Princeton Spark is a production of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. 

Engineered by Dan Kearns and Dan Quiyu at the Princeton Broadcast Center and produced by me, Wright Seneres. 

Music for this episode is by me, Wright Seneres. Our theme music is by the Treadmills.

Special thanks to Rose Kelly, David Hopkins, Elio Lleo, Tiger Gao, Margaret Koval, Beth Jarvie, Kristin Haraldsdottir, Daniella DeLorenzo, Megan Donahey, John Damond, Josh Carter, and Morgan Spencer, and the whole Princeton Entrepreneurship Council team, which is Anne-Marie Maman, Don Seitz, Lauren Bender, Diane DeLorenzo, Neal Bituin, and me, Wright Seneres.  

The comments and suggestions box is always open – send an email to [email protected]. If there is a topic or a person that you think we should talk to, please let us know! 

If you still can’t get enough of the Princeton Spark, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram too @princetonspark.

The views expressed by our guests on the show are theirs and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council or Princeton University. 

If you rate and review us in the iTunes store, it really does help people find the show. If you haven’t subscribed to the show yet, please do so at princetonspark.com, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

We’ll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening.

Thriving Under Uncertainty with Brooks Powell '17 and Pilar Castro-Kiltz '10

SHOW NOTES:

Watch Brooks Powell pitch at Shark Tank. Find alcohol-related health from Cheers at cheershealth.com.

Learn more about Princeton Arts Alumni and their "Alumni in the Arts" programming.

Learn more about More Canvas Consulting: Business Management for the Arts.

CREDITS:

Produced by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. Music by Wright Seneres. Theme music by the Treadmills (Wright Seneres, electric guitar and electric bass; John Damond, Jr., drums). Engineered by Dan Kearns and Dan Quiyu at the Princeton Broadcast Center. Edited and mixed by Wright Seneres. Promotional readings by Megan Donahey '20.

TRANSCRIPT:

From the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council, this is the Princeton Spark. I’m Wright Seneres. 

The various people that make up the Princeton entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem have long been at work, taking risks to bring transformational ideas and companies to the world, in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity. These are the stories of Entrepreneurship the Princeton Way. 

At PEC, we support Princeton-connected startups and help to build the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem in New Jersey and beyond. 

In our series opening three episodes, we are exploring three important aspects of entrepreneurship. If you haven’t heard the first episode on taking risks, it is available now at princetonspark.com or wherever you get your podcasts, so do check that out. 

The very nature of entrepreneurship is doing something new and innovative, and so there is always some uncertainty involved. Navigating this uncertainty is something all entrepreneurs need to do if they want to thrive. So how do they do this? For one answer, we turned to Brooks Powell. 

Brooks is the founder of Cheers Health, which used to be called Thrive Plus. So in an episode on thriving, I thought I’d go to an expert. 

My name is Brooks Powell. I graduated from Princeton in the class of 2017. And I founded a company called Cheers, which we like to call an alcohol related health company.

I came across an article that just been published in 2012. I was reading this a few months after it being published, titled "Dihydromyricetin as a novel anti-intoxication medication". And in this article, they showed that DHM, which is a chemical extract, like caffeine to coffee, or THC is marijuana, is basically the active ingredient that makes the plant work. Well, basically, in Asian countries, people will steep this leaf in hot water and drink it after consuming alcohol. And evidently, it made them feel better in the moment. And then it also made them feel better the next day. A team at UCLA, they took that, they took the chemical extract, dihydromyricetin, injected it into rats, and they found that they can instantly sober up rats. They can prevent rats from becoming alcoholics. They can cure alcoholism and rats and oh, yeah, rats given DHM show no sign of hangovers. Basically, I took this study, I found it really compelling. I brought it straight to my neuroscience professor, he thought it was compelling. He scrapped the planned class lecture and lectured on this instead. Within a month or so all of my sort of post graduation career ideas, and totally transformed to me basically thinking, you know what, I'm gonna try to start a company off of this dihydromyricetin. 

Starting an alcohol related health company is sure to have much uncertainty around it. 

I think our uncertainty is really sort of related to the market that we're in. So, you know, there's never really been this concern that, could we make a working product? Would we be able to figure out the supply chain, etc, especially hardware companies, and they fail all the time, because it's just so hard to build a hardware company, such as, like Ring doorbells successfully accomplished. For us, the challenge was, was this idea of, could you actually raise money for something that is alcohol-related. You know, would you be able to employ people on something that is alcohol-related? And the reason is, is that specifically for the VC community, you know, VC, you always think of VCs, as the investors, the people that give other people money, but VCs really have to deal with people called limited partners, which are universities, like Princeton, or state pension funds, or high net worth individuals, and some LPs are having to raise money every five years. So our sorry, venture capitalists are having to raise money from LPs every five years or so. Meaning that every investment they make, they don't want some LP looking at it going like, "Well, why did you invest in that company?" So for the longest time, as we're sort of building this company, you know, we would have 50 conversations with VP and 60, or 70% of them, who wouldn't really want to take past the first meeting, primarily because they didn't know what their LPs would think of them investing in something that might be able to be characterized as a hangover cure. And so that was one of the things that we really sort of the uncertainty of, we knew that that sort of category of alcohol related health was going to become a thing because we were going to make it a thing. But you still have to convince other people, the sort of gatekeepers the funding, that is going to become a good thing. And 10 years from now, everyone's going to look back and go, Oh, alcohol related health category makes so much sense. Just like the immunity section of supplements of the supplement aisle, or the sleep section of the vitamin supplement aisle, or the vitamin C section of the vitamin and supplement aisle, right? Soon, there'll be sort of be an alcohol related health section. And there's sort of that uncertainty like, "Could we grow the company big enough where we can start getting funding from these institutional partners? Or, you know, would we ever be able to sort of get funding from these institutional partners?"

Through this uncertainty, Brooks’s startup is thriving. They raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2018. And they brought a very thoughtful and well-researched effort on a major rebranding to their investors. The result of which? Say hello to Cheers.  

To put it lightly, the consumption of alcohol has its good and bad sides. Even though Cheers’s customers call it a hangover cure, Brooks is careful to use other nomenclature. It’s a long explanation and it involves the federal Food and Drug Administration, but the end result is they are a dietary supplement in the eyes of the FDA.

For us, we have to leave it a bit vague. We have to say, “after alcohol aid”, you know? Feel better. Support your liver. But that enough is enough for consumers to come to their own conclusions about the products. 

In 2018, Brooks appeared on ABC’s popular television program Shark Tank, in which entrepreneurs pitch in front of a panel of investors, led by Mark Cuban. Just to get to that point might have been harder than even getting into Princeton. After the break, he’ll tell us about it. 

Welcome back to the Princeton Spark. When we left off, Brooks was about to pitch to the sharks on Shark Tank, but just getting into the TV studio was a very uncertain process. 

Every year, every season, there's about 90 companies that get on the Shark Tank. So they'll do about 25 episodes, sometimes it's about 20 episodes. And they usually have three to four companies per episode, right, little 10 minute segments. But they also have the press release and that says, that every year, there's somewhere between 35 and 55,000 people or companies that have applied to Shark Tank. So doing the math on that, it's about 20 times harder to get on the Shark Tank than it is to get into Princeton. Which Princeton is already very hard to get into. You know, people that apply to Princeton usually have a shot to get in, but it's sort of self selecting. But it's still it's still a pretty peculiar fact. The other thing, I think people don't sort of know about Shark Tank, which really how long the casting process for them to go from 35 to 55,000 applications each year, it's actually getting on the show, it takes, you know, six to nine months of casting. So you have to go through all of these different rounds and different steps, some of its written, some of it is video pitches. And then finally, they get to California, they have the pitch in front of them live and answer questions. And, you know, there's a lot that happens before you actually get onto the stage. But despite all of that sort of being such a fine-tuned machine, When you get out on stage, what you see is what you get.

However, Mark Cuban traditionally does not put dietary supplements on the show. 

Basically, what ended up happening for us is Mark Cuban traditionally just hates dietary supplements. Because the truth is, in the dietary supplement industry, more stuff doesn't work than works. Right? And so Mark Cuban's point of view is, you know, we don't want to bring anything onto the show that could be deceptive towards consumers. Right? So if you actually watch the episode, that's why he's asking so many questions about science.

Originally, the producers didn't want to let me and Thrive+ on the show, because they're like, "Yeah, it's just going to make Mark Cuban mad, he's going to make it bad TV. So what I did is I actually wrote the producers this 15 page, back and forth Q&A. If Mark says this, I'll say that. Mark says this, I'll say this. Mark says that, I'll say that. At that point, I get this email back, talk to some of the producers, they bring me to California, they say, "In the history of Shark Tank, we've been doing this for 10 years now. And we have never seen somebody do what you just did. We would love to put you in the Tank and see what happens between you and Mark Cuban."

Brooks won Shark Tank’s producers over, and went on the show and pitched. In the end, Brooks made a valiant effort, but there was no deal. They did get a lot of exposure, which made a nice bump in their sales figures. And they are continuing to build and build.

You can read about Cheers’s alcohol health products, maybe buy some for yourself at cheershealth.com. 

After the break, we’ll talk about the arts and entrepreneurship. You may be wondering: what do arts and entrepreneurship have to do with each other?

Creating art for public consumption is some of the most entrepreneurial and uncertain endeavors that you can undertake. We’ll meet an artist and founder who knows this intersection intimately well. She happens to also have both an MFA in dance from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and an MBA from Wharton, so she is uniquely positioned for this conversation.

Welcome back to the Princeton Spark. There are aspects that apply universally to entrepreneurial pursuits, whether your stage is attached to a microscope, or set under the bright lights of a theater. One of these aspects is how to thrive under uncertainty. Meet Pilar Castro-Kiltz. 

Hi, my name is Pilar Castro-Kiltz, class of 2010. I am an artist and an entrepreneur. 

WS: Elliot McGucken, also a Princeton alum – he says, “Every artist is an entrepreneur, and every entrepreneur is an artist.” How do you react to that statement?

I completely agree. I think that artists are entrepreneurs in the sense that they are creating something new. They are building out of nothing something whether that's a painting a poem, a piece of theatre, whatever it is, they're crafting something that didn't exist before. And there's uncertainty, there's danger, there's excitement. And I think that for entrepreneurs, they're just as creative as artists, I think that's the thing that brings the two of them together, is making something where there wasn't something before.

But the truth is, you know, the arts, a piece of art is a product, an individual is providing a service when they create an experience for others to consume, to change their minds to open their eyes. And as an artist, I think that I came to realize that the arts and business live together when I wanted to sell out the house, you know, I wanted there to be people to share my art with and I wanted to be creating a piece of theatre, that could bring people into a room who are from diverse backgrounds, from diverse experiences, and make a place for them to meet one another talk about something. And in order to do that, you have to market and you have to advertise, and you have to create something, that's appealing. Product market fit.

WS: Yes, product market fit. We talk about that a lot in tech entrepreneurship and other entrepreneurship. But it really matters for arts entrepreneurship too. Tell me more about that. What you think of when you say that?

Yes, when I think about product market fit in the arts. It's a word that's used in tech entrepreneurship, that in the arts, I think it's sometimes “community building”, bringing people – there other words for this idea of “make something that gets people to come out, buy a ticket and be a part of that.” And you know, when you look around a packed gallery of people loving a certain artist, no one says, “Wow, this is real product market fit.” But that's not the conversation. That's not the vocabulary that’s used. But that's what's happened. Someone has tapped into a need or a desire, and created something that meets that, which is what product market fit is.

WS: How would you characterize the uncertainty that you face, say running a dance production or putting on a show?

Wow, that's a big question. There are many stages of uncertainty in putting together a Dance Theatre production. So I was the executive artistic director of this Dance Theatre Company. And I wrote, directed, choreographed the productions, produced it. And the first stage of uncertainty is, “What are we going to make?” You know, it's sort of from the the internal mind of the artist. I would say like, the first question of uncertainty is getting the collaborators together? Is it how are we going to create a team that's going to bring this to fruition? And that's from composers, dancers, actors, musicians? There's the uncertainty of where we are going to put this up? Is there is there a channel that I can distribute this product to my eventual customers? And for many artists, that's about, you know, there's that difference between, I just keep thinking of like, you know, there's direct to consumer. If you're creating a digital product, you can get it right to people. But if you're creating a live piece of theatre and dance, you need a partner, you need a theater to say yes. We need enough funds to rent the theater. And sometimes the latter doesn't happen. So I think that there's uncertainty in are you putting together a team of people that are going to be able to collaborate effectively? There's uncertainty in in the people, are you going to be able to put together a team of collaborators of dancers, actors, musicians, you can pull this pull this off? There's even just the piece itself, it changes and it evolves as you're going. So sure, the piece of art you think you're making at the beginning? What goes on on stage is totally different. There's that there's also the uncertainty of, especially for one night only productions. Are people going to come? Are we going to sell enough tickets? Are people going to like it? I did one show that there's a fire on the F train. And five minutes before curtain, there wasn't a soul in the house. Even though we had almost sold out the tickets, there wasn't anybody there. And we realized, yeah, there's a fire in the subway. Sometimes there's a fire in the subway, and no one comes to the show. Luckily, they kept the house open. And we just started 30 minutes late. Everybody showed up. Late in the game. Which made the whole thing more fun, because it was a play about dating. So you know, that's uncertain.

WS: Sure. The most uncertain thing of all.

The most uncertain thing of all, will there be a subway fire? And will you find love?

WS: Yeah. So it’s the same question.

It’s the same question. 

WS: It's the same thing.

It’s the same thing.

After putting on these various shows, Pilar identified something that didn’t exist in the market, that she wished she had. This is often the spark that turns an idea into an impact. After the break, she’ll take us through the founding of the Princeton Arts Alumni.

Welcome back to the Princeton Spark. Before the break, Pilar had talked about product market fit, and the stages of uncertainty in the arts. It’s always nice to lean on a network of mentors when faced with these uncertainties. Except...  

I founded the Princeton arts alumni in 2013.

WS: Okay. And so what did you see out in the market that required the creation of this group?

It was actually the late Tim Vasen, who was then the director of the theater program at Princeton. I was at his New Year's Eve party. And I went up to him and I said, “Tim, I'm ready to talk to the arts mafia.” And he's like, “What's the arts mafia?” And I said, you know, “The Princeton arts mafia, just like, Princeton has this community of lawyers and bankers and doctors, you can call up and find mentorship. I've written the play, I'm ready to like, contact the people.” And he said, “There's no such thing. What are you talking about?"

WS: Is he like, sworn to silence though? Because it's the mafia?

Yeah, I know. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just said “It would be great. Like, I want to talk to people and tell them about my play, I want to get mentorship, I want to learn about it”. And I think I went on and on and on, as I sometimes can. And he said, “That sounds great. Do you want to start it?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “You know, we can make this, that the university can give you funding for two years, kind of let you launch it, then you'll be financially independent. If it works, great. And if it doesn't, we’ll tell nobody. It will be our secret.” And so, you know, it's very grateful that when, when I approached him and said I think that I think we need a community of alumni to support each other, and to find mentorship and collaboration, find fans and funding and whatever that is, that that he and Michael Cadden were both very supportive of making that happen. So they sponsored two big parties in New York, two annual parties to kind of launch it to get the community together. And ever since then, we've been financially independent since 2015. 

Having founded the Princeton Arts Alumni group, she then noticed another critical need in the arts market. The next year, she founded an arts consulting company. If this isn’t entrepreneurial, then there is no entrepreneurial. 

So the company is called More Canvas Consulting. And it started in 2014, when I was working as a playwright, director, choreographer, artist in New York, and I wanted somebody who could run the business side of the art, somebody who could take care of some of those day-to-day administrative issues, and also answer the big questions that I didn't know, in terms of strategy and marketing and growth. So I could focus on the art. And I asked around, and no one knew of a company who would do that for individual artists and small companies. Many people are familiar with management consultants. McKinsey. Bain. BCG. The big ones. But someone who is familiar with the arts and who could be nimble and affordable. And what I didn't find one, I decided to start it. And yeah, I think that More Canvas, really what we do is we take care of the administrative, so our clients can focus on the creative.

In our show notes for this episode at princetonspark.com, you can find links to More Canvas Consulting and Princeton Arts Alumni.

In our next episode, we will talk about persisting through failure. We will resume our conversation with Pilar, and also with Vaidhy Murti, whom we talked to in the first episode of the Princeton Spark. 

But before that, we will talk to Stuart Ahlum, co-founder of sustainable sneaker company Thousand Fell. His first sneaker company ended without making as big as an impact as he had hoped. But in this venture, he hopes his newest line of sneakers has as little impact as possible. Download the next episode of the Princeton Spark, and you’ll find out what I mean.   

Many thanks to Brooks Powell and Pilar Castro-Kiltz.

The Princeton Spark is a production of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. 

Engineered by Dan Kearns and Dan Quiyu at the Princeton Broadcast Center and produced by me, Wright Seneres. 

Music for this episode is by me, Wright Seneres. Our theme music is by the Treadmills.

Special thanks to Rose Kelly, David Hopkins, Elio Lleo, Tiger Gao, Margaret Koval, Beth Jarvie, Kristin Haraldsdottir, Daniella DeLorenzo, Megan Donahey, Josh Carter, Morgan Spencer, and the whole Princeton Entrepreneurship Council team, which is Anne-Marie Maman, Don Seitz, Lauren Bender, Diane DeLorenzo, Neal Bituin, and me, Wright Seneres. 

The comments and suggestions box is always open – send an email to [email protected].  If there is a topic or a person that you think we should talk to, please let us know! 

If you still can’t get enough of the Princeton Spark, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram too @princetonspark.

The views expressed by our guests on the show are theirs and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council or Princeton University. 

If you rate and review us in the iTunes store, it really does help people find the show. If you haven’t subscribed to the show yet, please do so at princetonspark.com, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Thanks for listening!

Taking Risks in Entrepreneurship, with Vaidhy Murti '15, Daphne Earp Hoppenot '10, Marcus Stroud '16 and Brandon Allen '16.

SHOW NOTES:

Try Vaidhy Murti's new app Wit at the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Friendsy does still exist! Check it out at friendsyapp.com.

Visit The Vendry on the web or check out their très chic Instagram account. As of this episode release, they are also hiring! Contact Daphne.

TXV Partners can be found on the web at txvpartners.com. For partnership and investment opportunities, reach out to [email protected]. TechCrunch profiled Marcus and Brandon late in 2018.

CREDITS:

Produced by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. Music by Wright Seneres. Theme music by the Treadmills (Wright Seneres, electric guitar and electric bass; John Damond, Jr., drums). Engineered by Dan Kearns and Dan Quiyu at the Princeton Broadcast Center. Edited and mixed by Wright Seneres. Promotional readings by Megan Donahey '20.

TRANSCRIPT:

From the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council, this is the Princeton Spark. I’m Wright Seneres. 

On your way up the main staircase at the Frist Campus Center at Princeton, if you look to the right as you go, there’s a marble bust of a man named Cyrus Fogg Brackett. Legend says his classroom was the first classroom anywhere with electric lights, which he rigged up himself, sometime in the 1870s.

Brackett was the first Joseph Henry Professor of Physics at Princeton, named for that large, looming figure in American science. Based on Joseph Henry’s work in electromagnetism at Princeton, the unit of electrical inductance is called the henry. From Princeton, Joseph Henry went on to be the first leader of the Smithsonian Institution, in 1848.

All of which goes to show that the entrepreneurial spark has always existed at Princeton, at least that long ago.

The various people that make up the Princeton entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem have long been at work, taking risks to bring transformational ideas and companies to the world, in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity. These are the stories of Entrepreneurship the Princeton Way. Hello and welcome to the Princeton Spark, a production of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. I’m your host, Wright Seneres, social media and marketing specialist at the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. 

At PEC, we support Princeton-connected startups and help to build the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem in New Jersey and beyond. 

In this first season of the Princeton Spark, we’ll explore what it takes to succeed in entrepreneurship from experienced Princeton startup founders, investors, mentors, and more. We’ll look at their experiences in different industries, but we will likely see that these experiences...are not so different. Through these shared experiences, we will illuminate some aspects of the startup journey for the benefit of early-career and first-time founders.  

No matter what kind of entrepreneurial pursuit you’re involved in, you will be taking risks. This is true whether you have a Princeton degree or not. Meet Vaidhy. 

I'm Vaidhy Murti. When I was a sophomore, I wanted to build a better way to help college students on campus connect with each other. And I felt that when I was a freshman, the first few weeks like, it was this magical feeling where everybody was willing to, you know, reach out and connect and try to meet new people do new things, like you'd walk past someone on the sidewalk, they would, you know, look at you and smile and sort of look down at their phones. And I met a lot of like, my best friends in those first few weeks. And I think a lot of that was through serendipity and random chance. And I felt especially as I got older, as I you know moved on, like my next year in college, like those opportunities became like fewer and farther between. Everybody sort of was set in their social circles. And it felt as though everybody wanted to branch out and meet new people. So the core initial idea for Friendsy was, "Can we build a risk-free way to help college students, you know, branch out and meet the people around them?" And it was all started out of that. 

And then Vaidhy got to work. In December of his sophomore year, he built out a website for other Princeton students to meet each other based on their interests, with the same kind of double-blind matchmaking concept that Tinder now dominates. With a couple friends, they rolled out a big marketing plan, and Vaidhy went to bed. With great anticipation for half the campus to sign up, Vaidhy woke up, opened his computer, and found one person signed up. One. But a couple of days later, they had a hundred users. After a week, a thousand. After some time, they rolled out to other schools, then came a problem. 

What was happening was people would try to sign up for our app. And because the server was getting hammered, like every time, they would try to do anything, it would take, like 45 seconds to get a response. And that first impression is everything. So for a new user, when he walks into a new school, they download this app, and, you know, it's not working, they're going to immediately think, "Oh, like, what what junk, like, I'm not gonna ever use this again." So that was the first time where I was just like, "I don't know what to do, but we need to do something." And we try to, you know, talk to as many advisors as possible and try to get help from people who had a better understanding of how to set this up. 

One of these advisors, had them over. 

And what we ended up doing is we went over to his house one day. It was my CTO, another guy, and myself. And our goal was just to, you know, stay awake, until we were able to get our entire infrastructure off the single core machine into like the cloud, such that each part can be vertically and horizontally scalable, and to handle our traffic. And I remember, he told me, he was like, "Alright, well, your job is to buy as many energy drinks and coffee as possible. And so I went and I did this. And I remember, my mom asked me, she's like, "Where are you going?" And like, "Why do you have all this stuff?" "I don't know, Mom, like, we could be in for a long night." 

That night turned into 50 hours straight. Five-zero. Certainly a risky move, health-wise. But they did get Friendsy on the cloud. Fortunately, this was not a regular occurrence. But the startup founder’s life has a sense of responsibility when weighing the risks. 

I felt a sense of responsibility to everybody who is using our service to constantly improve it constantly try to make it better, I felt a sense of responsibility to my team, who believed in our vision and who believed in me to make sure that this can continue to be a possibility for them, that we could raise enough money that they would be able to get paid over the summer for their jobs, and then the bets that they were taking on me and this concept would also be good bets and pay off for them. 

It crossed my mind the most once we graduated, and I was, you know, I had to make payroll every month, so people can pay their rent. And that's why it really, really, really hit me where if I cannot do this, many people will be negatively affected. You try, I feel like you try as a founder to not think about that as much as possible. Because you have to stay positive, you have to try your best to believe in what you're doing, and to try to not let those negative thoughts drag you down. But they're very, very real. And I feel like people don't often talk about that. When I was in school, it was somewhat easier. We had people I would say, taking risks by working with us over the summer, working with us during the school year. And you know, not going to that big Google job or that big Goldman job or, whatever it is they're interested in. It's like you're taking a bit like, there's, there's some opportunity cost there. But then, I also feel like the types of people we attracted, in terms of a team are not the types of people who necessarily wanted to go work at Google, or you know, work at one of these big companies anyway. There are people who were really, really excited by this idea. 

And startup founders have their own personal risk calculations to make. 

So you never really thought, “I'm gonna go get a job at Goldman or Deloitte or something.” was that ever part of your risk calculation? Like I could take this high paying job, I’m a CS major from Princeton...I could do that, or work on this, work on Friendsy or work on a startup. Was that ever part of your calculation?

It's tough. It was definitely a part of my calculation. It was definitely something that I had to consider because all of my friends were doing it. And that's like, I felt in college, that this was the standard thing that people would do, right? There's a lot of peer pressure, and even external pressures from other people who are like, “Oh, this is like a fun little side project, but you're gonna get a real job, right?” And gratefully, I would say, my mom and my sisters have always been immensely supportive of what I've wanted to do, and that's helped a ton. I know, there are people in situations where that's not the case. But that, that really helped me. At least, worst case, if all else fails, and I fail at everything, I still have them. So in my mind, that's how I rationalize it. Like, how bad could it really be?

Friendsy did reach a point where Vaidhy had to decide whether the worst case was happening. You’ll hear about that in Episode 3, available now wherever you got this episode. 

Coming up next, we’ll meet someone who had a wonderful, perfectly stable, well-paying job with a great company that was going to send her to Paris to open a new office there. But this is an episode on taking risks, so you might guess where this is going. After the break. 

Welcome back to the Princeton Spark. On this episode on taking risks, we go to a different type of matchmaking. This is Daphne, founder of The Vendry.  

Daphne Earp Hoppenot, Princeton graduate 2010. And I am an entrepreneur based in New York City, who founded a company called The Vendry, which is an online platform that is connecting brands who are investing in events and live experiences with the venues, the vendors, and the promotional good companies that they need to hire for their events.

Before The Vendry, Daphne ran partnerships at Yext, an enterprise software company in New York City for seven and a half years. She opened the Berlin office during her last seven months at Yext.

And to be totally honest, I mean, I grew up at Yext, like it was my everything. And I, for the entire time I was there. I couldn't imagine leaving. And I think it just sort of came to me quite suddenly, but in a very peaceful way.

I agreed with yet to basically moved to Paris where my husband's originally from Paris, okay, and so he was going to move from New York there. And I was going to move from Berlin there to meet him and I was going to work for that office. And what I felt happening from my career, which just starts playing a little bit into the risk that I wanted to take was, I was really comfortable. I knew that I had everything I needed at Yext. I could sort of, you know, increasingly coast there and sort of maybe increasingly vague positions, as they were like, “Go help in Paris, we got you.” And that's great. But I was 29 years old, and I had no real desire to coast. And I felt that it was just the time to sort of say, you know, this chapter of my life was awesome. And I want to make sure that I can sort of stand on my own as a professional and as a wannabe entrepreneur without the comfort of this machine behind me.

But was her next move fleshed out? 

Not at all! So I literally called my husband in Berlin, and he had already quit his job and moved to Paris for my job.

WS: Wow. So that sounds risky.

Yeah. So that was a phone call, because it just literally came to me in a flash and I was like, “This is the cleanest, best time for me to transition to something new.” And so I called Pierre and I was like, “Hey, I know you quit your job to move to Paris for me, but actually, I also want to quit my job.”

And so I pitched him. I was like, “Look, look, we don't need to freak out. Let’s still move to Paris.” 

They still moved to Paris. They spent the next year living in Airbnbs. He worked on freelance projects remotely, and she set out to find her next path. 

And I guess through my soul searching in Paris, I just totally got that entrepreneurial bug. I love New York City, I'm totally obsessed with New York City and just the work culture here. And so both Pierre and I – he also was itching to come back and start his own company, which is an architecture firm – and so we decided to move back. I decided, I wanted to start a company and I had all these ideas. And so what I started doing was, I started putting together pitch decks as if I was pitching an investor something. 

I think there were two ideas early on, totally different, that I dropped fairly quickly. But the truth is that at the same time, I was planning my wedding – Pierre and I got married in Franc – and I was feeling a lot of these pain points around event planning specific to sourcing vendors and managing them, as the event planning rolls out. And so I started seeing in the back of my mind, I feel like there's room for technology to make this all much more efficient. Personally didn't feel much passion for the wedding market. Also, there's already been a lot of investment from the venture side into that market. And so Zola raised $100 million last year, Wedding Wire and The Knot merged and so I just didn't feel that that market was big enough to merit another big player. But tapping into my experience at Yext running partnerships, and then also the consumer thing, pop-ups everywhere, brands investing in IRL, I knew that there was something in that space.

Thus, The Vendry was born. And…

And so Pierre and, I moved back to New York last fall, September. And that's when I started talking to potential angel investors about raising an angel investment round. Also found out I was pregnant, which was a little bit of a surprise. 

New companies for both of them. New baby. New York. 

We were jumping into the unknown. We're like, we're doing this and we’ll figure it out, and that’s how it's played out.

And I was very lucky, I guess, speaking a little bit about just going through pregnancy as an entrepreneur, You know, every woman and every family is going to have a totally different experience. And any parent knows that. And So I was very lucky in that I had a very easy pregnancy. And it just I literally worked until the last day. It just wasn’t a thing. 

And we didn't have an easy start to parenthood. So we had some unexpected events that made the first two months of parenthood really difficult. But, you know, you just work through it. And we had supportive families. You know, we were very lucky in that regard.

It’s already been quite a journey. Daphne had this reflection on it. 

I think, you know, after you guys asked me to do this podcast, I thought about what I felt What I felt I had taken in this journey. And I think there's one big glaring one, which is that I feel I'm somewhat risking my reputation. And that is a risk that I took on without needing to, right? I think I built a very good professional reputation and networking at Yext. And I think I easily could have stayed at Yext and, you know, chosen that path or taken another high paying job somewhere else. And instead, I chose to basically start my own company, go to all the most powerful people I know and say, “Hey, make a bet on me, will you give me some money?” And that is a risk I didn't need to take and I did because I have conviction in myself and The Vendry. But it's a risk. It definitely is.

At the time of this episode’s release, Daphne is charging ahead, and The Vendry is rolling out. You can find The Vendry on Instagram at thevendry and online at thevendry dot co. 

After the break, we’ll meet two men who have embarked on a venture capital journey in an unlikely place. 

Welcome back to the Princeton Spark. 

On this episode about taking risks, here now are two men with Texas-sized entrepreneurship goals, deep in the Lone Star State. Meet Marcus Stroud and Brandon Allen, the founders of TXV Partners, a venture capital firm.  

Marcus: Yeah, my name is Marcus Stroud, class of 2016 from Princeton, I am one of the founding partners of TXV Partners, we’re an early stage venture capital fund, based in Austin, Texas with an office in San Francisco as well. We focus on early stage investments.

Brandon: Hi, I'm Brandon Allen, one of the other founding partner at TXV, as Marcus said, focusing on early stage investments, a lot of which is in the consumer space, in the enterprise space. And so I tend to handle some of the enterprise related companies.

The two of them set up shop in Austin, which is certainly on the rise. But frankly, not the most obvious place. 

Marcus: I will say this, it definitely is risky, because at the end of the day, two-thirds of venture capital comes from one part of the country, which is Silicon Valley. And then a larger concentration is also in New York City and in Massachusetts obviously. And Texas is kind of a state that is going through this initial growth of venture capital. Historically, we have had successful funds before from the likes of Austin Ventures or Sevin Rosen and we've never had venture capitalism, the level that other parts of the country have, regardless of how incredible our economy has been for the last 10-15 years. So there's definitely substantial risk that we're taking in saying that we're betting on Austin as a venture capital fund regardless of our network, the strength of it that largely resides in San Francisco and New York, and other places. But at the same time, venture capital is inherently risky asset class, you have to take that and double down on places that people may have some skepticism about. And, we are making that bet on Austin and Texas as a whole.

Not obvious, like Silicon Valley, although they do maintain an office out there. But they observed and calculated that Austin - and Texas - have the resources to make this idea work. 

Marcus: I interned in New York. And then, when I got into my professional career spent a substantial time in San Francisco, in various investment roles on behalf of firms in Texas and New York. And being in those places, really taught me that, man, Texas has all the resources, has just as much capital, that you would need to build an ecosystem. But I'm not sure that there are a lot of folks that have the same vision that maybe needed to create an ecosystem of something of that magnitude, or that could scale.

Texas is great, in that Austin has a great amount of venture capital funds, there's a ton of funds moving there. There are a ton of people moving from the Valley to Austin every day, because the cost of living is so much cheaper. And then the standard of living is a little bit higher, as a result of a lower amount of money needed to do well. But being a native Texan, I have a ton of pride in Texas. And when I was pitching Brandon on setting up shop in Texas, he saw the same vision in Texas also.

The two of them are building a $50 million venture fund. TechCrunch says TXV is the largest fund led by an all African-American general partner group.

Marcus: as far as we're concerned, we know, as of right now, we're the largest African-American GP-run fund in Texas. As far as the country, I'm not sure, because there's a lot of great firms out there right now that are building strong track records, building large funds like Harlem Capital and others. So we're not sure but you know, we're glad to be in the conversation.

TechCrunch also called the $50 million dollar number “lofty”, especially for two young, black men starting their first fund. In Austin. In Texas. But to them, it was almost necessary to set that as the goal. 

Brandon: We definitely set a pretty high target for ourselves. I think that was driven by the work that we felt that we could do with the perspective that we thought we could bring. $50 million for a first time fund is definitely a little bit higher than some other people would have chosen to do. But at the end of the day, when Marcus and I decided to do this, we decided to do so with a mission, and to have A mission driven firm. And so for us, the amount of the fund is just simply going to be a factor in the amount of good that we can do. 

Marcus: Yeah, I'll say this. I think in life, you gotta have big goals. And like, you gotta take crazy shots, you gotta do things that folks aren't willing to do. I think if we were in Silicon Valley or New York City, then you're playing by those standards, you’re playing by those norms, you’re playing by what the venture are rules out there, then yeah, you can call it lofty. When you're in a different place, a different ecosystem, you’re playing under different rules, the LP base is a lot different, things are just much different. And so I wouldn't necessary call it lofty, we're just playing in a different ecosystem in different worlds than the rest of the venture capital world. So we can do things a little bit differently. 

Brandon: I think whenever you do something, especially if it's atypical or ambitious, or whatever word we choose to use, is you have to be willing to risk it all. And so I think that if you set a goal, like raising a $50 million fund, when it's not done too often, especially at the ages that we are, you have to be willing to really go for broke. You know, there are times I think that, we think about what our lives were before. And you know, what we've given up, but I think we actually circle back to what we've gained, and what we've been able to do with the people that we've been able to meet. And so risk doesn't play into it anymore. For us what plays into it is, what's the scope of what we're trying to do, and how do we get there? And how do we execute on a plan that you had say, How much were you willing to risk to get this done? I'd say that we will continue to risk everything.

For Marcus, his risk taking is a kind of personal mission. His story is a classic, come from small-town poverty to make good at Princeton, and then get a great job on Wall Street. He thought he was set for life. 

Marcus: When I began working in my first job in New York, I wasn't fulfilled, I wasn't satisfied. And I actually got very tough phone call from family members saying, “Hey, this is kind of position the family is in right now.” And here I am on my first day of work in New York City, really happy, just got a great signing bonus. And I'm getting a phone call from a family member about how bad financially the family is doing. And I just knew in that day, it was crazy. That first day of work. I just knew in that day that my life had to be atypical. Because we didn't go through normal things. And I think if I was going to help change the trajectory of my family, you know, change generations, I was going to have to be the one to take a significant risk in my life, because I was the one who was afforded the opportunity to go to a place like Princeton, where those resources are numerous, that folks will back you up on your crazy dreams, you're taking a risk that they took themselves.

To start a venture capital fund in Texas, instead of going down a traditional Wall Street path, that takes some risk. But they weren’t completely starting with nothing. 

Marcus: We didn't have a numerous amount of money. We didn’t have an absurd amount of capital. We didn't come from wealth, but I will say this also: I would be lying if I didn't say we didn't have an upper hand compared to a lot of people. Yes, we didn’t come from wealth but I also was fortunate that I had somebody by the name of Torii Hunter and Katrina Hunter.

Yes, that Torii Hunter, the baseball star. He lives in the same small town as Marcus in Texas. Torii Hunter took Marcus under his wing, and gave him his first experience with venture capital. And now he’s encouraging him and Brandon - almost mandating them - to be bold and take on risk. 

Marcus: He said, “You've been afforded the privilege you have, by going to a place like Princeton, by having a mentor like me, you better take some risk.” And so I didn't see any other opportunity not to do something like TXV. It was just meant to be. 

TXV Partners is focused on millennial and Gen Z founded startups. When these startups walk in the door, this is how they weigh the risk.

Brandon: It’s a lot of different things. I think the first thing is, when the founder walks in the door, it's presentation. So presentations, first thing that anybody always notices about everybod y. After that, the second thing you look for is mastery. Does this person know what they're talking about? Do they have a lot of knowledge in this space? Marcus and myself, the rest of our team, we don't know every single thing about every single industry in the country. And we never will. But the people that we back should know, almost every single thing about the field that they're in. I think that's the second thing. As far as risk, there are going to be a lot of things that happen, just in the course of running a business. Pivots are going to be required. So the third thing after that is, you look to the person, to the level of grit and intensity that person has, Is this person relentless in accomplishing their goals? And so, things change, people change, markets change, company shifts strategy, but we're betting on a person or group of people to adjust to those headwinds or tailwinds, or macroeconomic factors or whatever else it may be. And so it really does come down to, I think, the person at the end of the day. 

For partnership and investment opportunities, send an email to [email protected]. 

Many thanks to Vaidhy Murti, Daphne Earp Hoppenot, Marcus Stroud and Brandon Allen. You can read the show notes for this episode at our website princetonspark.com. 

The Princeton Spark is a production of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. 

Engineered by Dan Kearns and Dan Quiyu at the Princeton Broadcast Center and produced by me, Wright Seneres. 

Music for this episode is by me, Wright Seneres. Our theme music is by the Treadmills.

Special thanks to Rose Kelly, David Hopkins, Elio Lleo, Tiger Gao, Margaret Koval, Beth Jarvie, Kristin Haraldsdottir, Daniella DeLorenzo, Megan Donahey, Josh Carter, Morgan Spencer, and the whole Princeton Entrepreneurship Council team, which is Anne-Marie Maman, Don Seitz, Lauren Bender, Diane DeLorenzo, Neal Bituin, and me, Wright Seneres. 

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On the next episode of the Princeton Spark, we’ll explore thriving under uncertainty. We’ll hear from two more entrepreneurs in the Princeton ecosystem on how they navigate uncertainty and succeed. It’s available now, at princetonspark.com or your favorite podcast app. 

Thanks for listening!

The various people that make up the Princeton entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem have long been at work, taking risks to bring transformational ideas and companies to the world, in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity. These are the stories of Entrepreneurship the Princeton Way.

Welcome to the Princeton Spark.

I’m your host, Wright Seneres, social media and marketing specialist at the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council.

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Music by the Treadmills (Wright Seneres on guitar and bass, John Damond, Jr. on drums)