Charting the Path to Success in Tech Investing: An Exclusive Interview with GoAhead Ventures’ Founding Trio
GoAhead Ventures (“GoAhead”) is a Silicon Valley based venture capital firm founded by three Stanford graduates: Takeshi “TK” Mori, Clancey Stahr and Phil Brady (the “Managing Partners”). GoAhead’s Managing Partners met through their respective Stanford networks. Takeshi “TK” Mori and Clancey Stahr met in 2013 at a cafe on Stanford’s campus and worked together on various investment projects before deciding to launch GoAhead Ventures I in Q4 2014. Clancey Stahr and Phil Brady met in 2014 sitting next to each other in class at Stanford and worked on a class project researching the Stanford entrepreneurship ecosystem. At the time, Clancey was working with TK on miscellaneous technology investment projects and Phil was working at Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley based venture capital firm. The three partners joined forces in launching GoAhead Ventures I while Clancey and Phil were still undergraduates.
How did you break into tech investing?
Clancey and I broke into tech investing by getting our hands dirty and going on and doing some small deals. Our first fund, GoAhead Ventures Fund 1, was established through a process of rolling small closes over a period of more than two years. So, as we would find new LPs, we would do deals and learn by doing. Unlike trading public equities, it is much more difficult to gain that ability early in one’s career.
What is it that excites you about investing?
I think that our Stanford roots explain a lot about us and why we’ve been excited about startups and investing long before the onset of GoAhead. It doesn’t take much to catch the startup bug if you spend any sort of meaningful amount of time on Stanford’s campus. When it comes to investing, our team collectively enjoys the thrill and fulfillment that comes with supporting some of the most talented and ambitious people on earth. Generally speaking, startup founders are some of the most passionate people in the world, and they’re often tackling humanity’s biggest problems. We find ourselves inspired every day by founders and it motivates us to work smarter and harder so that we can identify the best founders who will have the greatest chance at solving the world’s challenges — which in turn should lead to the best return for our investors.
What has been your biggest challenge when it comes to finding the “right deals”?
At GoAhead, we are laser-focused on choosing people. Most of our biggest misses historically have been situations where we loved the team but frankly hated the idea. And that dislike for the idea has turned out not to matter compared to being really impressed by the founder(s). As a result, our biggest challenge when it comes to finding the “right deals” is being able to see the absolute best founders and identify them as efficiently as possible. From there, we want to make sure that they feel great about their interactions with GoAhead and that whether they receive an offer or not, they go out and tell the other great founders in their network about our firm.
What major trends do you expect to see in technology innovation over the next 5 years that excite you?
Predicting trends in innovation before they’re obvious is the name of the game for early-stage investing, but it is very difficult. At GoAhead, we take a somewhat contrarian approach. After 9 years of early-stage investing, we’ve found that some of our best founders have pivoted multiple times and are exceptional at adapting to market changes and new technologies. For this reason, we are hyper-concentrated on picking great founders that can predict the future for us.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
My advice to founders with an idea is to spend less time in the “idea” stage and more time on execution. We see time and time again that many of the smartest people that we interact with have great ideas that they think about, but they get stuck at the intersection of thought and action. The reality is that ideas aren’t worth all that much, and what separates great founders is what they are able to go out and build and bring to users. This is such a highly iterative process that the only way to really get any sort of momentum going is to get SOMETHING in someone’s hands and learn what they like and dislike and build from there.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
We aren’t active on social media at the moment. We see a lot of funds that write a lot of thought leadership to garner the attention of founders and it’s nice material. But for us, we really try to focus fully at the moment on our product, which is our process of allowing founders from anywhere in the world to get in front of our full partnership via our rapid video pitch process. So, we encourage any founder readers to check out our rapid pitch process on our website and ‘go ahead’ to submit a pitch if the time is right!
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
