 Hello. Hello. Hey, Ella. How's it going? Hi, Seth. How's it going? I'm doing great. So you and I are I would say a bit Closer than most most fireside chat duos in that we Have started a company together In which we currently run We we live together We are we're raising a baby together In this case a real human nine-month-old baby and unlike most Co-founders we we sleep together Yeah, we've got that and so I guess the kind people at slush Some of them are inspired by our work in our lives and so Asked us to share a little bit of the behind-the-scenes of How things work in the world of Ella and Seth and so this this Talk is very unusual for us. Normally we are Talking about how to combine profit with purpose or how to commercialize scientific research or how to build legendary companies This is much much more personal Yeah, and there's two things to get off out of the way one is We fully acknowledge we're the last thing between you and the party and the second thing is that Yeah, unlike the two characters in the mr. And mrs. Smith movie We are not super spy assassins working for competing agencies Or are we? It's true. Our our our life is not very Hollywood, but it is I would say very Silicon Valley We or two entrepreneurs we met in Y Combinator Silicon Valley startup bootcamp fell in love And then ended up starting a company together which which we now run a tech tech firm And so we we've found a great meaning by being able to back entrepreneurs solving the world's biggest problem is their technology Entrepreneurship our entrepreneurs are addressing the climate crisis defeating disease ending malnutrition connecting the unconnected but we've also managed to Infuse the organization that we run in 50 years with a lot of the values of our relationship empathy vulnerability humor and even love Yeah, and I think in the early days we were really struggling to like So we started six years ago and in the early days we were like, you know, we were trying not to lean into too much into the fact that like we're Partners in life and we're partners in the firm And I think we thought it would be this impediment for the founders we talked to and for the investors we talked to for LPs and and For the team we ended up when they ended up hiring and I think Yeah, like there were those moments when when we I know you were like dreading questions about that, right? Yeah, when we would be pitching LPs LPs are investors in VC funds We would be dreading the moment that they would inevitably ask wait a minute. Are you two a couple? And we dreaded it so much that we we worked to find other examples Maybe there are some of great organizations founded by by romantic partners and it turns out that there are quite a large number Companies like event bright and Cisco and VMware and the gap And even some great VC firms so what my combinator of a true alumni was founded by a romantic partners lowercase capital Arguably the most successful VC fund of all time. Yeah, and I remember also You would commonly have this question when you were getting off 50 years off the ground like how can can this ever work like has there ever been a Successful VC firm that was started by partners and then you know Arguably one of their also most more successful firm venture funds is is why combinators started by PG and Jessica So when I think when we fully internalize that we're going to lean into this thing. This is who we are Things became really much more productive. So in preparation for today. We're thinking, you know, the slush team Was very excited to have us talk about sort of work life behind the scenes of 50 years and we wanted to make sure this is also Generalizable and and there are some principles that that that we realized that we have and we will tell you more about them that Hopefully can be useful for everyone else. So there's a few of those operating principles that That we we've seen and the very first one and the one that is the most guiding principles of everything We do at 50 years and I think it's it's a common guiding principles of many entrepreneurs is Throw your cap over the wall. And what does it mean son? so This phrase throw your cap over the wall actually is an analogy The it comes from this old Irish story about a bunch of Irish kids who are on this great adventure And on this adventure they came across a wall that just seemed too high to possibly scale They really wanted to continue the adventure get it get over to their side And so they took off their caps and they threw their caps over the wall Forcing themselves to figure out a way of climbing over and in you know, if we all think about our own lives There are so many times where we come across a wall that seems Impossibly high to climb there are times we come across obstacles that just seem too difficult to solve And what we found is that approaching these obstacles with this mentality of throwing your cap over the wall Just taking the first step such that you then have to figure out the next step to actually get to the conclusion You want is a really really valuable valuable way of thinking about things. Yeah, so we even when we were just getting started I was a partner at another fund said was still running his white combinator company And we would always have this vision that one day we're going to start this firm that's only backing Companies that are using technology to solve biggest problems in the world and it was always this mission this vision that you know One day when we're done doing what we're doing, you know, maybe five maybe ten years from now We're going to do it and I think in like a very entrepreneurial spirit. I think Two or three months into this conversation. We emptied our bank accounts. We at that time live We're living in the in New York City we moved to move back to Silicon Valley when when we first met at YC and we Moved in to a house and this I think will make some some some some of you happy Which was called the Moomin house It's a house in San Francisco that looks exactly like the house from the Moomin cartoon And we lived with 14 with 12 other people so 14 other people because this was And we lived there for two and a half of the initial years of running a venture fund because this was what we could afford Having emptied our banks accounts. It was before my other company was acquired. We we were Definitely even went in debt to get things off the ground But it was it wasn't waiting for the perfect moment It was essentially saying we're doing it and and it's going to get done by the nature of us Committing to getting it done and I remember when we first it sounds quite dramatic when you when I talk about it right now But the experience of what it meant to throw the cap over the wall at that time was that I remember the night we signed our first dogs first very small fund And we just started with like a prototype fund of a little over four million dollars six years ago We sign our first dogs. We had our first LP first investor I think we immediately committed to back a company and and that experience of that was that I was Crying that night and I was like, oh my god I really hope we can like raise the rest of the fund because like otherwise we're like in real financial trouble So like throwing the cup over the wall It's like not always the easiest way but it's it's like the fastest way to start sort of the snowball of the progress and the personal side of the story is I think it's it's it's a it's a personal example But I think it's exemplary of how we operate and how now 50 years with this bigger team operates is that I was in New York City In between jobs on a sabbatical and I was studying contemporary dance just for fun And I had a student visa, but I was already working as an investor So I stopped going to the dance classes and I got a phone call from my school. Hey your visa got cancelled you had 24 hours to leave the country leave the country and A few months into our relationship. We were like, okay, let's just bike to the city hall and get married So we can stay in the country and it was the same sort of like let's Do it and then commit to making it work six years later. It's working out. Yeah, we have I have a baby my incredibly romantic email It was just a email and all it had was a link to the immigration services website on getting a green card through marriage And my my romanticism paid off there so, you know This idea of throwing a cap over the wall if you're gonna start if you want to start a VC fund Right, you could spend months and months researching. How does one do that? You could talk to a lot of people or you can just Immediately start one and then figure it out along the way and there are a lot of advantages of throwing your cap over the wall You you get started faster the pace of learning through doing tends to be much faster than just studying without doing But there are also a lot of downsides because if you are learning through doing you are inevitably going to make a lot of mistakes when we started the fund we leaned on our own entrepreneurial experience raising money and so we thought it would work the same way and so we We pitched a lot of VC funds to invest in our VC fund And so we get a lot of these funds would take the meeting and then we'd have these great conversations And then it would come time for the ask and we'd say hey Do you want to invest in our fund and and then we would just get a lot of a lot of chuckles Didn't always work out so well. Yeah Yeah, so that's throwing your cap over the wall another operating principle that we have is one that This guy is deeply passionate about and it's this our very specific riff on Work-life Balance said what does work life balance mean to you? That phrase fills me with intense rage. I I I despise that phrase work life balance It's it's very it's very bizarre to me that it's even made it into the lexicon because we don't you know We don't have the same phrase about hobby life balance or Friendship life balance or family life balance right when you when you talk about balance you sort of imply that there's a scale And you have two things on the scale and they're sort of Opposing each other right they're pushing against each other But you know friendships Augment life and they're a part of life and hobbies augment life and they're part of life And if if you're if you ever feel like your hobbies are out of balance with your life You just get new hobbies and same thing with friendship family Maybe a little bit harder to get get rid of family But I think this idea of work life balance that sets up an expectation That work and life need to be opposed to each other and so we we much prefer approaching Work and life through the lens of work life harmony right where you you can have these two things Become sort of integrated right where your some of our greatest friendships are with the entrepreneurs that we work with we have Invited some of our entrepreneurs to join us at our burning man camp and camp with us That the head of our burning man camp joined our team And we've attended I think maybe two two or three weddings of our founders over the last last year and yeah And I we love European tech But I think one of the one of the special things about Silicon Valley is that this idea of work life harmony is It's pretty core to the culture of the place and it allows for much deeper bonds deeper connections Which can then lead to both more fulfilling friendships, but also much more productive professional relationships yeah, there's many problems even with San Francisco as a city, but but still it's a place where a lot of people intentionally move to Make something happen. So there's this like very natural flow between What people are working on and like what and and just the friendships they make and and it is just a very dense network of People who are sort of on a very similar journey, which which is really which is really great in many ways And so I think is this this sort of idea of integrating Work and life is very core to who we are. I don't think we could really imagine ourselves living any any other way Which which brings us to Another principle that we like to live by yeah another another principle that We live by is leaning to who you are and it there's there's many levels of it. And I think it comes with Sort of us doing what we're doing for the last few years and just there's some confidence in us being able to do it Well, but it's essentially trying to you know, we are partners in life or more partners At 50 years we were humans and we're humans with very specific set of values and interest and We see that in many of the companies we back that that the cultures They create and then when those come there with those companies kind of operate that their best It's really when they sort of fully and I'm not unable logically infuse who they are into those organizations and and actually Lean into their eccentricities and lean into those things that like often there's this like Initial instinct to like hide it because there's something really vulnerable about that. So I think we realize at some point. We you know that When we lean into the fact that you know, we We are together and then like we maybe thought like maybe that would be uncomfortable So some of our team team members or for some of the founders we back and we actually learned that And people really love it. I mean there's it's it's just kind of us showing up Authentically and and and people see that authenticity and I think there it sort of is helpful and many of the really vulnerable Conversations we end up having so we think companies and organizations should lead into who they are and and embrace it and there's also There's also a personal side of it where Sort of everybody comes I mean most founders we work with and and I'm sure everybody in this room has some superpowers And then the question is like how can you even stronger lean into those superpowers and and then acknowledges things You're not great at and then hopefully surround yourself with the people who are great at what you're not great at but you know for for For for said I guess the superpower would be that like he really cares about something he doesn't he doesn't He doesn't mind what people say like he's like not afraid to like rough Some feathers which is like not the skill that I naturally would have like I'm I'm much more of a Of like a conflict avoidant like wanting wanting to make maybe not a maybe that's not maybe the full fullness of it, but This is that superpower and then like he's not definitely not a spreadsheet person and definitely not a process person And then instead of like trying to become great at this. It's much more important For him for example to lead it and lean into this and and for me like I'm extremely sensitive And that comes with the baggage of maybe occasionally getting overwhelmed, but like my superpower is Being a people X-ray and like I just have really strong intuition in that in the world of tech and in the world of Everything we do. It's still very much a world of people operating those companies and that ends up being very very impactful for early stage Investing and that makes me a really great investor and it came with some, you know a degree of Vulnerability for me to to acknowledge that as well and very pragmatically Leaning into who you are and being authentic to yourself and letting your eccentricity shine comes also with some downsides, right? Because it's very scary because you think oh some people might be turned off by this You know, I think one concrete examples of Forbes Poland decided to do a cover story on Ella And they sent a Photography crew while she was eight months pregnant and so the photographer was sort of asking like oh Do you want me to you know hide hide the pregnancy and she said no, this is who I am. I'm a business woman I'm eight months pregnant, you know show it and so the article, you know Didn't mention anything about the pregnancy But in the photo she was clearly pregnant and there's no doubt in my mind that there may be some very conservative You know people out there who who might have been turned off because of that, right? But a lot of especially younger female entrepreneurs were really attracted to the fact that LFL comfortable doing that and just sort of Pragmatically the way we integrate some of these things into our culture, you know, you probably have been able to tell we don't really like corporate Corporate culture or corporatist mentality We much prefer a more human approach where you get to know people in a more casual way And so one way we've incorporated that in the 50 years culture is every every headquarters. We've ever had has been a residential home That we just happen to not live out of but work out of and always the offices convert to guest bedrooms So when our founders are in from out of town They'll crash with us. It's a shoes off policy. Our current one actually has a sauna Which if there are fins in the audience, you'll be happy to know it was actually made in Helsinki and imported into San Francisco Which we're pretty happy about another way we we incorporate this very pragmatically into 50 years is Empathy and a particularly empathy for the founder journey is very important to us And we realize that a lot of the common lingo of venture capital Tears one away from founder empathy a lot of the very common terminology that people don't think much about For instance Oftentimes this turn to this term exit is used right when I come in to get sold or IPO They say oh, it was a great exit right and it seems innocuous But if you really think about it the founder journey does not end when a company gets sold or a company IPOs If a company IPOs the founder might be with the company for another 20 years If the company gets sold the founders almost certainly with the with the acquiring company for two to three more years Right and so this idea of VCs calling it an exit is actually not really accurate to what the founder experiences And so we avoid we avoid words like we avoid words like that Yeah, we have a whole list of forbidden words and there's a swear jar where You it swearing is actually for for a game when it's actual swearing but when you use words that Diminish the founder empathy. That's when you end up paying money to the to this to the 50 year swear jar Yeah, and I think the had the final the final Operating principle that we thought it would be good to talk about is This idea of us being a happy warriors and what that means happy warriors is this term that we started using to To talk about the team and talk about the 50 years of founders that we partner with maybe about two years ago I think we like it crystallized and it's this idea that like for the work that we're doing and for the work that many of the founders are doing it's it's very important to like to have that the mindset of a Positivity and it's not you know either some people are born with more of this mindset on some people are Not it's this it's this constant work to be showing up In a way that's that that helps advance the work So we have founders who are working on the climate crisis We have founders who are working on ending animal agriculture. We have founders who are working on, you know ending malnutrition And it's it's hard. I mean, there's like days that are good. There's days that are bad and the way it We cultivate the culture of happy warriors is we We take care of ourselves. We you know look into the research of Of you know, how to slip sleep impact ass How does you know? What are the things I can like lower the cortisol levels that we have which is like you know stress hormone And it is sort of exercise good diet sleep For me personally, I mean said is more naturally a serotonin factory where he just essentially wakes up happy and jumps out of bed And he's like ready to do the work For me it was much a much bigger journey of of you know discovering meditation and and running and we have We encourage founders to go Through therapy if they need to and have coaches and it's just creating the support environment when where people Can be the happy warriors and do the work because it's you know We're talking about hopefully trying to contribute in a really positive way to some really massive massive challenges and and that just hard on individuals so Yeah, we're leaning into that every day That's why that's one that like we discuss every day and like it's people's personal responsibility, especially on the team to be happy warriors So we've been super fortunate to have built together an organization. That's thriving a Romantic relationship that's deeply fulfilling and now started a family with a non-corporate a human a baby The principles we shared have been have been super useful to us and navigating both of those things and hopefully they're They're useful to all of you and so at first I want to thank you for being a great partner in all of the things Yeah, and then and then second I want to thank you guys for for going the abundant free drinks And and food at a lot of the after parties to hear us ramble on for for 20 minutes Cheers. Thank you