Feb 19, 2019
My guest is venture capitalist Greg Sands. Greg is the founder and managing partner for Costanoa Ventures, an early stage VC firm based in Palo Alto, California. I can tell you I've met Greg and he's got passion. Passion for life and passion for entrepreneurship. Listen To The Podcast: Resources: Twitter: @gsands, @costanoavc Website: costanoavc.com Interview: Mitch Matthews: He worked, even as he was growing up, worked in a community bank, so he started to get to know the ins and outs of entrepreneurship early and up close. In college, he even co-founded a micro enterprise incubator in East Palo Alto. Before founding Costanoa, Greg was a managing director at Sutter Hill where he had a number of huge successes. Plus he was the first product manager at Netscape Communications where he helped to write the business plans. He even coined the name Netscape and built SuiteSpot a business unit. That unit went from zero to $140 million annually. Amazing. No schlep either. He went to Harvard for his undergrad, Stanford for his MBA. But most importantly, he's the proud father of four, and apparently around Palo Alto, he simply known as Sara Sands' husband. I know what that's like. I love it. Hey Greg, welcome to Dream, Think, Do, buddy. Greg Sands: Thanks. It's great to be here with you. Mitch Matthews: I love it. So, okay. Many, many facets to venture capital. How do you describe specifically what you do? Greg Sands: Well, our job is fundamentally to find extraordinary entrepreneurs working on important problems and then make an investment and support them through the entrepreneurial life cycle and journey. It's extraordinary work. I honestly feel grateful to do it everyday. Mitch Matthews: I bet. And I'm sure peaks and valleys, adventures and horror stories all go along in that. Again, as we got to interact even in Jefferson, it was just obvious you are in a sweet spot where you're really truly getting to do something you love. Now we've got a lot of different people, as you and I have talked about, we got a lot of different listeners to Dream, Think, Do, but a lot of younger listeners also just anybody that's kind of also trying to find that sweet spot in life. So I love to ask some questions about that a little bit as well. When did it start to sink in that maybe this was your gig? This was your jam? Was that at an early age as well? Or was that something you uncovered over time? Greg Sands: No, uncovered over time. I mean it's interesting. I would say my career has not been one that's been planned very top down. I tend to be bottoms up and kind of sense of direction and push towards it. So I was working at a consulting firm out of college. I was working with pharmaceutical R&D and environmental technology and I basically decided to go to business school at Stanford because I wanted to put myself in the middle of Silicon Valley. And I didn't know that much about it, but it felt like the right direction for me to focus on smaller organizations and entrepreneurial organizations and technology driven organizations. Greg Sands: And so I just throw myself into the middle of it. And then within that ecosystem just started exploring. And so I happened to be introduced to Jim Clark as he and Mark Andreessen were founding Netscape. So some of that is right place, right time, as you mentioned. Got to write the first business plan and shipped the first products and build the suite of Internet server software. And in the end, by virtue of being in and around that ecosystem, playing a hands on role first as a product manager and software business and in and around the emergence of the Internet, actually got a call about the venture capital business. And I hadn't really been thinking about it. But as I spent six months talking to people, exploring, getting to know the team at Sutter Hill, I came to to think that it was a place that would use a lot of my skills that would move some of my passions and the...