Intro
Chauncey Hamilton is a General Partner at XYZ, a firm which was started with the thesis of backing Palantir alumni. I met Chauncey earlier in the year and had the chance to hang out a few times at Chapter’s office in NYC. I know founders who camp at their investor’s office, I don’t know many investors camping at their portfolio company’s offices. She explains how this helps her at her job, we discussed archetypes of venture capitalists and how to identify which one you are or what you are best suited to doing.
We have been back and forth talking about live experiences and media for a few months now and I was particularly interested because she started her career doing special projects at Wired in their prime when an index fund of the public companies on their cover could have made you your retirement money. Media and venture capital have always had an overlap, a ton of people with media backgrounds have become successful VCs or have been highly sought after. More recently we have seen people like Mario Gabriele (Generalist newsletter) joining Hummingbird VC, Mike Moritz is one of the OGs, another journalist who was at the helm of Sequoia. We talk about some of the transferrable lessons there in our conversation.
Some of these Palantir alumni are past and upcoming guests of the show like Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz (cofounder of Chapter, a $3B medicare and retirement company) and Ian Cinnamon (cofounder of Apex Space, a $2B satellite manufacturing platform) and having met them I can see why the thesis made sense especially given that Ross Fubini, founder of XYZ had been an advisor to Palantir in early days and has a special relationship with them. I had questions though about the thesis because the firm is now $1.2 billion under management and I am not sure there is an endless supply of top entrepreneurial talent at Palantir so we got intro discussing the evolution of the thesis and the role of networks in VC.
In some way both of us started our career working in a Chief of Staff/Special Projects like role which wasn’t called that at the time. The upside of that is an incredible apprenticeship that acts as an incredible catalyst for your career. I asked her about her lessons from her time at First Round where she got that apprenticeship and later co-running Dorm Room Fund as a young mom, flying around the country to college campuses. Having done that in my early twenties, I know how hard it is to build that network and also realize how it becomes a moat in the long term. We talk about building these unique founder networks at length and how she goes about it.
Hope you enjoy our hang as much as we did!
Watch on YouTube:
Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
01:28 - Meme culture and internet micro-cultures
03:16 - Career lessons at Wired
05:08 - The path to Chief of Staff
06:25 - Finding space for analog technology
09:12 - Category creation and business model shifts
12:10 - The culture of early 2010s Silicon Valley
14:34 - Transitioning into institutional venture capital
17:55 - Sourcing, due diligence, and building conviction
21:20 - Becoming the founder's first call
24:07 - Evolving through career and life phases
27:55 - Core thesis at XYZ: Accessing unique networks
29:47 - The Palantir thesis and the Forward Deployed Engineer
33:01 - Evaluating talent pipelines: The Chapter case study
36:40 - Observing operational cultures in-person
40:17 - Sourcing talent through the Dorm Room Fund
44:34 - Campus programs as durable marketing engines
53:19 - Being short-term contrarian, long-term consensus
59:29 - Josh Kopelman: Lessons in leadership and firm building
1:00:50 - Unvarnished feedback and the willingness to pivot
1:09:11 - Sourcing talent and building firm ecosystems
1:12:37 - The platform engine and the 10-year alignment test
1:15:49 - Closing
