From Superhuman To AI: Venture Capital’s Biggest Opportunities With Andrew Romans Of 7BC Venture Capital

Venture capital is evolving fast, and Andrew Romans of 7BC Venture Capital reveals how his global “seven continents” approach is reshaping the game. From his roots in telecom and enterprise software to founding companies and raising capital, Andrew shares the journey that led him to building 7BC’s unique dual strategy: investing both directly in startups and in other high-performing VC funds. He unpacks what makes a disruptive founder, why emerging managers matter, and how cherry-picking direct investments from fund portfolios creates outsized returns. With insights on AI-native companies, the Superhuman-to-Grammarly success story, and the power of curated demo days, this conversation is packed with lessons for entrepreneurs and investors navigating today’s VC landscape.

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From Superhuman To AI: Venture Capital’s Biggest Opportunities With Andrew Romans Of 7BC Venture Capital

I’m excited to have a friend of mine and someone you’ve known for quite a while, too, Tracy, Andrew Romans from 7BC. It’s interesting. He approached me several months ago. He goes, “Scott, I’ve known you for decades. We’ve got to figure out a way to work together.” Now, we are. He’s been hosting events around the country and around the world on venture capital, as have I. It seemed a logical conclusion that we work together on events. He’s been hosting these events for entrepreneurs and also for venture capital firms around the world, in London, Dubai, Singapore, and around the country.

He’s our first, if not our second, fund of funds VC. Not only does he invest in top venture capital companies with a long history of success, but he also invests in the venture capital firms that invest in these companies. He brings an interesting perspective to the show. He’s a four-time author. His latest book is pretty much becoming the Bible for venture capital funds looking to raise capital.

I met him at a Mastermind a few years ago. We had a few meals together, sat next to each other, and started chatting about various things. His book is fascinating. I don’t know if everyone knows this, but I’m a huge reader. I read about a book a day. People are always like, “Here’s my book,” or “Here it is.” The next thing they know, I read it. It does happen. It has to interest me, though. I’ve got too much on my list already. It’s fascinating to get these inside views of how venture capital has worked, especially from Silicon Valley. I love the name of his newer book. It’s Masters of Raising Venture Capital: Inside Secrets from the Silicon Valley, which is interesting because so many of us are outside of it, trying to raise capital. You don’t understand. Why does it work the way that it works?

It was appropriate to have Andrew on the show because, as we’ve talked about before, the genesis of this program is to cast a light on venture capital funds that are lesser known and are struggling to get the recognition and ultimately raise the capital they need. We have someone who’s successfully done it for decades in Silicon Valley. He’s based in Austin now, but he travels around the world helping these entrepreneurs and venture capital funds raise capital.

Let’s hear from Andrew Romans.

I’m excited to introduce Andrew Romans of 7BC Venture Capital. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Scott, it’s great to be here. I’m waiting for the day they stop calling me an emerging manager. It’s been an emerging manager forever. That might be emerging until death. If there’s an afterlife, I’ll be emerging in heaven.

From Telecom To Venture Capital: The Early Journey

There you go. Before we get into 7BC, share a little bit about your background prior to 7BC and your background prior to the venture.

I started off in the telecom industry in the UNIX enterprise software industry. I started my own startup in the late ’90s. My very first startup, I raised $48 million pretty fast, and $25 million from Lucent and vendor financing. A bunch of VCs started plowing in. We did a $50 million pre-IPO. We IPO’d the company, and then I failed to survive the lockup. I was like some rapper who has made a lot of money and then got busted by the IRS. I’m kidding.

I didn’t get busted by the IRS, but my $300 million disappeared on me. After you’re worth $300 million on paper, it’s hard to work at Goldman or Microsoft. I did more startups, and then thank God, I managed to raise more venture capital. I sold the company. I knew a lot of VCs. I started The Founders Club, which was a venture capital equity exchange fund where, when secondaries were taboo, you could exchange some of your founder stock. You’re worth $100 million on paper, and you can’t even take your kids skiing because you’ve got no money.

You could own 27% and 3% of the companies now in my thing. The other founders come in. We all go out to dinner. I say, “You all own shares in each other. Let’s at a minimum introduce each other to the next funding round since you’re backed by the Ivy League of VCs here.” That went on for a long time. I then converted a regular vanilla 2 and 20 VC. We raised money from LPs. We invest in startups. We try to help them as much as possible. The early LPs and early funds were Founders Club guys who were VC-backed founders. Behind me are a lot of venture-backed CTOs. That was a bit of the background on how we got here.

Let’s talk about 7BC. First of all, why the name 7BC? Let’s start with that.

I’ve always been an international guy. I went to high school last few years in Paris, where there were 40 nationalities. My buddies are dudes from every country. Same with the girlfriends. It was fun. I meet someone from Kuala Lumpur, and I’m like, “You can invest in my fund.” A lot of other guys who never got out of New Jersey probably don’t think it’s even going to happen. We end up with LPs from all over the world. Also, I’ve written a bunch of books. They’ve been published in a bunch of languages. Conference organizers are like, “I’ll pay you to speak at my conference.”

I’m like, “All right.” I’ll go to Riyadh and maybe meet some family offices while I’m in Riyadh. Next thing you know, you’re looking like the big VC from Silicon Valley giving out your book in Arabic, and you’re raising money. We ended up with LPs from literally six continents. I don’t think anyone lives on the seventh one. We thought 7BC is seven continents, global, international. We have a network that goes beyond five white guys from Boston. We’re people everywhere. We have LPs from Africa, South America, Australia, Asia, Europe, the US, Canada, everywhere. We thought seven continents, global, borderless continents. We can take you anywhere. If it’s working there, we can run it at the flagpole to one of the LPs who happens to own and run that country.

7BC’s Dual Strategy: Direct Investments & Fund Of Funds

Talk about your dual strategy. We’ve had up to this point only venture fund managers who invested in companies. You have a dual strategy of investing directly in companies and the fund of funds strategy. Break down the thesis between those two strategies.

I went from being the founder to being the VC. We’ve been investing in startups and trying to help them as much as we can. After a few decades of this, I lifted my head up and looked around at the whole soccer field, looking straight down at the ball. I realized what’s changed here. This is what led us to this dual strategy of fund of funds, FOF, and cherry-pick or invest directly. When I got started, when I opened our office in New York City several years ago, and I was living in the Valley, but I opened that office and flew back and forth a lot, we were one of 38 VCs with a real team in New York. There was a blip in the dot-com when every banker took the tie off.

I jokingly said, “After the dot-com crash, B2B meant back to banking, where you belong, and back to consulting, where you belong. Leave it to the professionals.” Now, if you look at New York, nobody even knows how many VCs there are. I would guess there are 1,200. Probably, 400 are going to fail to raise their next fund or realize this is the worst job they have ever had in their life. They go back to what they did before. Not to worry, 25% of all YC CEOs who do even fail are going to raise a VC fund coming out of New York. We’ve had this Cambrian explosion of smaller funds that are founder-turned-VC. Even placement agents, like the guys who used to raise money, and I would pay them like a banker, they’re now VCs. Lawyers are VCs.

Some guy from Google who’s never had a startup said, “I’m sitting on a million. I’ll spray and pray Y Combinator investments, see if I get lucky, and then raise a fund.” The number of VCs has increased. The old, the original Sand Hill Road VCs that I was raising from, if they had a $50 million check or fund, that’s now a $700 million, $500 million, or $600 million fund. The guys who had a $250 million or $350 million fund, that’s now $1 billion, if not $6 billion. It stays private forever. People don’t IPO when they’re worth billions.

That means the hedge fund guys like IPO people, Carl Icahn, and Fidelity are crossing over and investing in privates. These are the big changes. What does that mean for strategy? We thought the fund of funds that are typically putting money into the funds, to some extent, do we even need them to have a layer of fees if you can go direct to five guys that went to Stanford that were the old ones? The returns they’re making are low. If your fund is over $1 billion, you might get $500,000 into the Facebook seed round and do great on that. When you invest the other $3.8 billion into growth rounds, you’re actually entering at a price point that’s not that far from the exit.

It’s even dangerously above. You’ve got to grow into it. It’s taking longer to make a small return. Their problem is that they can’t get the ownership target percentage they seek, which is that they want to own 30% of every unicorn at the time of exit. The first time you had a billion-dollar fund, LP said, “How are you ever going to invest in startups and return a billion?” They said, “Easy. If I own 25% of four, voila, there’s your money back.” If the company in the growth round is only issuing 10% stock, they’re not going to sell more than 10% because they’re going to double the size of their spend and double revenue in a year. They’ll buy the growth that the lead investor is only getting 5%.

It created an opportunity for smaller funds like us to sell part of the preferred shares we have in the best startups into the next funding round when we’ve gone from our entry point of $10 million or $15 million to the company raising $500 million, if not a few billion. Let’s invest in the smaller emerging manager funds where the fund size is typically below $150 million, some of them even $5 million or $10 million. They’re going to be investing more early. Net of losses, the delta between the entry point and the exit is huge. It’s like a classic venture.

If somebody is coming out of Palantir or OpenAI, the Scott Kelly network is unmatchable. I’ve got my network, but she’s got her network, too. It’s all OpenAI engineers who are going to spin out with all their checks and do something interesting. It’s to invest in these funds, maybe 20% of their LP base. Twenty percent of their money is from us. We can look at all their deals and, from our direct fund, cherry-pick the winners and get into the best deals. We can talk a lot more about it, but that’s the basics.

Mastering Venture: Andrew Romans On Authoring VC Books

That’s a fascinating approach. I love the fact that you are investing in funds because the genesis of this show was much like you said. Everyone is becoming a venture capital fund. The reason why we set up this show was an article that came out that out of the 3,200 venture capital funds, the vast majority went into 18 to 20 of the monoliths. They weren’t getting the alpha. They weren’t getting the delta you mentioned. It’s encouraging to realize that you have this dual strategy that you can bet on a multitude of horses in a multitude of ways. You’ve authored a lot of books. In October, you launched the Masters of Venture Capital. Maybe share about some of the books you wrote, why you wrote them, what the rationale was, and who you are trying to talk to in these books.

The first book was like a baby that wanted to come out. I was running The Founders Club. I had over 200 portfolio companies, which was part of the challenge of that lifestyle, that on my Sunday morning, every slot was overbooked. It’s ridiculous. We ended up owning a small percentage of the common shares. I experienced so many founders having success or failure, or how they solved the problem. When I was having those Sunday morning calls with all the CEOs, they’re like, “What should I do? Should I sell? My board member wants me to sell so we can increase their points on the board and return money to raise our next fund. I don’t want to sell. They’re blocking me. What do I do?”

I would often be like, “This other guy did this,” or “She did that. You may do the same thing. I can put you on the phone with that person.” Back then, I was trying to be a little more entertaining in meetings and make jokes. The combination of telling stories of what somebody that I knew did and making it entertaining, I was getting multiple times a day, “You should write a book.” I finally said, “I’m not going to tell the Jon Kraft story of how he failed to meet payroll at Pandora twenty times and then still got to an IPO. He founderized people with shares to stay and all kinds of stuff. Let him tell the story. I would interview him. The first book was interviews with a lot of real founders, like Jon Kraft at Pandora and Rick Marini, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of San Francisco.

You, in 200 pages, are collapsing hundreds of years of experience, a lot of painful, could-kill-you lessons from real people, spoon-fed yet. Book one is a bit all-encompassing. That was McGraw-Hill. I didn’t enjoy a big publisher with a slow pace. I’m a startup guy. They’re like, “This is coming out in three years in Japanese.” They were demanding huge advances from our Japanese publisher, Nikkei, which came from my Japanese LPs. I dumped them. Book two was Masters of Corporate Venture Capital. This is like, “Your large corporate be like Cisco, be a beneficiary of technological change, not a victim of technological change.”

This AI wave is kill or be killed. Every corporate should invest in VC funds and have those VC funds show them anything relevant to their business that’s a threat or an opportunity. If they want to, they can partner with that startup and maybe even buy 10% of it from their corporate venturing arm that did a fund of funds plus cherry-pick. They can buy the company with M&A, or they can say, “We should hire people who know something about AI and what the salaries should even be.” There are huge benefits to corporates. It’s also a little bit of a fundraising exercise.

We get corporates to invest as LPs in our fund. We took around medicine. We’re telling Telefonica, if you try to invest directly in a startup, you’re going to mess it up. Is an uncapped note a good idea? No, it’s not. Invest in VC funds first. Get them to hold your hand, bring you into the room, and guide you. Don’t use your commercial contract lawyer. Use one of our lawyers on Page Mill Road. That was book two. Book three was Masters of Blockchain and Crypto. I interviewed everybody. I became an insider of that technology, which is finally attracting entrepreneurs who are not out to end up in prison.

This last book is Masters of Raising Venture Capital Funding. How to raise Angel funding, how to recruit co-founders, board of advisors, and all this stuff, and then how to get to VCs, each step in the way, you can do everything right and kill yourself by self-inflicted wounds right at the end. It’s a bit of M&A, but it’s mostly fundraising, like the title says. That’s incredibly important. I allowed 12 or 14 years to go by, where if something happened in my daily life as an active practicing VC, I would add it to the outline. You’re forced to throw something off the boat to make room for somebody else on the boat. I let years go by before saying, “I’m going to sit down on an airplane and write this.” It’s mostly written in the air.

The Founder’s Blueprint: What Makes A Fundable Entrepreneur?

You obviously invest in a lot of companies and a lot of funds. You interviewed a lot of companies and a lot of fund managers. Talk about the attributes of a founder that you would invest with and a fund manager that you would invest with.

They’re similar and different. I like a founder who was born to disrupt that industry, so they understand the workings of that industry. They have existing relationships and goodwill with people who almost have guilt to know them a favor, as opposed to sometimes, it’s also interesting to get someone who’s completely outside the industry to disrupt it. If you ask a doctor, “Why don’t we use this medical device and do it completely differently?” They’re like, “That’s not what they taught me at medical school. That’s not the safe acknowledged thing.” I’m like, “What are you, a bribed politician by big pharma? What’s your problem?” That’s how they think.

Sometimes, the outside of the industry could be a new, fresh take on it, but more than not, I like that. Every VC will tell you, “I want a founder that’ll never quit.” The guy who’s already a billionaire, who’s worth hundreds of millions from their last IPO or something, you almost have to be like, “Is this guy going to get through torpedoes hitting him and everything’s going wrong?” The husband or the wife is like, “Why the hell are we not on a boat somewhere between Sardinia and Corsica right now if we’re billionaires?”

A little bit of grit and no plan B sometimes can be good, but I like working with repeat entrepreneurs. This idea of universal basic income and abundance of AI is complete crap. You tell a VC with a $100-million fund, “Are you going to stop working?” He’s like, “No, I want $1 billion.” Is he going to stop working at $1 billion? No, he wants $10 billion. This mindset, which is becoming more European, but it’s a workaholic San Francisco thing or New York thing, is good. We look at a lot of other factors, though, when measuring how fundable this is. I don’t know how deep you want me to get into frameworks.

I appreciate all that feedback. We talked about the entrepreneur side. You’re a fund of funds. There’s an ever-growing list of funds out there, whereas you’ve got athletes and musicians launching venture capital funds.

I got pitched by one.

I forgot the name of the band, but they raised $300 million in a venture capital fund. Their claim to fame was platinum records prior to that. Talk about it from an investor of funds. What attributes in a fund manager do you look for in making that investment?

Navigating The Fund Landscape: Attributes Of Top-Tier Fund Managers

Knowing our dual strategy, one side is to get into funds that have a track record of being in the top 10%. That’s going to knock out almost every fund you’ve heard of. All the big funds tend not to make these returns. They’re a little bit like a Hollywood film slate. Every third movie is a hit, but the other two suck, so it’s amazing compensation for the guy who’s getting 2% times ten years. It is 20% of $1 billion. They’re pulling out $200 million on a $1-billion fund. It’s probably bigger than that. They have a new fund every two years.

If they only get 20% of 1.2 on $1 billion fund, it’s not worth it to be illiquid for so long. You’re probably better off in the stock market than investing in a 1.2X returning fund. That team, the GP, took out $200 million in cash. He’s got some expenses, and then 20% of the $200 million profits. They get a $40 million payout for losing money to inflation. These are not funds we want to get into. I don’t care if it’s called Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or Sand Hill Road Fund. We don’t want to be in those. There actually are some big funds that do perform well.

We put tiny checks into them. It makes it easier for us when we’re dealing with a wealth manager in Singapore and Nebraska to say there are some IBM big blue names you’ve heard of to be in it. It’s a very small layer of our capital. We like the funds that are on fund seven that have been added since 2005. I call them OG emerging managers. The OG emerging manager probably thought they knew everything about being a VC in 2005.

If you talk to them now, they’ll admit that they didn’t. They now think they know everything about it. They tend to have some flywheel going. They’ve had the discipline to keep the fund under $150 million. They might have an opportunity fund, which we don’t want to be on, and which is to invest in their winners, where you’re getting closer to the exit and the multiples are smaller. The idea that it’s going to exit sooner, I don’t believe it.

It’s very hard to do a secondary because it hasn’t moved up enough. We like the sub $150 million fund that’s an OG. At the same time, the Cambrian explosion, how to address the pound-tier woman turning VC with her network is. We’re saying, “We are willing to be up to 20% of your fund, but we want to be in the final close. We want you to run around and raise money. We’ll be in the final close if it’s up with a positive TDPI.” TDPI is the Total Value to Paid-In. That measures if you invested $1 million into the startup at a $10 million valuation, you’re on 10%.

They raised at an $80 million valuation. You’re up. For bad math, you’re up eight X. It’s actually not true, but if you’re up eight X and they do a couple of those, some of them go to zero. It might be that they’ve been raising for 24 or 36 months. We’ve been tracking them. They’ve been coming to our events. They met you. They met me. You’re telling me what you think, and we get to know them. We will say, “The final close is coming. The fund is up on paper 2.2X.” If they maybe only raised $8 million, that’s a $2 million check from us. We put in $2 million. At the moment that we put in the $2 million, our $2 million is worth $4 million.

When I’m doing the financial statement for my LP from Africa or wherever, I’m saying, “Good news. The minute we invested, it was worth $2 million and went to $4 million.” We also look at every company in their portfolio, saying, “Do we want to invest in it from our direct fund? Do we think these guys are fundable?” We might see this guy’s not going to get funded. It’s going to go to zero, or they’ll be lucky to get anything out. These other ones more than make up for it. This one’s on a tear.

There might be one company in the portfolio that we want to own. We might not even love or even like the GP running the fund, yet I see one asset in there that I have to have. We’re going to get into it by being an LP in their fund that bought into that at $8 million or $3 million, something crazy. We’re begging for an intro to get in direct or the back door. The other thing is, if I see a VC with high TVPI, unrealized returns, it’s up on paper, and low DPI, which is distributions where they’ve returned cash, I say, “I got in your last fund at the very end. When are you going to raise the next fund?”

They’re like, “I’m exhausted. I need a vacation, but I’m going to have to go do it immediately because I’m out of money.” I’m like, “How much money have you returned from the other funds?” “Almost nothing. It’s only been three years,” or “It’s been a slow IPO market.” If you can return your fund one X, it’ll be much easier to get those same people to re-up in your next fund and even attract new investors to invest. If you say, “I’ve returned more money to my investors than 90% of all the other VCs in the Valley or the world,” it’ll make it much easier.

We step in with our direct investing fund and say, “What happens if we buy 10% of the shares that you have in your top five startups? That’ll enable you to return 50% of the fund. Let’s make it 20%, but we’re going to be looking for some discount on the last round. If they don’t like that, we say, ‘No problem.’ Go find someone to pay you full value. That’s great.” It’s not so easy to find a secondary buyer for these small slugs. Most secondary guys don’t get out of bed for anything under $100 million, whereas for us, we always like looking at a startup. We’ll do it. That’s an example of cherry-picking. That’s an example of a fund that has high TVPI and low DPI. Immediately, our spider senses start tingling when we see that.

Superhuman Success: A Case Study In Early-Stage VC Exits

Let’s talk to potential LPs in 7BC. Maybe you could share some success stories from previous investments or some of the port codes that are doing some great things now.

The most recent exit is a fun one. I wish they could all be Superhuman. We met Rahul. I was a user of Rapportive. I knew his previous company. I loved it. LinkedIn bought it. One of our portfolio companies, the founders were actually cousins of Rahul, all San Francisco stuff. They said to Raul, “Let these guys into your seed round. They’ve been enormously helpful. We like them a lot.” All the investors who invested in Rapportive wanted to invest in Superhuman

He was oversubscribed for his very first outside capital round. It was focused on optimizing email. I send a lot of emails, and I receive a lot of emails. I’m making intros for portfolio companies for the next round and all this. I make sure I look at every email productivity I’ve ever heard of, but this one looked like doing it the right way. He seemed like the right guy to do it. When he came into my office, I committed to fund their first outside capital round before he incorporated and before he recruited the first employee. He had an idea of who he was going to go to, but he wanted to recruit him, saying, “I already have the money.” He’s a smart senior co-founder.

Not everyone can be Rahul Vohra, but he pulled it off amazingly. I knew he would have no problem raising more money. I knew he would have no problem taking the same tech that he had made with the same team to make this work. It had all the pieces in place for a pre-revenue, pre-launch, and pre-product investment. We invested $8 million. I don’t know if I can say all this. I guess I can. It’s over now.

A year later, we were in the next round at $11 million. We were in again a year later at $41 million. We introduced him to First Round Capital, Josh Kopelman. They led around. We introduced him to Andreessen Horowitz. They led around. At that point, Andreessen is making the introductions to Tiger Global and IVP. They raised a big round. A lot of it was secondary, but they raised $75 million in their Series C in August of 2021.

I’m not legally allowed to disclose what it went for, but the company was acquired by Grammarly for a good chunk more. I don’t know if that’s legal for me to say, but more than the $825 million valuation of August 2021. Coming in at $8 million, coming in at $11 million, coming in at $41 million, exiting at above $825 million, that’s venture capital the way it’s supposed to be. If you had invested in that last round, you’re multiple. It’s not the greatest, but I guess in on August and out in 2025, it’s four years. I don’t know.

What things are piquing your interest now?

I’m not going to differentiate myself by saying it. For many years, we’ve been saying, and it’s documented because you write a book and you’re not going to go back and edit it. Software companies that are automating human workflows and then reimagine the workflow. A couple of humans are taking clinical trial data and making reports. They’re all PhDs with huge salaries. They begin to automatically programmatically get the data from the clinic as it’s happening and make a continuous report. You can push a button at any minute and get a report that’s using the brains of these super smart PhDs and makes it.

It’s programmatically disclosing the side effects that are written on the side of that pillbox or whatever. This causes hair loss. It causes weight gain, bloating, or whatever. We’re not huge in healthcare, but that’s an example of reimagining the workflow. You’re not going to fire this team of 30 PhDs that live in Basel, Switzerland. You’re going to repurpose them into something else. I don’t believe AI decreases jobs in any way. That’s like saying, “Now that I’ve got a $10 billion fund, I’m going to stop working.” That freak wants its $100 billion fund.

Thank you for your process.

I don’t think I’m that way, but I like the small fun and the discipline of the art of the game. I would say that’s a long way of saying AI. I was helping the guys at Palantir do secondaries every six months. For a brief period of time, I was under a BD doing that. It was an offshoot of The Founders Club. When there were no secondaries, it was us. As secondary started to happen and I’m losing people, they sell their private shares for cash instead of joining the club.

I was like, “I can get you a better deal. You’re getting taken advantage of by your VC, buying your shares at a 30% discount to the last price round, and saying these are common shares under the liquidation stack of VCs get their money out first. I’ll get someone to pay more than the last of the preferred. Your common will sell for more than that.” I was working with Palantir closely. I thought, “This is the answer. This is the holy grail to everything.” We need a Palantir for every single idiosyncratic industry.

The way this is done, we should be doing the same basic AI stuff of ‘if this, then that’ pattern slam. I got very excited about Palantir for everything, if you know how Palantir works. With the open AI, we all had the aha moment of, “Write a love letter that rhymes and raps. Do it in Japanese.” They were like, “Holy shit.” That being applied to everything, it’s now an arms race and kill or be killed situation of AI native companies are destroying incumbents or forcing the incumbents to buy them.

Why 7BC? Answering The Call For LPs And Wealth Managers

It’s every day in the news that you hear that. For potential LPs that want to invest in 7BC and wealth managers that represent those that want to invest in venture, why your fund and why right now?

I certainly don’t want to violate the ban on general solicitation and be saying that we’re soliciting anyone to sell securities and shares in a VC fund. We do have a lot of in-person events and opportunities to meet with people or get to know people, and develop relationships over Zoom and in person. When it’s suitable at the right time, they can come. You’re saying, “Why us?” Somebody told me at an event that we hosted in Singapore, “I don’t like investing in fund of funds because it’s a layer of fees on top of a layer of fees. I can directly invest in these guys myself, the VCs that were in the room.”

I said, “Do you know any VCs in Utah?” He’s like, “No.” “Do you know any VCs in New York?” He’s like, “I know some.” I’m like, “Name five VCs in New York with a fund under $150 million, and if you look through all their portfolio companies.” I think that every big endowment should create a business unit to do the work. They should. I don’t know if they’re going to do it or if they are doing it. Trust me, I’ve been around for forever, trying to raise money from the fund of funds that I’ve heard of.

The fund of funds were either too viciously invested in cherry-picking that we’re not investing pre-revenue enough for them to come in when we want to come in. They didn’t have a lot of money, or they’re like, “We don’t want to invest in anything under $250 million. Our minimum check is $25 million. I want to be 10%. I’m not going to be more than 10%.” They’ve forced themselves into the low margin sector of the market, which is to stay private forever and invest at a $750 million pre and get out at something north of $825 million. This is what happened on the last round of Superhuman. It was a $750 million pre and a $75 million primary for that.

I would say that there are going to be others who look at what we’re doing and say, “Why don’t we try to do that?” I feel like we knew the founder before the founder turned VC. When COVID happened and I heard a lot of Sand Hill Road guys going, “I can’t invest in a startup over Zoom,” I’m like, “First of all, are you going to smell her hair like a creep?” We always had New York and Silicon Valley. One of us was always investing in Zoom.

I also said, “What kind of VC are you that you’ve never met this founder before? This is her third startup.” I would say that being out there and an ecosystem builder, much like you, Scott, of all the events that you do, you help the other person first and see what good karma comes back eventually. We know all these people going back for so long that we have a little bit of a sense of which one to back, not to mention doing the math on everything that’s happening inside of these funds.

You wrote the book on it. Anything else you want to share, or some final thoughts you want to share with our audience?

One thing that we are committed to doing is we used to go to a lot of family office events or VC meet LP events. We found that it felt like ladies’ night, where the women drink for free and the guys pay. It was like, “It feels like a lot of guys in here,” or “If that person’s not paying, they should be paying because I don’t believe they’re allocating. I figured out that they’re not.” There were a lot of fake people who said that they were a family office to get the free suite at the Ritz-Carlton that we were paying for. They say they’re a family office at an event.

The next week, they’re like, “Pay me $80,000 retainer.” I’m weaseling my way by lying that I’m an allocator to five more of these events in the next six weeks. We thought, “Why don’t we do our own events? Let’s do our own events. We’ll be like Y Combinator.” Another key thing to know is that for most of the other events, the only criterion for stage time is that someone paid them money. If you say, “I’m allocated with the Jeffrey Epstein fund,” they’re like, “Sure, whatever. Pay me the $50,000, and you’re on stage.”

They don’t care about anything else. We thought, as the FOF, and looking to cherry-pick and develop relationships with VCs to invest in our deals, we invest in their deals, and all that. We’ll have merit-based. They’re selected based on performance and other subjective metrics. We have top decile funds presenting. We fill the room with another 80 VCs or 50 VCs that are out there. We vet. Right before this call, I was researching who had applied for the free ticket. I’ve been issuing one acceptance for every ten because people say they’re an allocator.

I’m like, “You don’t look like an allocator to me, but I’m happy to tell you about this if it’s true. Happy to get on the phone.” It’s called the Global VC Demo Day event circuit. We’re doing it twice a year in Silicon Valley and twice a year in New York. We’re doing two events in Austin. We’re doing one in Miami. We’re doing an event for founders and VCs in DC coming up in September. We did London, which we’ll do once a year, Dubai, once a year to get all the GCC people together, and Singapore, which is an amazing place.

We probably should be doing more, but there’s only so much travel you can do. This enables us to keep a lot of relationships going. Primarily, we’re looking for VCs and allocator LPs to come together. There are a lot of other important people that are the glue that keep the system together, that we like working with, and are super important. We want to keep a high density of allocating LPs and VCs. That’s an event.

With that, where can they learn more about 7BC, you, and your events?

I am easy to find on the internet and LinkedIn. I’m Andrew Romans. Our website is 7BC.vc. With your network, with all these emerging managers that you’ve got, and people that are interested in this, my email address is Andrew@7BC.vc.

Andrew, thanks for being on the show. For all of you tuning in, I encourage you to follow up with Andrew, go through his books, and listen to what he’s talking about. He knows what he’s talking about because, like I said before, he wrote the book on venture capital. Andrew, thank you for being on the show.

Thank you, Scott. So great to see you. See you soon in person. I think we’re going to meet up in September.

Absolutely. Take care, guys.

Bye for now, buddy.

—

Scott, that fund-to-fund that you’ve referred to at the beginning, and Andrew was talking about, is unusual.

It is. The reality is that smart investors realize they can get diversification with individual investments, or they can get diversification through a series of different funds. They can invest in individual stocks, or they can invest in a number of different mutual funds, which in turn own hundreds of stocks. Andrew’s taken this approach of backing these top venture capital funds with his capital. What it does is that he can’t be a no-fund manager, regardless of what they say. He can be a specialist or an expert in every sector, every industry, or every region. This provides an opportunity for him to take his expertise in investing in very fast-growing individual companies and apply that same ability and that same skill set to invest in good fund managers doing the same.

That’s probably why we didn’t hear of it here, because when you’re an emerging fund manager, you’re usually focused on the sector you know best. That’s why it hasn’t come up in our show so far.

You’re finding many of the folks on our show have got their investment in their funds from a fund of funds. It provides an interesting perspective. For the emerging managers who read this episode, they’re going to want to learn more about what Andrew’s doing and probably get in contact with him.

You were talking some more about the events you guys are going to be doing together. I’m excited about that because there’s a real synergy to your audiences and what you can bring to each other. He was doing some of these Global VC Demo Days. Is that going to continue?

Yes, he’s been doing them for years. If you go to his website, there’s access to all the events he’s doing. We’re going to be working and partnering together on several of his events in New York, San Francisco, and D.C. Later in 2026, it’ll be Singapore, Dubai, and London. He’s been in the VC event business probably as long as I have. It seemed to make sense that one plus one could at least equal two and a half.

It definitely will. I look forward to seeing what you both do. The perspectives that you both bring, because you have a little more experience on the nitty-gritty founder side, and he has more of the big fund side. You are broadening that pool that the two of you have out for both of you. That’s going to be fascinating.

No, the reality is between the two of us, we can pretty much spawn between pre-seed and all the way up to an exit. It provides an interesting opportunity. For me, it’s a good opportunity to get the Emerging Managers into more of the folks that we want to talk to.

Even more funds, even more managers. I so look forward to it. Scott, this is my last episode being your sidekick. It doesn’t mean I won’t pop in. It doesn’t mean I won’t comment on social because I definitely will. You know I will. You have done such a fantastic job on getting all these that I can step away now and do some other things that I’m working on because I got to put my founder hat back on and get some work going again. I will touch base with everyone.

Let me do this. Why don’t you share with the audience what you have going on?

That’s so sweet. I appreciate that. I have been working on this podcast production company that produces this show right here, the Emerging Managers. We have been working on that since 2017. Early in 2018, we added AI. We added AI way before anyone else did. We realized we had hit on an actual creation process for a large language model, a model creation system. We have the basis for that. We decided to spin it off. The spinoff is happening. I will be solely going over to that new company and working on the finality of our model.

You and I both know that in retail and in e-commerce, it’s called last-mile delivery. That’s what our large language model delivers. It delivers that last-mile delivery. There are some people out there who say, “Our transcription process, our speech to text, all of this is correct. Everything you do in AI is based on that.” It’s not. It’s about 70% correct, no matter what anyone says that theirs is 90%, 95%. I’ve even heard it’s not true. It’s about 70% correct. That last 30% is huge.

They’re like, “It’s good enough for the AI to learn.” That last 30% means your brand is spelled wrong. My name is spelled wrong. It means the important stuff is missing. It means it didn’t get delivered to your doorstep. That’s what our model can provide because we’ve been doing it so long. We transcribe, by human and by AI, 50,000 episodes to train our original model. We’ve gone even beyond that. It’s pretty cool. I’m excited about it.

We’ll probably be interviewing you sometime soon, Tracy.

We’re not raising or anything, so not right now. Who knows? We might be.

We never know. Thanks for being my training wheels. Hopefully, I will continue to ride the bike straight.

I know you will. I’ll check in on all of you. You all can check in with me anywhere on social media. Check in with Scott. Do not forget to go to EmergingManagersPodcast.com because that is the most comprehensive place for you to get everything you need on this show.

Important Links

• 7BC Venture Capital
• Masters of Raising Venture Capital: Inside Secrets from the Silicon Valley
• Andrew Romans on LinkedIn
• Palantir
• Jon Kraft on LinkedIn
• Masters of Corporate Venture Capital
• Masters of Blockchain and Crypto
• Josh Kopelman on LinkedIn
• Andreessen Horowitz’s Website
• Global VC Demo Day Events
• Andrew Romans on X
• 7BC Venture Capital on Facebook
• The Entrepreneurial Bible To Venture Capital on Facebook