E27: Jonathan Lacoste, Founder of SpaceVC on Building & Investing in Frontier Tech & His Own Founder Journey

IntroJonathan Lacoste, is the founder of SpaceVC, a pre-seed frontier tech fund with at least a 20% unicorn hit rate, this is my observation based on publicly reported valuations of the companies listed on their website. Before starting his fund, Jonathan was an entrepreneur, he dropped out of college to start his company Jebbit for which he raised for $90m and successfully exited to BlueConic. Their product was similar to a better version of SurveyMonkey or Qualtrix, like a Canva and SurveyMonkey fusion. Highlight of the company was that they sold billions of questions in consumer interactions with customers like NFL, NHL, eBay, NBA, P&G. Jonathan’s company was part of one of the early Techstars cohorts which is pretty successful and a mafia of its own. His cohort includes people like Nikita Bier, the founders of PillPack (TJ Parker & Elliot Cohen) acquired by Amazon for $750m, their MD Katie Rae is the Cofounder of The Engine at MIT, Kash Razzaghi who is now CCO of Circle ($CRCL) a $25B company. Highlights of what we cover: * Early investments in Castelion and True Anomaly which just announced a new funding round valuing them at $2.2B alongside friends of the show Colin Greenspon (E9 and E22), Seth Winterroth (E25), Thiel Capital etc* Why concentrated portfolio is a winning strategy* When to run away from a category?* How to identify top-decile founders? (by camping outside SpaceX, Anduril and Pentagon?)* What makes a great cofounding team?* Would SpaceVC ever consider getting acquired by a mega fund?* How the skill of debating is great for cofounding relationships * The State of Accelerators * Approaching venture as a craft business and learning from CJ Reim at Amity Watch on YouTube:Timestamps00:00 - Introduction01:49 - The state of start ups in Austin05:07 - Why venture capital is concentrating into fewer deals? 07:54 - The founder journey and transitioning to VC 09:59 - Discussing Castalian and True Anomaly 11:17 - How to find top-decile founders at inception? 13:26 - Why small concentrated funds win at pre-seed? 16:17 - What It Takes To Build a Frontier Tech Franchise? 19:42 - Frontier Tech vs. Deep Tech: Engineering execution over science risk 21:14 - Evaluating technical founders without data points 26:11 - The importance of speed and iteration 31:36 - Identifying market forces before they become obvious 36:45 - Finding insights at the edge of the venture lexicon 40:41 - Why now is the time to invest in biotech? 43:25 - Why being a founder is harder than being a VC? 44:54 - The power of a concentrated, hands-on portfolio 47:59 - Talent networks: SpaceX, Tesla, and the cultures of innovation 49:18 - The DNA of a complementary co-founding team 52:20 - The founding journey: From college dropout to multi-hundred million dollar exit 55:37 - Gorilla marketing and the early pivots in his company1:01:48 - How accelerators have evolved over 15 years? 1:06:27 - Brand degradation in the venture and education ecosystem <a target="_blank" href=