Emily Man’s Post

As EVP of Global Financial Products at Brex, Erica Dorfman took Brex global into 100+ countries. Emily Man sat down with her to unpack the work that went on behind the scenes in Part 1 of this series.

Repeat founders are statistically more likely to succeed in their next business. At Primary Venture Partners, they are also more likely to tap into our portfolio support resources. We talk about Primary's "Impact" team as our firm's core product; we have 20 former operators on our full-time staff working deep in the trenches with our portfolio companies. These operators are people who have truly been "been there, done that" in their careers: people like Rebecca Price (former Chief People Officer of Capsule, Enigma, Sailthru), Lisa Lewin (former CEO of General Assembly), Jason Gelman (former head of Revenue Strategy & Operations for Compass) and Brian Gwiazdowski (former VP Finance at Watermark and investor at Vista), among others. I like to say that no one tells the story of what you do better than your customers, so I'll quote one of ours: "the currency most VCs offer is their networks; for Primary, their currency is doing the work." Whenever I detail our approach to someone for the first time, the usual reaction is, "wow, that's a great benefit for first-time founders," and I always challenge that point. Anecdotally, it's always felt as though the REPEAT founders were Impact's power users (we've long hypothesized that this is because they know the value of free work!). Kidding aside, repeat founders are more experienced and are smarter and better consumers of our resources as a result. But that data was anecdotal, so to put my money where my mouth was, we ran an analysis of year-to-date Impact utilization cut by founder archetype: 1) serial entrepreneur, 2) first-time founder with prior executive-level experience and 3) first-time founder without prior executive-level experience. Much to my delight, the results showed nearly identical utilization and engagement levels for each group (there are four core functions of Impact: go-to-market, strategic finance, people/networks and strategic leadership, and the average portco is engaged with 2/4 each quarter). Interestingly, the more experienced founders yielded higher net promoter scores, likely because they have a baseline for comparing Primary to other investors. This chart does not report on frequency of engagement, but I can confidently tell you that serial entrepreneurs are MUCH more frequent / repeat consumers of the Impact product. No matter who you are as a founder or how well-connected or experienced you might be, you will be under-resourced in your earliest days of company-building. Primary is here to help.

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