Haystack's Semil Shah on building the firm from the ground up, portfolio models, and the state of VC today

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Today’s episode is with Semil Shah, founder and general partner at Haystack, a pre-seed and seed-stage supporting outlier founders. Haystack’s portfolio includes DoorDash, Instacart, HashiCorp, Figma, Applied Intuition and many more.Semil is also Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and in 2017, was selected to the Midas Brink List.  He previously was a venture partner at both GGV Capital and Bullpen Capital.We covered topics like the challenges Semil faced when trying to get into VC, how he’s evolved his approach over the years and his current and future view of the industry. A message from our sponsorAnduin is revolutionizing fund management with streamlined fund operations, digitized fund subscriptions, and real-time status updates. Traditional, paper-based subscriptions are costly, tedious and error-prone, with up to 80% of submitted documents being incorrect and considered not in good order.Fund managers lack real-time visibility, facing manual processes, endless back-and-forth and a mountain of emails, documents and spreadsheets.Anduin’s investor onboarding workflow improves the investor experience, bringing clarity, guidance, and efficiency to fund subscriptions which drastically reduces error rates.The Anduin platform allows GPs to perform fund operations simply and efficiently with improved data accuracy, freeing up time so they can focus on what they do best... investing.For more information, or to arrange a demo, visit fundsub.io/ventureunlockedIn this episode we discuss:02:26 Semil’s path into VC and some of the challenges06:00 Initiating relationships with LPs12:54 Scaling as a venture firm16:15 Semil’s portfolio construction methodology20:30 Were there any transferable elements from LSVP and GGV to running a seed fund?23:21 Semil’s take on differentiation31:06 Do LPs push venture firms to be too big?33:25 Redefining venture scale outcomes40:08 What it means to be disciplined41:15 Semil’s view of the venture landscape today43:50 The most counterintuitive lesson he’s learned being a VC46:07 Underrated characteristics of successful VCsMentioned in this episodeHaystack VenturesI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Semil. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com