Transforming Early Stage Investment: Jonathan Wallace’s Expert Dojo Innovation

Anthony Codispoti (00:01)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotispodi and today’s guest is Jonathan Wallace, partner at expert dojo, the most active international early stage startup accelerator in Southern California.

They invest up to $100,000 in each startup to help them gain traction and scale quickly. Focusing on pre-seed and seed stage companies, Expert Dojo supports passion-driven founders, including many from minority and female-led backgrounds. Since 2018, they have invested in over 300 startups worldwide. They also plan to commit $45 million to global startups by fiscal year 2028.

As partner, Jonathan sources companies for their program, conducts due diligence and manages follow on investments, leveraging a vast network of influential investors. He has played a key role in expert dojo’s growth since joining the team in 2013. Over the years, he has contributed to more than 260 investments across diverse industries, strengthening expert dojo’s presence globally. Now, before we get into all that good stuff,

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Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, Jonathan Wallace from Expert Dojo. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Jonathan Wallace (02:07)
Yeah, thank you for having me. Really excited to share some fun stuff here.

Anthony Codispoti (02:10)
So I referenced in the intro that you joined the team in 2013, but you’re one of the founders of the team, is that correct? Okay.

Jonathan Wallace (02:17)
So I’m on the founding team, would say on that.

I would say Brian is the one whose inspiration really drove this, but I was with him in the very beginning and I’ve been on the founding team. So yeah, we’ve I’ve known Brian since 2013. It really formed over that time. So from 2013 to 18, it was more of just finding what we could do together, where that actually what that actually meant and then really officially launched it in 2018, 2019. And I’ve been leading that side of things ever since. yeah, on the founding team, I’ve been here since the very beginning, leading the investment side for Brian here.

Anthony Codispoti (02:48)
Okay, so let’s rewind a little bit, because I want to give people a bit of your background, what you were doing before you and Brian connected and created Expert Dojo. Give us a little bit of sort of the playground that you were running in.

Jonathan Wallace (03:02)
Yeah, so my whole background comes in the startup world. So I think when you’re working with VCs, you either get people who went through investment banking or in startup. I came from the startup side of things. So had a company back in 2012 that I was working for a few years. Through that got really involved in just the venture ecosystem because obviously I needed different things, whether it be fundraising, whether it be the sales side of things. So really leaned heavily into the network that we had there was always.

Anthony Codispoti (03:27)
What was the nature

of your startup, Jonathan?

Jonathan Wallace (03:30)
It was in the real estate technology business. So that’s how I got connected with Brian to his his background comes from that space. There was a lot of synergies between the two of us. He had just moved to LA, I was operating out of Los Angeles as well. So got connected there too, and really ⁓ got got to know that network there and relied really heavily on what they were doing there too. But yeah, worked with that company for four or five years. Eventually, Brian was getting involved in the fund, I had obviously built up a lot of investor connections working with just the VCs that I had met.

primarily in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Got to know that side of things too on the LP side of things. So was able to help raise that fund through that. ⁓ But really it was off to the startup side of things too. So I tend to come into most startup conversations with a little more empathy than most VCs are. ⁓ I know how difficult it is to be pitching to VCs day after day and being told your baby’s ugly and that it’s never gonna work and that you’re stupid for trying and ⁓ it’s tough. obviously,

Part of my job is telling companies, I try to be helpful where I can. But yeah, I think coming into it from the startup perspective, it gives you lot of ideas of what they’re going through on a day-to-day basis. So I use a lot of that experience with my own company, with how we were doing things before, just with the companies that Brian had operated before, and just the rest of our team. Almost everyone on our team here has had their own startup to varying levels of success, but they know how it is to actually be an operator and to see that.

Anthony Codispoti (04:52)
been there, you’ve done that, you understand

the battle pains that go along with it.

Jonathan Wallace (04:57)
Yeah, it’s not easy. Yeah, there’s a lot of sleepless nights. You’re constantly emailing, you’re constantly selling people on what you’re doing, telling them why your company is going to be the one that breaks through and being told that you’re wrong. So it’s tough process. And there’s obviously ⁓ a lot of companies that do fail, but it’s really breaking through a lot of those things that gets you there and gets you to the next level of success in these companies.

Anthony Codispoti (05:18)
Okay, so you and Brian met back in 2013. You were both working kind of in the real estate space. He was at a large company, you were doing real estate tech. Something between the two of you clicked and you’re like, hey, we need to work together on something, but it kind of took a little bit for that to sort of shake itself out, right?

Jonathan Wallace (05:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. had, Brian has a great network. Brian’s just certainly a personable guy. Just knows everybody so quickly. ⁓ So he had a great network in LA and obviously was was trying to get involved in more of this side of things too. I’d been working with startups and basically wanted to see, we know so many startups. We see so many great founders. We should be investing in these companies and doing something with them beyond just helping them out and making referrals and doing different things and working with them. So it really just came from like, why are we not?

getting involved in this and we know we have the great startup community that we can invest into personally. From there, it’s spun into something so much bigger now where now we’re global. You’ll see things in every continent. We’ve done things in, I think, like 70 countries. So it’s obviously expanded much bigger than what we had in the beginning. But it was really just through that network effect, through helping startups. The mission never changed. It was always around helping early stage entrepreneurs who didn’t really feel like they had support systems.

That’s why a lot of what we see on our website, a lot of what we do online is just helping startups and trying to provide a resource for them. Obviously from the investor perspective, it’s different. We can’t invest in every company, but we can try and do something and that’s what we really want to do. ⁓ So it’s really grown from that mission of helping entrepreneurs who don’t have money, who don’t have things that can, that VCs typically look for, that who don’t have resources to pay other people too. So it’s really driven from that network. And now we’re able to invest in the companies who are doing well.

who are following those steps to become a good company and really double down on that as well.

Anthony Codispoti (07:08)
When you’re making that initial investment in these companies, are you typically ⁓ the first investment that they’re getting?

Jonathan Wallace (07:15)
⁓ it varies. Usually they’ve raised friends and family or something like that. ⁓ usually we usually come in right as products are going live. So if a company, ⁓ can do that, they have a CTO in house and they’re able to build and they’re able to get something in place. We can get involved as the first investor. That’s not a problem for us. I would say most companies have raised one to $200,000, ⁓ typically through friends and family, maybe some angel investors or whatever it may be. We tend to be one of the first institutional checks into them.

We don’t have to be by any means, but that just tends to be where we get involved. We get involved very early, pre-seed primarily, but we can play with things quite a bit. We try to be a lot more flexible than most investors in that stage, so we have some options there. yeah, as a product’s going live, really helping that go to market, optimizing that growth within the business and really getting involved and helping them scale past Series A.

Anthony Codispoti (08:08)
What are you looking at in terms of say industry? What’s kind of your fit your sweet spot?

Jonathan Wallace (08:16)
Yeah, we’re agnostic as a whole. We’ll take a look at almost anything. I think it comes down to us for more on the growth side. Like if we think we can add value, whether it be through our immediate LPs, through other companies we’ve invested in, that’s where we want to get involved. The great thing about just the amount of companies we’ve invested in is somebody knows somebody in our portfolio. You know, like if you’re trying to get in front of a customer, somebody in our portfolio has sold to that customer before somebody there knows somebody there who could make that introduction. So

Just through the amount of companies we’ve invested in, we have such a massive network of enterprise sales. ⁓ have a lot of different things that you can see. How do you go to market? How do you do different things on the CPG side of things? How do you do things with enterprise clients? So we have experience with so many companies. It’s really seen, we can see what works and what hasn’t worked and really help companies formulate that go to market from there as well. So ⁓ it just depends what they want to do and how they want to approach it. ⁓ But we’re agnostic as a whole. And if we think we can add value, then we want to get involved.

Anthony Codispoti (09:16)
So when you talk about adding value, it’s more than just the dollars that you can bring to the table. mean, you mentioned that you’ve invested in a few hundred companies. There’s going to be somebody in your network that is likely to help them. Is that sort one of the boxes that you’re looking to check is, do we have the network to be able to open doors for this company?

Jonathan Wallace (09:39)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ So we just finished our Fund 2, which we’re closing that out. ⁓ It’s June right now. We’re going to be closing that out over the next month. We’re launching our Fund 3, which we currently have most of it already finalized there too. Most of the people in that one are celebrities, athletes, and influencers. So we have a lot of things on the enterprise side of things. We wanted to really work more with brand ambassadors and people who could help on that marketing side of things.

and do it in a way that’s sustainable. think a lot of companies, especially at pre-seed and seed, they go to things like influencer marketing and they find out very quickly they’re going to get priced out or the user acquisition costs are going to be tough. So a lot of what we’re doing is trying to break down those barriers for early stage companies, connect them with the right brand ambassador, somebody who’s passionate about what they’re building and really help that as well. So it’s just where our fund has evolved to now where we don’t necessarily need the connections on the enterprise side because we have a lot of those already and

If you’re building a strong product that provides value, can open those doors. So now we’re expanding into different avenues of this and really helping with that side of things more than anything.

Anthony Codispoti (10:42)
So these would be more consumer

products for Fund 3 since you’re talking about influencers and celebrities.

Jonathan Wallace (10:50)
Not necessarily. ⁓ There’s a lot of different ways people can get involved. like we have a company that we have a couple of ex NFL players that are involved in and it’s logistics company. But what they’ve done growing is they’ve worked with like different brands that athletes or other people may own and they’re selling to those people as well. So it’s not even that they’re coming in as an ambassador. They’re just making direct introductions because they know they can add value. So the thesis behind the companies we’re investing into is not going to change, but how we add value to them will.

If we have those companies who can still really benefit from those enterprise connections, we already have all of those and they may not necessarily care about the athlete influencer side as much, but we want to make sure that we can leverage both sides of that network as well. So it’s not changing the model, it’s just adding on to it more than anything.

Anthony Codispoti (11:36)
And so we’ve talked so far about sort of that early stage investment that you guys make, 50, maybe $100,000, kind of get them going, make some introductions. Is there operational support that goes along with that or kind of that early stage or the sort of more operating on their own to prove themselves out?

Jonathan Wallace (11:56)
Yeah, operationally, tends to be they’re running a lot of that primarily. We want to get involved more on the growth side of things, so more on the sales side, helping them with the go to market, put into other campaigns that they can do something sustainable. We don’t encourage them to spend all their money in a few months and hopefully it works out. It’s around building long term growth and setting milestones that are attainable. ⁓ Day to day, their operations are still going to be their own. mean, it’s the downside of having 300 companies is

Legitimately, we couldn’t manage that kind of thing with 300 companies, but we want to add value where we can. I would say with that portfolio, it always comes in waves of how often companies are working with us. And it tends to be centered around two things. That’s sales and investment. So usually it’s like they’re trying to get in front of customers. They’re trying to work on some sort of growth strategy. We come in, we help them optimize that. We do some testing with them and see what’s working. From there, we help them with the investment side of things. So making direct introductions to our network and making sure they can close.

I think a lot of startups and even investors tend to think that investment fixes everything. ⁓ I think it’s the other way around. The sales will fix things for most people. If an investor sees a company taking off on sales, it’s growing rapidly and they can put gas in the fire, that’s where most investors want to get involved. So rather than just putting you in front of investors and saying, hopefully the signs, it’s like we’re doing things to change it and make sure that when you do get in room, they’re pitching to get you in their fund because you’re doing so well.

that you have the leverage in those conversations. So as a previous founder with the company, like you can, it changes that conversation when you have sales, when you have leverage in those, it makes it a lot easier and you don’t have to be begging for investment. Not that that’s bad, but like you got, it’s, it’s put you in a position of leverage and it really makes that conversation a lot easier. And it doesn’t waste your time just to be in there with 50 investors and hopefully one of them signs, whereas you know, they’re going to be coming in because you fit the criteria they’re looking for and you’re growing rapidly.

Anthony Codispoti (13:52)
So if you have invested early stage in a startup that is now starting to get some traction and they’re in sort of that spot that you’re talking about where like they’re getting sales, they’ve got some momentum, do you guys ever make follow on investments or you kind of stick to just that sort of pre-seed, know, early stage investment?

Jonathan Wallace (14:11)
Yeah, our model is built around investing in follow on rounds. So the small checks are how we get involved with the company. We want to demonstrate value. want to make sure we’re investing in something and then showing them this is what we can do. This is how we can add value beyond the capital. But our model is built around we need to be investing in larger state, larger stage companies. So we know the company, we have three years of two years of diligence we’re doing with this company. So while we’re working with them, we can see what’s working. We can see, okay, if we continue to invest in this company, we can all really win here together. So

Yeah, we want to get involved past series a is where we’ll get priced out typically. So we almost always invest in our companies who are raising at series a rounds, whether that be just retaining pro rata, whether that be just investing separately. We’ve, we’ve led series a rounds just depends on how they’re structuring it. Or if they, if they want us to be a lead, typically they’ll pull on a couple other big VCs that they want to be involved in the round who come in as value adds as well. But yeah, absolutely. That’s what we want to do. Our whole model is we deploy the small checks, be with the companies, invest in our winners, really double down there.

and continue to be with them on this journey and ⁓ invest much more later on.

Anthony Codispoti (15:15)
Can we pick a particular portfolio company that’s kind of gone through this life cycle with you, early stage investment, they got some traction, you did a follow on investment, now they’re continuing to do well.

Jonathan Wallace (15:26)
Yeah, we have several. ⁓ I could point to this week, we had a company we invested in credit, which is a company I found out of Africa. ⁓ They were early stage and we invested, I think they had just launched the revenue side of the company. ⁓ They’ve just exploded over that time. So some big VCs are involved in that company now too. ⁓ They’re a fintech company based out of Africa. So it’s almost like building a credit system in Africa where they may not necessarily have the best banking records. They track

Anthony Codispoti (15:45)
What does that company do?

Jonathan Wallace (15:55)
things through a blockchain ledger and are able to see what your transaction history looks like. They’re able to monitor everything and then basically use that information to help the consumer as well. So they’ve done really well. That’s the most recent one we’ve done as far as a later stage check. And then we have companies like Link, which was Shopin’ Pal when we invested in there. We ended up just doing a smaller check with that company because they had already closed most of the round and we just wanted to do something smaller there. So we did a $500,000 check with that one.

part of their next round. They have some other great investors involved in that round as well like Mukher and a few other ones. And they’re more on the logistics side within, ⁓ sorry, but they’re in the food and beverage space too. They were initially based out of India, now they’re in the US though. So we have probably 20 years or so investments on that side of things that have been larger checks, but it’s really just seeing what we can do beyond that, who’s doing well quickly and doubling down on those investments.

Almost all of those rounds are with other investors at that time too.

Anthony Codispoti (16:57)
Do you have any companies that are getting close to maybe a potential exit scenario?

Jonathan Wallace (17:03)
Yes. So it’s kind of a funny thing. So most of our investments have come since 2020. We’ve been active before that. So yeah, exactly. when we have an acquisition two years in, it’s not like a super exciting acquisition typically. It’s usually like maybe we made one X, two X of our money, whatever it is. So the big ones, like the ones that I just mentioned, the ones that are exciting, those are

Anthony Codispoti (17:10)
So not enough time for a lot of these to kind of get to that point yet.

Jonathan Wallace (17:32)
They look really good for us. They make us look really good on the AUM, things like that. Realistically, there’s still five, six years with a lot of those companies before they can really show us something. And the life cycle of acquisitions and IPOs and everything now has moved further and further down the road. ⁓ So our really good ones are still a bit out, but we’ve had smaller acquisitions, nothing that we were going to post globally and tell everyone how amazing we are because it didn’t really, it’s not going to change the fund.

Anthony Codispoti (18:00)
Yeah. Why so much focus on international companies? It seems like it would be easier to kind of wrap your arms around what’s going on in your own backyard, but you must see some kind of strategic value there.

Jonathan Wallace (18:15)
Definitely. So well, when we started initially, this has changed since recently, but I used to be the only US born person on our team. We now have one other person who’s from the US here, so I can’t say that anymore. ⁓ But it was really good for us because we had access to these Metme markets because we had people on the ground there. So like we work with places like Nigeria where a lot of investors don’t know what’s going on over there. They don’t really know the market. And frankly, it just scares people that like all they know about Nigeria is like scam email as they get sometimes.

showing them like there’s great founders here that are building legitimate businesses that are doing amazing things. You just need to know who they are. Like it can be a great thing for us too. And like I said, we’re doubling down in India. We just opened up a physical office there as well. We had a team already present there that was really active in Indian market. And we really are just formalizing that. ⁓ We do a lot of things in South America. ⁓ I mentioned Nigeria, but we do things all over Africa. So you’ll see a lot of the successes.

in our portfolio are based in Africa. I mentioned credit, we’ve got companies like Clash show, which are doing great over there as well. There’s some really exciting stuff.

Anthony Codispoti (19:17)
So basically you guys are going

to places where other people aren’t. And so you’re finding the deals that other people don’t see.

Jonathan Wallace (19:23)
Yeah, and those deals get found. They’ll get found eventually, but we get involved early on in those companies. So we want to be able to really help bridge that gap in the beginning, especially. I it’s always kind of funny because most of our team is European. We have somebody, Ireland, Sweden, ⁓ just really all over the country, a continent there. But we don’t do a ton of deals there because those deals aren’t as hard to find, I think. Where we do a lot of our deals are the places I mentioned, ⁓ Africa, South America, Southeast Asia.

So we do a lot of things in those markets because some of those deals are hard to find. They get overlooked a little bit just because of their backgrounds. None of them, most of them didn’t go to Ivy league schools and go to big schools in the UK. Like, so finding those people who have great backgrounds, who know the space, who are really intelligent people who just for one reason or another have been overlooked, whether it be just where they’re from, whether it be race, gender, whatever it may be. But our portfolio is, it’s funny. Like we we’re in some of

We have some of the highest rates of men to women in our portfolio. And it’s really about 50-50, which is actually really good for the VC world. But in reality, it shouldn’t be that high. So I think it’s like 45 % women, 55 % men right now at this moment in our portfolio, which it’s weird to say it’s one of the highest ones in VC just because you don’t see very many that are purely right down the middle like that.

Anthony Codispoti (20:45)
And was that intentional or was that something that just kind of happened accidentally?

Jonathan Wallace (20:51)
Yeah, I would say it just happened. Like we just found good founders and we’re just looking for the best founders no matter where they’re based, no matter what they’re doing. ⁓ We wanted to find the best founder. So it’s really more just happened like that. And same thing with just where we invested. Like we didn’t make a point to say we want to invest in companies in Nigeria. We just found a lot of good companies that we liked in Nigeria. And a lot of those founders were like, hey, we want to be a more established business. We want to help transfer into the US and sell to the US market.

But nobody’s opening our emails. Nobody’s listening to us. Nobody’s talking to us. So what can we do to change that? we want to get involved in markets where we can add value. And again, with places like that, we know how to help those kind of founders as well. And that’s not necessarily the issue for everybody. We invest in a lot of US companies. So it’s probably 50 % US, 50 % everywhere else. India is probably pretty high on that list as well. But if we think we can add value to a company, as long as we can legally invest there, we’ll try and work with the company anyway.

Anthony Codispoti (21:51)
You guys have invested in hundreds of companies. What is it that you’re looking for on the founder side of things? Are there particular personality traits, particular paths of experience that are important to you?

Jonathan Wallace (22:07)
Yeah, it depends. think, I mean, obviously the technical side of things is hard in the beginning for founders. If you don’t have a way to build the product in an efficient way, it can be very difficult just to start. So if they have technical experience, that’s a bonus. ⁓ I tend to find, especially in the beginning stages, I think this stops to be useful around series A, but people who have sales experience, people who are not afraid to call and afraid to be messaging people.

we see them get pretty far in the beginning because I think a lot of that initial pre-seed and seed stage is just hustle. think, mean, I think obviously your idea has to be solid and your company has to be doing something, but being like ready to pick up the phone and just call and just be, do whatever it takes to break the doors down. There’s nothing that can replace that in a founder. And I think a lot of founders think they know what that is until they act. then you see founders who really know how to do that. And it’s very different things.

So it’s not sending emails when you wake up in the morning and then hoping they respond. It’s making sure they’re responding to you because they’ll find a way to make it work. So we have founders like they have a product launched next month like, I already called 500 people today. I have 500 more tomorrow and they’re going to convert and they’ve they’ve already wrote me LOIs and I’m going to make sure that day one happens. They’re paying for it. And like there’s something to be said for like founders who can make things happen. And again, a lot of founders think they’re doing that and it’s not always the case. So.

I think again, some of that starts to wear out around Series A as you start to legitimize the business more and more, but that hustle in the beginning is something you can’t really replace within a founder.

Anthony Codispoti (23:39)
And how many members are part of your team now at Expert Dojo?

Jonathan Wallace (23:43)
Around 20, 25, because we’re global, so we have some people kind of sprinkled all around the world. Primary people are based out of our Los Angeles office. We have an office in Miami as well. And then we have our office in India. So in Bangalore, India, we have a team there as well. A lot of our operations stuff is done there. So we have about 10 people on the ground there. A people in Nigeria, one in South Africa, a couple sprinkled around Europe.

Anthony Codispoti (24:08)
How did you find all these

people all over the place? Or how did they find you?

Jonathan Wallace (24:12)
Yeah, you know, it’s been an interesting experience just finding everybody. So a lot of them have just come from startup communities. like we have somebody in South America and we met them just through a startup community down ⁓ in Chile. So they were running some things down there with us. ⁓ My wife went to high school down there. So I kind of just got involved in this community down in Santiago, got to know him. He knew a ton of people in that community. They’re connected with a few good companies, worked with some other programs down there that were doing things like. ⁓

Chile is a good, great place for startups. have like Startup Chile and other good programs like that. They’ve got like government run things where they’re incentivizing founders to start their companies there. So you’ll see a lot of founders from places like Peru or Colombia come down there. And so they have a lot of things there. So finding those hubs is really useful as well. ⁓ And so we’ve gotten connected people just through various things like that, gotten them involved with what we’re doing and seeing how they can help us in those markets as well. Obviously they know the culture down there better than we will. They know the economics down there. They know what’s happening.

And they know like things to look out for as far as like well, I see 50 these type of companies It’s not really unique down here and they can just give us more ⁓ Some more information on the market because I think that’s something that’s lost for a lot of places as well And so we bring in good people in those places our team in Nigeria is awesome And I love working with those guys too, and they find us some great companies there, too They’re always looking for new companies. They’re always doing different things again same way. They’re hustling there in communities They have their own startup groups and they do them all over ⁓

Northeast Africa. they do a lot of things in Ghana and Nigeria, Ivory Coast, ⁓ pretty much all the francophone countries over there as well, and then Kenya and stuff.

Anthony Codispoti (25:47)
When you’re investing in

a company that is outside the US, obviously some of them like the credit blockchain set up that you were talking about in Africa, that’s something that is most likely gonna be specific to that country or that region. But are there often opportunities where you look at that and you’re like, oh yeah, once you get that going, you’ve got a little momentum, let’s bring that same thing to the US.

Jonathan Wallace (26:11)
Absolutely. So, so, yeah, we have, we have a lot of those too. And I think it can change just depending on what their vision is as well. But I don’t, I don’t want to know a company better than the founder does. I believe that they know the market because that they’re the ones running this and this is what they’re dedicated their life to doing. So if we think we can add value, whether it’s helping them in the U S or helping them in other markets, we’ll definitely do that. We tend to find if they’re working in, like if their company is really successful in a place like Nigeria, it tends to work in better and underserved markets than saying,

you need to focus in the United States. It’s like, well, Peru has a lot of these same problems economically. Maybe they’d be a good market for you guys as well. we have somebody that works in Peru that maybe they can help you guys with some customer interactions, seeing if that works there too. finding, it’s not always like the US is not the option for everybody. India is not the right option for everybody. a lot of times you get like the language barriers can be issues in certain places. You have cultural differences. Sometimes like we don’t do a ton of things in places like Brazil because

culturally Brazil tends to build their own things in-house and they just, they make their own Brazilian unicorns and that’s kind of how it works. There’s some things that are different there too, but like we don’t see a lot of our companies be successful going there unless they’re from Brazil and like they invest in Brazilian founders. So, and there’s a few markets that are like that. India is kind of like that as well. Obviously India does a lot more export into the US now and there are obviously a lot, there’s a lot of great companies coming out that working with the US, but.

it doesn’t always transfer one to one to other countries. And sometimes the resources to open another country might be not worth it. And if you can just take over the Nigerian market, it can be better just to do that and then just go into other countries around there if you need to at all. So it just depends. I think it depends on the company and it’s always a case by case basis.

Anthony Codispoti (27:53)
So you mentioned earlier in our conversation about how you let the founders kind of tend to the operational aspects of the company, because this is the area that they understand they know the best. You know, where you like to be able to offer support early on is kind of on the growth side of things. Can we make some introductions that are helpful to you? Can we be helpful in the sales side of things? Outside of making those intros, what are some other levers that you can pull to

Jonathan Wallace (28:05)
Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (28:23)
help your portcodes, you you guys helping them run Facebook ads or like what else can you kind of bring to the table for?

Jonathan Wallace (28:31)
Yeah. So, so Brian who leads, Brian leads our growth program on a day-to-day basis. So he’s actually working with our companies. I tend to focus more on like the investments that are things and helping them on the finances. But when you’re working with those companies, it can, again, I don’t ever like to put everybody in a box and say, that’s the way to do something. When we’re working with these companies, it can be developing the brand and saying, Hey, your customers are churning off of this after two months. Why are they having issues leaving your platform? Like, why are they, why are they not paying? Why are they leaving you?

So going through problems like that and examining what’s happening within the business and saying, okay, well actually your user experience isn’t very strong here. They’re not seeing value with this over the long term. You need to really change things on this side. So it can be developing on the brand side of things so that when a customer sees your product, they actually are converting on there as well. I think things like Facebook ads and Google ads, mean, they’re obviously useful and they can do a lot of great for a company, but relying on something like that is never the right way to do it in my opinion. I mean, there’s…

If I ask a company, like, how are you acquiring users? Well, we’re going to spend money on Google. That’s not the right answer. I if you’re going to be doing SEO behind that, if you’re going to be doing things to make sure you’re converting on Google, that’s different. If you’ve proven you know how to sell on Google, it’s easier said than done just to sell on Google. You can say that, but actually converting is a whole other thing. So I think it’s lot more than just selling on Facebook, selling on Google. It’s converting on Facebook and Google.

That’s what we want to focus on. So it’s not about spending money. It’s about doing things efficiently. If you can build an email campaign and convert more than an ad campaign, you’re probably going to spend a hell of a lot less money. So if there’s ways you can do things that are a lot cheaper, if you can just pick up the phone and call your customers and get in front of them that way, that’s going to be a lot less money too. And a founder can do that all day long. So spending your money wisely. And I think every company hits a stage where they probably, where they’re going to have to spend more money. They’re going to have to expand their marketing and things like that too. But doing things in a way that are sustainable.

and that you can scale. If you can’t scale that growth campaign, you’re not going to be able to raise your next round. You’re not going to be able to continue to run the company the way you are unless you have a VC who commits to giving you a billion dollars and can fund you all the way through and doesn’t matter, doesn’t care about what your metrics are. But there’s very few of those kinds of companies that exist.

Anthony Codispoti (30:47)
As you think about a lot of the companies that you’ve looked at and had to say no to, what is the most common mistake that they’re making? Where, you know, you want to give them some coaching, you want to give them some advice, like, this was kind of a red flag, or this was something that was missing, so that, you know, other folks maybe in similar shoes right now who are listening are like, ⁓ that’s something I need to go button up.

Jonathan Wallace (31:13)
Yeah. I think a lot of companies struggle to understand the market and don’t, when I see like a slide of like who their competitors are and it’s just, selling, they think they’re selling to one group when they’re really selling against somebody else. And I think a lot of companies struggle to understand like when you’re selling a product, you’re not just selling to that person you’re selling versus the other people who could potentially be selling for that same product. And so refining what does that sales actually, that sale actually looks like and saying, Hey,

I’m not competing with just this person. I’m competing for that HR tech person’s resources. I’m competing with everybody else in this industry and competing for the entire market that when they see my product, they have to be sold versus everything else because this person in HR is going to be being pitched to 10 different companies and they have to pick the one or two that are going to be the most useful to the company. And if you don’t demonstrate that value, you’re not going to be the one who converts. understanding what that process actually looks like and who you’re really selling against.

versus just saying like, yeah, Google does this part of it. They’re my main competitor. You’re probably not selling against Google because Google can get in front of anybody if they want to. Define the companies who are selling directly against you. Learn what they’re doing. Learn their value propositions and tune your company accordingly. Figure out how to sell versus other companies. And you’ll really refine that sales strategy and start to see what’s working and what’s not working. And start to understand why things are happening to your company versus just hopefully throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.

You need to continue to understand your market every day because it’s always going to be evolving as well. Especially when you get like things like AI now. AI tech is, it’s so many, there’s so many great opportunities in it. However, we get so many pitches for it on our side of things. I can’t imagine on the enterprise side, how many pitches they get as well. Like you have to stand out. If I get 20 emails about companies that are in the AI tech space, they start to blend together. Even though you may have a bit of a value proposition that’s different here, you’re still competing against some these other companies in that space.

whether it’s direct or indirect. just understanding the entire market and setting how to set yourself apart from everybody can be a huge thing. I think a lot of companies overlook that part.

Anthony Codispoti (33:17)
So now as you think about companies that you looked at, you said, yeah, we want to get involved in this. There’s been hundreds of them now. If you look at those companies, what are the most common mistakes that you see those founders make? They’ve got to the point where they’ve got a product when you get involved. Maybe they’ve even got some sales going on. What are the most common mistakes you see them making at that stage?

Jonathan Wallace (33:41)
⁓ There’s a lot. There can be a lot of things. The problem with having 300 companies is you’re going to see companies fail. And that’s just the reality of this. If we didn’t have any failures, we wouldn’t be doing this for long enough then. So it’s just the reality of situation. You see a lot of things. Sometimes sales don’t work. Sometimes you see that they’re churning. Sometimes the sales processes don’t work. Sometimes evaluating those things I just said are like, how are they differentiating themselves?

Sometimes it works for a certain amount of time and then they need to pivot and they’re not able to pivot fast enough or somebody comes in who just takes that market over from them. Sometimes you get things like, we’ve had founders that have passed away before. know, just sometimes things happen. it’s just like, sometimes life happens alongside. Sometimes founders, we had a husband and wife team who got divorced and that was the end of the company basically. And they fought over the company and that was it. So it’s just, sometimes things just happen. I mean, you can look at the companies and see,

I think hindsight’s 2020 with lot of companies and you can always see what’s wrong with them after the fact. You can go through, as far as purely on the business side, the sales side of things is always tough, converting on that, making sure that you can do things in a scalable way. That’s why we focus on that side. But again, not every company is going to convert on that or else we’d have a hundred percent success rate.

Anthony Codispoti (34:55)
So

yeah, so then, Jonathan, as you look at the companies that you invested in early stage and then earned your respect to go, you know, for you guys to commit with a follow on investment, what are those companies doing? What’s the common thread there where ⁓ maybe people can take lessons from that?

Jonathan Wallace (35:15)
Yeah, I mean, so first, they listen to people. They’re very open to actually working with other founders. They’re open to working with investors. When an investor tells them no, think a lot of them, they really take things to heart and they listen to what they’re saying. And I don’t think there’s any investors out there who mean to be rude to founders who are trying to be hurtful to anybody. I think they genuinely are telling them their opinion. And listening to that can be hard to do sometimes, ⁓ which I can say myself.

I’m guilty of not listening to everybody necessarily like that too. And not that you need to listen to everything, but I think there’s always a piece of truth in everything they’re saying there. listening to the people, and then more important, listening to your customers. If you’ve got customers churning and you’re just deciding, well, they don’t know what they’re doing, or they just ran out of money or whatever it is, it’s typically something wrong with the product. There’s typically something that they’re having. mean, obviously some people are going to churn. It just happens. understanding, if you have a big customer leaves you, like understand why.

understand what’s happening, understand what the product needs to do to really convert, and then really just double down on your sales. So continue to push everything there, hire a great team around you. can’t be afraid to delegate as a founder. yeah, mean, there’s a lot, getting past series A is really difficult. I think you always hear like the 95 % failure rate or whatever it is. It’s really most of those companies when they hit series A, that’s where that number starts to go up quite a bit where you’re not gonna see 95 % failure rate because most companies don’t make it to series A nowadays.

Series A used to be where Seed is now. It’s moved further and further downstream now. Pre-Seed didn’t exist 15, 20 years ago. Now it’s a common round that everyone’s raising. things have just shifted. getting past your Series A is a huge milestone nowadays for a lot of these early stage companies. ⁓ It’s not the finish line by any means, but it means you’re on the right track and you’re building things the right way.

Anthony Codispoti (37:04)
I want to go back to something we talked about a little bit earlier, Jonathan, your new celebrity fund. ⁓ I’m curious, first of all, how you recruit these folks, how you find sort of celebrity folks that want to get involved.

Jonathan Wallace (37:18)
Yeah. So, so my co-GP in this fund, Steven, ⁓ Steven Zmikowski, he’s, he’s been involved in the, mostly the sports world for, for some time. I’ve known Steven for, for quite a while now too. And so basically what he was doing is he was working with a lot of great, primarily athletes, but some influencers and some celebrities as well. And the problem they always have is they get presented deals every day and they don’t really know what they’re looking for and they don’t really know how to filter them and they don’t know if it’s a trusted source. So a lot of the people he was working with, just, he would send us and be like, Hey,

Can you just evaluate a deal for them and give them feedback on if you guys would do something or not? And we would do it for, it was completely free. We weren’t charging them to do anything. It was just good for us to be exposed to those kinds of people. And a lot of them would continue to connect with us. And so when we were raising this fund, said, Hey, we want to pull a big group of people together. We want to make sure that we’re all sharing deals together. We want to make sure that you have the best opportunities that if you want to be a brand ambassador to a company, you can do so. If you want to be a partner of it and an investor in it, that’s a good way to do so. Cause I think a lot of

athletes in particular, they see people like like Shaq or these people who are like invested in all these big companies, and they don’t really understand how they got involved in that. And then they hear about one startup and like, that’s going to be the next big company. And they don’t know the failure rates and understanding just the VC ecosystem and what kind of failure rates you really do see, because it’s called high risk investing for a reason. And the reality is most VCs don’t turn a profit. The reality is most companies are going to are not going to help you back with the return and understanding what that timeline actually looks like. So

If you do invest $50,000 in a company today, you’re not going to see that for several years, if ever. So just understanding that full market and educating them more than anything in the beginning. ⁓ then beyond that, there’s plenty of athletes and things who are very well connected in this space and know it well. But just that deal sharing, that deal sourcing is a huge thing for them as well. So connecting them with those companies in Africa, like I was mentioning, where they don’t know anybody in Nigeria. And we can find a curated deal in Nigeria that they want to invest into, just having that access as well.

Working with Steven, his network of athletes, the great people he knows and what we’ve done in the past and just our tracker of investing, it just worked really well together.

Anthony Codispoti (39:25)
So you guys had a lot of these

folks coming to you before you kind of started the Celebrity Fund saying, hey, would you just evaluate this deal? You guys are smart. You’ve got a track record. You seem to be know it. You know what you’re doing. And so from there, you kind of said, hey, we’ve got folks that are interested. Why don’t we start showing them the deals that we’ve got and start finding deals that maybe are tailored a little bit more towards them.

Jonathan Wallace (39:30)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was really easy for us, like, just to put two and two together with this. You kind of asked how the fund evolved over time earlier and it really just flowed into this. Like, we’re not changing our model. We’re just adding this layer on so that startups want exposure to the people that we’re working with. They want to be in front of great athletes. They want to be in front of good influencers. But a lot of them don’t have the money to really pay for influencer campaigns and they don’t have the money to afford poor conversion rates, which influencer marketing tends to be.

on the higher side of customer acquisition costs. So if you can find a great ambassador who can connect you to other people they know and really build a great synergistic relationship there, it’s a no brainer for us. So it really makes everything easier on both sides. The athletes, the celebrities get access to these great companies and the companies get access to them and their network. So we want to make sure everyone’s winning in this. We want to make sure that the deals are curated, that everything is sourced there too. Athletes and influencers, we still do like monthly sessions where we bring them in and say, even if we’re not invested in this company, if we’re not involved in it,

bring it forward and we’ll all do diligence on a deal together. So we’ll just see what’s working. And if you want to invest in it, great. If we want to get involved, we can all do that together. So it’s really just a way we can work with them, educate that side of things too. And it’s a no brainer for us on how we win as well. So we get to work with them long-term on this too, just because we’re able to give back to it. So it kind of goes back to the beginning of expert dojo of giving back to that startup community. So we’re giving back to everybody in this as well. So we’re still trying to help. Everything we do is going to be free on that side of things. We want to make sure that they’re involved and they can trust us in this.

So we’re never gonna be giving them advice that leans towards our side for one reason or the we’re always on their side with all of this.

Anthony Codispoti (41:26)
Are the celebrities typically investing at the same rate that everybody else is, or are they getting some kind of special consideration because their likeness or their name can be used in promotions?

Jonathan Wallace (41:38)
It depends. ⁓ they just want to be an investor in a company, they would most likely just come in as part of a round. If they want to do some sort of brand deal, depending on who the celebrity is, depending on their influence, things like that, we work with our companies to figure that out too. ⁓ So we try to, again, keep it fair for everybody involved as well. that’s one of the great things of this too, is we can bridge that relationship and see the athletes and the people we work with, they know where these companies are at. They’re not expecting to get million dollar checks for posts.

like it’s just not the reality of these pre-seed and seed stage companies. So finding a way they can do things that’s sustainable, but also helps everybody out involved as well. if it’s like becoming an advisor, doing something like that too, that happens pretty often. ⁓ But we’ll work with the companies and the founders just to make sure everything’s working out on that side and making sure everybody involved is going to win in the end as well.

Anthony Codispoti (42:27)
Jonathan, I want to shift gears for a moment and talk about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life, personal or professional. How’d you get through it and what did you learn?

Jonathan Wallace (42:38)
Yeah, you know, I when I was ⁓ with my other company beforehand, ⁓ I just moved to LA. The company was not doing very well in sales side of the sales side of things. ⁓ And I ended up ⁓ I lost my apartment back then, too. So I ended up living in my car for about three months in LA. There was a it was a very like two or time with that, too. So I had a I had a big choice to make there, too. I could have left the company. I could have decided just to.

go stay with somebody back in my hometown. But I decided to stay in LA. I got a gym membership and I would just shower, work out at the gym, do everything there and then live, work on the company and do my sales stuff. nobody I was working with knew anything was happening because I was doing all that. So it was just hustling through that. So that was a long time. during that time I converted sales, was able to get everything back going. luckily it got going pretty quick. So I was able to get everything sorted out there.

⁓ but there was definitely a time I could have just been like, yeah, I’m not doing this anymore. And could have stopped working on the company and could have just gone back home or done whatever then. ⁓ but very happy I didn’t. So it was a, it was three months of very stressful times, but it was able to do that. And I think I was, that was at the beginning and it’s their startup I was working with too. So I was actually working with them. I was doing some consulting stuff on the side, trying to work with founders, helping on some sales side things, basically just doing whatever I could first founders.

Anthony Codispoti (43:49)
Which company was this?

Jonathan Wallace (44:01)
I knew a lot of founders in that stage too, so was always trying to tap into the network there, seeing how I could help with sales, doing things as well. So it was just hustling any way we could back then. And then obviously working with the startup that I was doing and then working with anybody else I knew who needed some support there too. So I was able to push through that stage of things as well.

Anthony Codispoti (44:19)
So you

are going to work during the day, making sales calls, doing your thing, getting a little momentum going. ⁓ You’re showering at the gym, showering, brushing your teeth, grooming yourself, making yourself presentable. And then at night, you find some place, like a quiet place to park your car and just go to sleep in the back seat or what?

Jonathan Wallace (44:37)
Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it was, was,

it was in my early twenties then too. So wasn’t, I don’t know if I could do it now, but ⁓ it was, it was, it was fine back then. ⁓ Yeah, that was pretty much it. So it was just like, it was just like hustling with calls, making sure. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have like a clear, like what I wanted it to have happen. I knew where I was, what I was trying to do. And I knew what, what I needed to do with the company to be all right, everything here as well. And it was more of just like, ⁓ do you gonna stop doing this or do you want to push forward with it? And it was a…

I made the choice, I’m okay with this for a few months, I’ll figure it out, I’ll work with it. If I need to stay at a friend’s house for a couple nights, I can try and do that. But I had just relocated down there too, and so I knew that was where my customer base was, and that’s where I needed to do things to be successful with it. So took a few months, I didn’t have much resources before I did that. So in hindsight, maybe I could have planned better, but I jumped off a cliff and hoped to figure it out on the way.

Anthony Codispoti (45:32)
Spoken like a true entrepreneur. Ready, fire, and then aim afterwards, yeah.

Jonathan Wallace (45:34)
That’s the way to do it.

Yeah, now I would say in hindsight, it’s probably not the best way to do things, but you you live and you learn.

Anthony Codispoti (45:44)
Yeah. And so as you think back to that time, have there been other challenges in your life that you’ve gone through where maybe consciously or subconsciously you kind of think about that time and you’re like, I don’t know if I can get through this. It’s like, dude, you slept in a car in your car for three months and showered at the gym. Like you got this, like you like almost like it was sort of like a proving ground for you. Like what you could endure and overcome.

Jonathan Wallace (46:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it’s funny when I work with like what we’re doing now, it can be very stressful. It can be very time sensitive and you get everything is the most important thing in the world that time. know, every deal we’re doing, every investment, like when we’re doing these follow on deals, a lot of it’s very time sensitive. A lot of it’s very much like we have to make decisions quickly and they can be very stressful. At the end of the day, it’s all money related. It’s all like just figuring things out and that side of things. I tend to

not be super stressed about a lot of things on that side anymore. Obviously, I’m always working on them too. So it’s not like when I say there’s no stress, it doesn’t mean we’re not doing what we need to be doing. But I try not to let it affect everything in life and after that now. But yeah, I think there’s parts of that too. I mean, just pushing yourself to do things that are uncomfortable. And I try to it every day. I try to do something physical every day, go on a run, do something. And I think that bleeds into everything in your life when you push yourself and do that as well. So.

Yeah, do something difficult every day and it makes your work seem a lot less hard.

Anthony Codispoti (47:16)
Say a little bit more about that, your daily routines.

Jonathan Wallace (47:21)
So yeah, I work out every day. I do at least 30 minutes to an hour every day. I usually run. So I’ll usually run three to four miles. My buddy wants to run a marathon with me in the next few months. So I’m going to try and step it up here in the next few months. We’ll see how that goes. And then I do jiu-jitsu and stuff too. So I like to have fun on that side of things. that’s obviously can be very physically testing as well. But I have lot of fun doing that too. And it helps with just

managing your mental health, think, as well, with running and exercise in general. It helps with a lot of that stuff, too. So I like to burn myself out. So when I’m at night, I can actually sleep as opposed to thinking about the 20,000 startups I’m working with. So I think a lot of those things bleed into each other.

Anthony Codispoti (48:06)
How would you characterize your superpower, Jonathan?

Jonathan Wallace (48:12)
You know, I think it’s really just connecting with people. think with founders, especially getting involved in that thing, I think sales is a very unique thing. I was always fairly good at sales and that was because I think I didn’t approach anything from a perspective of like, I’m just trying to get something. It was always, can we help each other? And I think a lot of those things carry into this now where when I’m talking to somebody, whether it be a founder, whether it be one of the athletes you’re working with too, I’m not looking at what can I get from this person? It’s like, what can I?

do with this person and how can we help each other out? And it’s always a very synergistic relationship versus me just taking something. I never want to approach a relationship like I’m winning and they’re losing on something. It’s about like, how do we actually connect together? How do we do this together and win the right way together? Because if I can, if it’s also a very long term view or short term view, like if I do something and they don’t like me afterwards because they are upset with this deal or something like that, they’re going to tell other people that they didn’t like working with us versus the other way.

even if a deal doesn’t work out, like, we did this together, it failed for this reason, still love these guys and they’re still going to do some great things with us as well. So I want to make sure that they’re all, I want to have transparency. I want them to know the good and the bad of a deal because every deal at Preseed is going to have bad and there’s just no, there’s no way to get around that because they’re all early and that they’re going to be missing something in the team. They’re going to be missing something on the sales. So ⁓ really just building things off of that. So I want to be working with them and want them to know what they are. So I think that’s where I’ve always done well is just connecting with people.

And I think that goes across international borders where I can speak to founders in Nigeria and I can speak to founders in India. I can speak to founders all across the US and still connect with them as well.

Anthony Codispoti (49:50)
Well, as I hear you talk, it occurs to me that you’re more of an educator than a salesman, right? Because you’re, it’s not like push, push, push. It’s, hey, here’s the deal. Here’s what we like about it. Here’s what we don’t like about it. And, you know, companies at this stage, there’s always going to be stuff that we like, but transparently here’s the full, the full Monte make, make your call.

Jonathan Wallace (49:57)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that’s where I mean, we’re like connecting to like, it’s not a pure sales approach ever. Like I never want to, I never sold used cards and I always sold a, if you sell a service, I sell a product, a product that can benefit somebody else. Like I have no problem getting on a phone and telling somebody why something is going to be great for their business that can help them. Because if I truly believe in that, then we’re helping each other here. If this product is going to help your business and make you better, like that’s great. We’re all winning together here too. And it’s the same thing with what we do.

Like if I think we can make the best investments, I think we can connect you with the best founders and connect you with great people in our network. I want to get you involved because I truly believe what we’re doing here. And I think that there’s nothing that really replaces like that belief in what you’re building.

Anthony Codispoti (50:55)
Jonathan, if you had to recommend one resource to our audience, a book, a course, a podcast, something that has been helpful, instrumental in your own, either personal or professional growth, what would that be?

Jonathan Wallace (51:08)
I read a lot of books when I first got into the VC world, because I think it’s very hard to break into when you don’t really know a lot of, it’s not a very, like, they don’t teach you much about VC to get into it. Like you kind of have to know a lot of it. And so learning on the job is not really an option. You have to go into it and kind of have an idea of what they’re saying to do, how to get involved and then how to source companies, how to find the right people and how to put forward deals. So most major VCs have some sort of book I’ve read.

most of them. I think a lot I haven’t I haven’t read it very many new vc’s books so I read a lot of the old ones in the beginnings like Brad Feld’s book and those ones the ones that everyone pretty much knows about those I think lean on those ones and some of the information might be a little dated now just because the vc ecosystem moves so quickly but the fundamentals remain fairly similar um just there’s but there’s so many resources out there you can have and really if you’re working with vcs there’s so many vcs that have scout programs and had different things because

At the end of the day, a VC just wants deal flow. mean, obviously like Sequoia doesn’t need more deal flow, but although a partner from them might tell me otherwise, you know, they want good deal flow. So if you’re going to be a scout and you’re going to send deals forward, there’s no, every VC is looking for deal flow. So if you talk to a local firm, you talk to somebody in a city that’s not as big as a Silicon Valley, typically you, I guarantee you, you can find something if you’re really committed to doing it you’re connected in that environment. So meet founders, meet investors and find a way you can get involved with that if you’re trying to get involved in that space. But.

⁓ I mean, as far as other resources with that too, there’s a lot of, like I said, most, there’s a lot of VCs have podcasts now too. So you can learn about what does their deal flow process look like and what does their diligence process look like? ⁓ I mean, they’ll all have different ones. So that’s the, that’s the funny thing with VC too is like what my diligence looked like is not the same as what another firm’s looks like. So they could have one criteria that’s a deal breaker for them. And for another, it’s not as big of a deal, you know? And so it just depends on what their mandate looks like. So

Understand who you’re working with understand those firms and it’ll help out a lot there and just you do that by listening to them directly

Anthony Codispoti (53:12)
You mentioned Brad Feld specifically and Brad was a recent guest on the show. I’m curious what specific things did you kind of take away from him?

Jonathan Wallace (53:20)
I think a lot of his was just understanding the market and what they’re looking for. And I think he has a lot of great perspectives of how they find deals. And obviously he’s well known and just what he’s done in the past and how he’s built companies and how he’s done things within his own fund and beyond that even. So learning from somebody who was in the beginning of this process really and knows how to be one of the big VCs here has really helped develop this entire culture is a big thing. I loved.

reading this book and understanding it too. I read that book when I was on the startup side of things more than anything too. So it was more like understanding what VCs were looking for so that I could pivot my conversation accordingly as well and understand like, okay, well, this is what they want to see. How do I change my startup to be something that’s more applicable to what they’re looking for ⁓ versus just doing what I think is right? Like I want to hear from somebody else who’s done things like they’re going to, if I need funding for a company, find out what they’re actually looking for and try and make my company fundable.

You know, because not every company is going to be a VC company. But if I want to go that route, I need to find out how to do that. And I think that’s a big thing, especially for early, like young founder. You don’t know what you don’t know. So finding out those things, trying to be a sponge for everybody, like learning from those VCs and listen to what they’re saying. And they have those books out there. That’s just, that is their thoughts. They’re telling you what they’re looking for. You just have to listen.

Anthony Codispoti (54:42)
Be a sponge, soak it all up, right? Jonathan, I’ve just got one more question for you, but before I ask it, I wanna do two things. First, I’m gonna invite everyone listening today to hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app. We’ve had a great conversation here today with Jonathan Wallace from Expert Dojo, and I wanna make sure you get more great interviews like this in your feed.

Jonathan, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you or directly with Expert Dojo. What is that?

Jonathan Wallace (55:13)
Yep, so everyone can go to our website. We have an open application page on there, so anybody can apply. Those go to me and my team. ⁓ So they will be seen by our team. I can guarantee you that, because I personally have to go through a lot of those applications. ⁓ We have somebody on our team who does some specific industries and things like that, just to make it little easier on me. But primarily, it’s our team evaluating everything. ⁓ And they can also just message me directly.

jon at expertdojo.com. So just john at expertdojo.com. I’m always open to getting emails. I’ve never seen a, I have no problem telling a founder what I think of the company, where they’re at, what we need to do on our side of things. So I’m always happy to have a conversation and just see what we can do on our side. Doesn’t mean necessarily we’re gonna fund a company, but if I can help a company, if I can help a founder, I’m gonna try and do so however I can.

Anthony Codispoti (56:03)
You get a lot of experience that a whole bunch of folks would really benefit from. So it’s super generous of you to be able to offer up your time like that. So the last question I have for you is, you know, ⁓ had a nice conversation here today. I hope you and I stay in touch and a year from now you’re super excited because you’re celebrating something. What’s that thing you’re celebrating a year from now?

Jonathan Wallace (56:26)
You know, I’m hoping we see a couple of these companies with some big series B, series C rounds here too. So I think more than anything, I’m looking forward to seeing our startups succeed. You know, I only win if they win big too. So I want to see that side of things. I want us to continue to see some of our celebrity fund grow. I want to see our network continue to grow on that. And ⁓ the great thing about those two things, it’s fun to see people like you’re up watching. It’s fun to see people involved in the sports world because I’m a big fan of everything on that side too.

Hopefully we’re seeing some startup success and we’re all out celebrating together somewhere.

Anthony Codispoti (56:59)
Actually, follow on question for you there, Jonathan. You know, you’ve got a lot of new things going on with sort of the Celebrity Fund coming. I’m curious, sort of as you look at the space in general, what are kind of the big changes you see coming to the funding space in the next couple of years? Do you see it shifting? Do you see there being like big changes, whether it’s because of ⁓

ways that AI is being leveraged or just kind of other like forces that are playing a part here.

Jonathan Wallace (57:34)
Absolutely. Yeah. AI is changing everything in technology right now. And it’s, mean, I’d be lying if I said I could tell you exactly what’s going be happening with that. And it’s going to affect our industry as much as it’s affecting every other industry right now. So I know a lot of like associate role stuff. lot of the times I know VCs personally who are doing a lot of those things on AI now developing deal memos, things like that. So there’s something to be said about what a VC is going to be pulling from AI.

I think there’s still elements of that that you’re going to have to refine, but we’ll see what happens with AI. think there’s a lot of things coming on that side too. But we’re going to see a lot of investments in that industry. think obviously AI is still the big thing in VC. Every company I speak to now has some element of AI. It’s just a big buzzword in our industry now and finding what’s AI and finding what’s not, seeing what kind of IP they can develop around AI. Because the reality is most of them are using open AI or some other

major AI platform that’s out there. And they’re just using those LLMs and seeing what they can do with them. developing, I’m sorry, developing IP around those things can be instrumental. So it has to be unique. It has to be something that’s different from the rest of the products out there. And you can really brand them a certain specific way. Because I think branding is going to be a big piece of that as well. And how you can actually go to market with your product. Because there’s so many AI video generators, AI

chatbots and AI works assistants that are out there now. mean, there’s going to be different ones, there’s going to be ones who win in those markets. Finding who those are is going to be interesting. And I think every VC would say they have the one that’s going to do it or they’re going to find that one. But we’ll see that evolve a lot. Deals we’re seeing, I it just, feel like it’s just a kind of a broken record. We’re seeing a lot less funding right now. We’re just not seeing as much of the pre-seed and the seed stage. I’m seeing a lot more funds move.

further downstream, getting closer to series A. Firms that were pre-seed now require $50,000 in revenue before they even look at a deal. It’s tough. then, as somebody on the VC side of things, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (59:44)
The criteria is getting tougher. People are being

a little more careful with their dollars.

Jonathan Wallace (59:49)
Yeah, it’s a tough market right now for founders. I think we went through a very good market for founders not too long ago. And now we’re on the other side of that. And that’s just what happens with markets. It just goes up and down. And right now it’s definitely harder to raise funding. So both on the LP side of things and on the GP side of things, and then the founders, there’s a lot less capital available for earlier stage companies. So you have to validate it. You have to push further than you would have before. At the end of the day,

there’s still plenty of dry powder available. There’s still a lot of VCs investing. And if you’re building something the right way, you will find investors if your company is looking for that avenue.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:27)
Jonathan Wallace from Expert Doja, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.

Jonathan Wallace (1:00:34)
Yeah, thank you for having me.