Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies
Episode publishedPodcast: Goldman Sachs ExchangesGoldman Sachs Exchanges
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Welcome to Goldman Sachs exchanges, great investors. I'm Ken Hirsch, co chairman of the global technology media and telecom group and head of venture capital coverage within Goldman Sachs' global banking and markets business. Today, I'm thrilled to be speaking with Mike Spicer, managing director of Sutter Hill Ventures. As one of Silicon Valley's most respected venture capitalists, Mike doesn't just invest in companies, he often takes a leading role in building them. It's a strategy that's proven massively successful, producing winners such as Snowflake among others, in which Mike has served n
Thank you very much. Thank you for coming to California to do this Goldman Sachs team, and thank you, Ken. It's thanks for the partnership in general and the opportunity.
You joined Sutter Hill Ventures in 02/2008, a firm with a rich and storied history dating back to the nineteen sixties as one of the earliest and most influential Silicon Valley venture firms, producing such winners as NVIDIA, Pure Storage, Snowflake, and more recently Astera Labs. What drove your decision to become a venture capitalist at that time, and how did your experiences leading up to that point prepare you for that moment?
You know, I really wanted to build great things my whole life since I was a teenager. And I'd done startups. I'd worked at large companies, and venture capitalists were the ones I would always kind of work with to try to figure out how to finance my companies and also learn. There's a lot of knowledge in venture capital. And so when I was trying to figure out what's next after I had sold a company to Yahoo, I had considered starting companies, and I had considered joining in venture capital. What I really wanted to do is what we do now. I wanted to go build a machine to build machines. I wante
And what led you at that time to Sutter Hill specifically? You'd had some interaction with Jim White.
Jim White was on the board of my company Bix, and, you know, Sutter Hill has a long history, very well known in the valley. One of the things they're known for is just really high integrity, good people. And that was my experience when they head back to my company. And so if I'm gonna go out and build things with people I care about, I wanted to work with the best, you know, highest integrity people out there. So it was a pretty easy answer when I was thinking about what to go do. And it was the firm in general, but Jim White in particular was someone who I just had deep trust for. And any ent
Yeah. Knowing Jim, I can understand why you feel that way about him. Fast forward to today, seventeen years later, you are by any measure one of the most respected venture capitalists in the world, yet you self describe not as an investor, but a builder. Tell us what that means to you.
Yeah. I look at some of the great investors, and I don't think I'm a great investor, at least as I imagine investors. I think I'm a pretty good builder. And venture is this really kind of unusual, I don't know, kind of asset class, if you wanna call it that, where it's part builder and part investor. And, you know, I think historically people have gone back and forth and still go back and forth between, you know, the share within venture of building versus investing. I think all the great venture capitalists at some level are partners to builders and builders or builders themselves. And so I w
It sounds like you knew what you wanted to do when you joined Sutter Hill, but you didn't know if they were gonna embrace it or not because it was a little nontraditional.
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