When Goyal reached out to Elad Gil, a prolific angel investor she had met after he invested in her husband’s company, for advice on how to break into venture capital at an established firm, Gil proposed a bolder plan: take $600,000 of his own money to start investing on her own. It paid off. Goyal, a former product manager at trucking software company Samsara, spent the next six months researching and investing in startups on nights and weekends before quitting her job to launch her own early-stage firm, Basecase Capital, in May 2021. Since then, she has raised three funds totaling $99 million and invested in more than 30 businesses, including IT services company Supabase and data warehouse startup Census. Investing in business-to-business software entrepreneurs isn’t unique, but Goyal has her own twist: She doesn’t take pitch meetings. Instead, she seeks out exceptional employees at tech companies whom she thinks will make great founders one day. She builds relationships and picks their brains on startup ideas before they even launch a company so that she’s the first call when they do. “The best part about my job is that I have 37 founders running around that are constantly making great things happen, and I genuinely feel success for them,” she said.
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TechTranscript
00:00 Alana, it is great to be here with you.
00:04 Thank you for coming.
00:05 Thanks for having me.
00:06 So I want to talk first about your founding story.
00:10 Tell me about how you founded your company.
00:11 Yeah.
00:12 So I think I always knew I loved startups and because of that, I wanted to be an investor
00:17 someday because you can help people start companies and not just do it once, but help
00:23 many different people.
00:25 And COVID, I kind of realized I wanted to spend more time with founders and I didn't
00:30 have enough personal capital to be an angel investor at that point.
00:34 So I ended up raising a very small like micro fund, 600K from one LP.
00:40 And I started using that to write small checks on nights and weekends.
00:43 As soon as I started not only investing, but starting Base Case and realizing that it was
00:49 the entrepreneurial aspect of figuring out how I'm going to get in front of people because
00:54 I didn't have a background as an investor.
00:57 I didn't have any firm name on the wall to show, you know, here's why you should take
01:02 a meeting with me.
01:04 And I was just kind of reaching out to interesting people or being connected to people through
01:08 my network.
01:10 And as soon as I started writing those checks, I realized I loved it and I wanted to do it
01:14 full time.
01:15 Is there any particular focus you're looking on when you invest in people?
01:19 Is there any particular industries or categories or people you're really excited about?
01:22 Yeah, so Base Case is a little bit different.
01:25 And I like to say I spend all of my time with founders before they're actually founders.
01:31 So unlike most VCs, I don't really take pitch meetings.
01:34 I am mostly talking to the brightest engineers and maybe second time founders whose companies
01:40 were acquired and sort of getting to know them when they are just in the thick of it,
01:45 whether they are just learning how to adapt as a company scales.
01:50 And so I try to figure out how I can help them, introduce them to maybe some of my portfolio
01:55 founders to talk about their journey.
01:58 And eventually, whenever they're ready to leave and start a company, I try to write
02:02 the first check in because oftentimes it's really before someone actually knows what
02:06 it is that they're going to build.
02:10 So what's it been like as a woman to navigate in this ridiculously male dominated VC industry?
02:17 Have you faced any big challenges?
02:20 The first fund I raised was a $20 million fund and I started raising it.
02:25 And I still remember about a week into that, I looked at my air table tracking of the investors
02:32 and there was probably one woman.
02:35 And I was like, okay, after this week, I need to only talk to women and underrepresented
02:41 minorities in tech.
02:42 And that's what I did.
02:44 I lowered the minimum check size.
02:46 Historically, funds have sort of a crazy minimum, like $250K to invest, lowered that to $5K
02:52 was the lowest check.
02:54 And without a doubt, the women and the people that I typically don't think would have made
03:01 it into the fund if I had stuck with sort of the typical norm of a $250K minimum are
03:06 the people who are most interesting to me.
03:10 If you could give yourself one piece of advice the day before you started your company, what
03:15 would you tell yourself that you wish you had known that you know now?
03:19 I would say lean into what makes you you and forget about what people traditionally do
03:26 in this role.
03:27 When I first started, I looked at all the other investors and I said, okay, you know,
03:31 typical investor is meeting companies that are actively raising, they are looking at
03:36 decks and they're asking really smart questions.
03:39 And there are a lot of great investors that do that.
03:42 And I thought that that's what I had to do.
03:45 And it really took me like a couple of years to realize actually what I'm really good at,
03:50 which not a lot of other people are good at, is just finding great people and building
03:54 relationships and seeing things in people before anyone else does.
03:58 And so what I sort of realized over the last two years is like, whenever I do that, it
04:03 ends up being a really successful company.
04:07 And one last question for you, and this is a lofty one, so you can take a second.
04:11 What would you like your legacy to be?
04:14 For me, it's not enough just to be an investor in great companies.
04:17 I want to be someone that those founders say, you know, she believed in me and she sort
04:23 of gave me the conviction to go and build something.
04:25 And I think the goal that I have with Basecase is to, you know, give people confidence in
04:31 themselves that they can go and build something and give them all the resources they need
04:36 to go and do that.
04:38 So if I can just inspire people to go build and give them the sort of push to, you know,
04:46 jump off the diving board, I think that's what my goal is.
04:49 [MUSIC]