How I Invest with David Weisburd
E133: Lessons from Investing in 2200 Startups (in 23 Minutes)
28 Jan 2025
In this episode of How I Invest, I connect with Lorenzo Thione, Managing Director at Gaingels, one of the most active and inclusive venture syndicates in the world. Lorenzo discusses his philosophy on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the democratization of venture capital, and his thoughts on the AI revolution. From his experience building a portfolio of over 100 investments to lessons learned from co-founding PowerSet, Lorenzo provides invaluable insights for investors and entrepreneurs alike.
Full Episode
Unlike the public market where everyone has the same access to everything, the private market is highly asymmetric. And so if you invest for a long time, but you only have access to a corner of the market, you may be at one or the other end of that spectrum.
Maybe that you have like uniquely qualified access and you do better than everybody else or you have uniquely adverse access and you do worse than everybody else. So to some extent, if you are a very large family office or a very large investor and you can be an LP in every major VC fund out there, that's a great strategy, right? Over years and years and years, you'll do really, really well.
That's borne out in the beginning. But what if you aren't? Tell me about your philosophy on DEI. I tend to be a very moderate person in my views. But I also think that like everything in life, even when there is a really good, solid, moral reason to do something or to stand for something, there is always almost an inevitable kind of risk that people co-opt. these things for their own purposes.
And so you have the good version of DEI, which says, you know, talent is universally distributed and doesn't see races or genders or any other characteristics. But opportunity isn't. And that's the reality of the world in which we live and we have lived in is we can absolutely and I am the first one to stand by saying merit is the most important thing.
It's not just about being an incredible worker, hard worker person. It also matters where you grew up, what kind of networks you had access to, what kind of resources you had access to. And so realizing that talent is uniformly distributed and opportunity isn't is not a bad thing.
What is bad is co-opting this mission in ways that are perverted and that ultimately don't do anything to advance equality, sometimes perpetuate different inequality. So I think there's a lot of absolutely legitimate criticisms that need to be levied at what DEI had become almost as an industry.
At the same time, we at Gangel's believe that there is work that we can do to provide more access and more opportunities to people, entrepreneurs, investors, folks that have traditionally just haven't been able to access the incredible wealth and value and innovation engine that is venture capital. And we exist to do that. What is Gangel's?
Gangel's today is one of the largest, most active venture investment syndicates in the world. We invest in companies that look to us as being partner with them to help them build truly inclusive organizations at the levels of talent, governance, and capital.
We help them with hiring, recruiting, bringing on board members, advisors, and we represent an incredibly diverse group of investors that come from all paths of life, all genders, all ethnicities, really all type of peoples that traditionally have found it hard to get access to the type of opportunities that Gainesville is able to bring them.
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