Chris is the Co-Founder and CEO of Drive Capital. Prior to Drive, Chris was a Partner at Sequoia Capital where he helped launch the firm’s first growth fund.
Chris left Sequoia in 2012 to start Drive in Ohio on a single bet: the best companies in America are getting built outside Silicon Valley (and almost nobody's funding them). Thirteen years later, Drive has handed back over $1 billion to its investors in a market where most funds can't return a dollar.
We talk chasing $2B outcomes instead of $50B, when his lead investor pulled out the day he moved from SF to Columbus, why only 100 of 3,500 firms can raise right now, the welders quitting to drive DoorDash, and why America is the best emerging market on earth.
Thanks to this episodes sponsors!
Numeral: Sales tax on autopilot https://www.numeral.com
Flex: Premium banking, 60-day credit, 0% APR https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapital
Amplitude: AI analytics https://www.amplitude.com
Merge: Every model, one API https://www.merge.dev/turner
Monaco: The revenue engine for startups https://www.monaco.com/
Timestamps:
(0:00) America is the best emerging market
(8:13) Why this couldn't have happened pre-2006
(10:48) Top lessons from 10 years at Sequoia
(14:17) Why the "meeting factory" model fails
(21:42) Searching for vacuums
(24:51) Sequoia passed on a company 10 miles too far
(29:37) Greece's GDP equals Detroit's
(34:34) The biggest tech companies aren't in SF
(40:28) 223 meetings to raise Fund 1
(44:27) Turning one fund into a product catalog
(48:47) The day his biggest LP pulled out
(52:08) Fundraising is a persistence game
(57:36) Returning $500M in a single week
(59:56) Only 12 companies hit $50B in 20 years
(1:01:29) Why Drive owns 30%, not 10%
(1:05:03) Returns over logos, the carry math
(1:10:00) Mindset of VC's outside SF
(1:15:54) How AI unlocks boring, giant markets
(1:19:22) Investing in catalysts, not sectors or geo
(1:25:35) 3,500 firms raised, 100 survived
(1:31:33) OpenAI won't eat every other company
(1:37:46) Compete with yesterday's version of yourself
(1:40:19) Small changes, compounding results
Referenced
Drive Capital: http://drivecapital.com/
Follow Chris
Twitter: https://x.com/ChrisOlsenCMH
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cholsen
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
