Founder’s Field Guide
Episode 55 Simplifying Fund Closing
Founder’s Field Guide

Episode 55: Simplifying Fund Closing

Simplifying Fund Closing

Tim Flannery is the co-founder of venture fund administrator Passthrough. We discuss the biggest frictions in investing, what achieving greatness in distribution and sales looks like, and the power of identity as a feature to build products around.

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[00:02:08] - [First question] - The push and pull nature of what Passthrough is trying to solve

[00:04:17] - What the idealized end state 10 years from now looks like

[00:07:33] - A history of friction in investing and what barriers still remain today

[00:12:35] - The spark of insight that led to starting this new venture

[00:17:45] - Lessons learned from Okta and why identity is so powerful

[00:19:39] - Plans to expand this concept deeper into the tech stack

[00:22:24] - Adjacent problems that they plan to tackle as they continue to scale

[00:24:30] - What it feels like to use their product as an LP today

[00:26:10] - Working with service providers without becoming one

[00:28:06] - What great sales and distribution looks like to him at the infrastructure level 

[00:31:50] - Defining what “bring your collaborators” means 

[00:33:19] - His secret to recruiting talent to help solve an unsexy problem

[00:37:46] - His love for the intersection between process, pipelines, and efficiency 

[00:40:12] - Having a process for designing processes

[00:42:11] - How they arrived at their pricing and thoughtful pricing in software

[00:45:08] - Lessons from building Passthrough that other builders could benefit from 

[00:47:16] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

Simplifying Fund Closing

Introduction

Patrick
My guest today is Tim Flannery, co-founder of venture fund administrator Passthrough. Passthrough is removing friction from the manual, time-consuming fundraising process by making investor onboarding as set simple and automatic as possible. Passthrough software helps investors fill out subscription documents in minutes rather than hours, and allows GPs to easily track LP subscriptions during a fundraise. Our conversation discusses the power of identity as a feature to build products around, the double-edged sword of solving an unsexy problem, and how Passthrough has thought about pricing their software. Please enjoy my conversation with Tim Flannery.

Reducing Frictions in Investing

Patrick
Tim, we were talking before hitting record, and you said something just there and I told you to stop because maybe it's the right place to start our conversation, which is this notion that if you think about the complex Yale endowment models, the fanciest of asset allocation investing models out there in the world, the ability to do that sort of thing maybe working its way down, all the way down to the individual. There's this democratization of ways that you can invest, types of investors, different kinds of backgrounds of GPS out there. We're going to talk a lot today about what's happening in the world of investing, but maybe that concept is a great wedge to begin our conversation. What are you seeing that leads you to say that what Yale can do perhaps at some point soon the individual will be able to do?

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