Venture

Ex-Brex exec Sam Blond is already leaving Founders Fund just 18 months after he joined

Comment

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 20: Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 20, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Image Credits: Kimberly White / Getty Images

Sam Blond is leaving Founders Fund, as well as the profession of venture capitalist, just 18 months after he joined the storied Silicon Valley firm.

In a tweet on Monday, Blond expressed his gratitude at the chance to work at Peter Thiel’s VC firm and explained, “Full time investing / being a VC isn’t the right fit for me and I’ve decided to go back to operating.” That likely means he’s either accepted/about to accept a position at a startup or another tech company, or is in the process of founding one. Reached earlier today, Blond told TechCrunch he had “no comment outside of the post for now.”

Before joining the VC firm, Blond was best known as the former chief revenue officer at Brex. Brex is not a Founders Fund portfolio company, although Founders Fund is an investor in one of Brex’s biggest competitors: Ramp. So Blond’s jump to the VC firm raised a few curious eyebrows, especially because at the time — September 2022 — Brex had reached decacorn status with a $300 million raise. That’s an odd time for a top salesperson to bow out. Typically, startup employees are salivating at the riches to come via an IPO or another exit when their company is experiencing such success. Prior to that, he was VP of sales at Zenefits, the once high-flying-then-troubled HR tech startup that was backed by Founders Fund. TriNet bought Zenefits in 2022.

The departure is a publicly friendly one. “Sam is a fantastic operator and he’s been a great resource for our founders. We hope to have the opportunity to work with him again,” Founders Fund spokesperson Erin Gleason tells TechCrunch. And maybe there’s a clue in there that the VC firm may one day back whatever new thing Blond is doing — or at least listen to the pitch.

But this is the second splashy departure of a Founders Fund partner over the past couple of months. Keith Rabois shocked the startup world when he left in January to return to his former firm Khosla Ventures.

It’s fairly rare for senior partners to leave their funds for other funds — especially prolific dealmakers like Rabois — because their earnings are tied to the results of their investments, and such investments can take years to mature. The situation creates some solid golden handcuffs. It is more common for those who come from a startup operations world, like Blond, and who have invested with their own money, to leave a VC role after a short time. Investing other people’s money is a very different skill.

And Founders Fund is a bit unusual in how it operates, too. While all Silicon Valley firms give lip service to being pro-founder and founder friendly (otherwise, no founder would sell them a chunk of their company), Founders Fund has some more stringent rules about that.

As Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens told TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos at the StrictlyVC LA event last week, “We are founder absolutists,” he said. The firm’s partners rarely take board seats: “we always vote with founders. And at the point that a company no longer has a founder as CEO, we are out. We don’t invest in non-founder-led businesses.”

Still, the firm doesn’t disqualify its partners from simultaneously being founders of their own startups, too. Thiel famously founded Palantir, for instance. Rabois founded OpenStore and Stephens co-founded Anduril. Many other VC firms also have partners who simultaneously run startups. If being a founder and a VC isn’t automatically mutually exclusive, that means a desire to be “an operator” may not fully explain why Blond took his leave.

Other than what he’s said publicly, we don’t know the other reasons. However, many VCs prefer to think of themselves as a “value-add” partner, meaning they want to be involved in helping the business they back, and at Founders Fund such involvement is frowned upon.

“The more that a VC says, ‘I’m going to add value,’ the more you should hear them say, ‘I’m going to annoy the ever living crap out of you for the rest of the time that I’m on the cap table,’” Stephens told the StrictlyVC audience. “So I think our approach is more, you know, we’re going to invest in the company because we believe that that founder or that group of founders are the people that are going to grow this business.”

And that means that a VC’s career there depends on choosing winners while having very little say in how those choices operate.

More TechCrunch

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch has been publishing a series of interviews focused on remarkable women who’ve contributed to…

Women in AI: Rep. Dar’shun Kendrick wants to pass more AI legislation

We took the pulse of emerging fund managers about what it’s been like for them during these post-ZERP, venture-capital-winter years.

A reckoning is coming for emerging venture funds, and that, VCs say, is a good thing

It’s been a busy weekend for union organizing efforts at U.S. Apple stores, with the union at one store voting to authorize a strike, while workers at another store voted…

Workers at a Maryland Apple store authorize strike

Alora Baby is not just aiming to manufacture baby cribs in an environmentally friendly way but is attempting to overhaul the whole lifecycle of a product

Alora Baby aims to push baby gear away from the ‘landfill economy’

Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd raised eyebrows this week with her comments about how AI might change the dating experience. During an onstage interview, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang…

Go on, let bots date other bots

Welcome to Week in Review: TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. This week Apple unveiled new iPad models at its Let Loose event, including a new 13-inch display for…

Why Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is so misguided

The U.K. Safety Institute, the U.K.’s recently established AI safety body, has released a toolset designed to “strengthen AI safety” by making it easier for industry, research organizations and academia…

U.K. agency releases tools to test AI model safety

AI startup Runway’s second annual AI Film Festival showcased movies that incorporated AI tech in some fashion, from backgrounds to animations.

At the AI Film Festival, humanity triumphed over tech

Rachel Coldicutt is the founder of Careful Industries, which researches the social impact technology has on society.

Women in AI: Rachel Coldicutt researches how technology impacts society

SAP Chief Sustainability Officer Sophia Mendelsohn wants to incentivize companies to be green because it’s profitable, not just because it’s right.

SAP’s chief sustainability officer isn’t interested in getting your company to do the right thing

Here’s what one insider said happened in the days leading up to the layoffs.

Tesla’s profitable Supercharger network is in limbo after Musk axed the entire team

StrictlyVC events deliver exclusive insider content from the Silicon Valley & Global VC scene while creating meaningful connections over cocktails and canapés with leading investors, entrepreneurs and executives. And TechCrunch…

Meesho, a leading e-commerce startup in India, has secured $275 million in a new funding round.

Meesho, an Indian social commerce platform with 150M transacting users, raises $275M

Some Indian government websites have allowed scammers to plant advertisements capable of redirecting visitors to online betting platforms. TechCrunch discovered around four dozen “gov.in” website links associated with Indian states,…

Scammers found planting online betting ads on Indian government websites

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The company is describing the event as “a chance to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far

The deck included some redacted numbers, but there was still enough data to get a good picture.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Cloudsmith’s $15M Series A deck

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude did not become a new App Store hit.

Anthropic’s Claude sees tepid reception on iOS compared with ChatGPT’s debut

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look,…

Startups Weekly: Trouble in EV land and Peloton is circling the drain

Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack…

Founders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts

AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least.  Announced in a post on the company’s official…

Anthropic now lets kids use its AI tech — within limits

Zeekr’s market hype is noteworthy and may indicate that investors see value in the high-quality, low-price offerings of Chinese automakers.

The buzziest EV IPO of the year is a Chinese automaker

Venture capital has been hit hard by souring macroeconomic conditions over the past few years and it’s not yet clear how the market downturn affected VC fund performance. But recent…

VC fund performance is down sharply — but it may have already hit its lowest point

The person who claims to have 49 million Dell customer records told TechCrunch that he brute-forced an online company portal and scraped customer data, including physical addresses, directly from Dell’s…

Threat actor says he scraped 49M Dell customer addresses before the company found out

The social network has announced an updated version of its app that lets you offer feedback about its algorithmic feed so you can better customize it.

Bluesky now lets you personalize main Discover feed using new controls

Microsoft will launch its own mobile game store in July, the company announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. Xbox president Sarah Bond shared that the company plans to…

Microsoft is launching its mobile game store in July

Smart ring maker Oura is launching two new features focused on heart health, the company announced on Friday. The first claims to help users get an idea of their cardiovascular…

Oura launches two new heart health features

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI considers allowing AI porn

Garena is quietly developing new India-themed games even though Free Fire, its biggest title, has still not made a comeback to the country.

Garena is quietly making India-themed games even as Free Fire’s relaunch remains doubtful

The U.S.’ NHTSA has opened a fourth investigation into the Fisker Ocean SUV, spurred by multiple claims of “inadvertent Automatic Emergency Braking.”

Fisker Ocean faces fourth federal safety probe