David Tisch closes two new BoxGroup funds as NYC startup scene matures and AI acqui-hires accelerate

service. We'll talk soon. Bye. Thanks, guys. Cheers. Uh before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about adquick. com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

Only adquate combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying across the globe. We have David Tish in the recent waiting room. Love t. Let's go. Let's go. Give us the news. What's new in your world? Did you raise one fund? No, two. What? Oh, hit that gong. We got two funds.

Two new funds. Thank you. Let's go. Incredible. We did two because two is more than one which was made bigger number better. They made a sequel to one fund. It's two fun and that's important to to do more always, especially in venture. Yeah. Yeah. Bigger is always better. What's the strategy? Put it all in one place.

Massive secondary slug of open AI. What are you thinking? We're we're we literally have no rules. Our plan is to give people money. Okay. And and pray and uh diversify our prayers and diversified set of prayers. Uh where are we on the prayer meter? Should we differentiate this year than last year?

Are we going to be praying a lot more next year? What do you think? Uh you just it's like a balance of stability and increasing at the same time. So you have to do you never like drop. you just keep doing more.

But we're we're different than other VC firms in that strategy, which is important because we're selling money, which is a commodity. Yeah, makes sense. I love it.

Uh what what uh besides fundraising, has that just dominated your life the last uh since we last chatted, or are you still I'm not a um you are forced to file with the government at a certain date. So 15 days after you uh it's like taxes but totally unrelated.

Um and so you have to file with the government and so our filing date was yesterday. So we're forced to uh talk about it and so that's why we did it. But we uh raised the money earlier in the spring and just closed it and we'll start giving it away uh in the new year which is a a 2026 treat.

What uh uh are are there particular areas that you feel are just like over like over hyperly like overco competitive right now?

Uh all the all like have been picked clean of new ideas categories where you feel like you have enough bets and maybe uh you're you're going to be declining to hear more pitches in a particular category or vertical or horizontal layer of the stack. Like are you thinking about that at all? No. Okay. Should we?

I don't know. Um, no. I mean, on this show, we hear like, you know, a million like you you you wind up hearing like AI agents for a million things and then you're just like, okay, I don't want to hear that. And maybe I mean, we're not even investing.

We're just like I'm kind of bored of talking about that particular niche. Yeah. Look, I think I think at the later stage there's a lot of direct competitors and if you're in the business of picking a later stage company, you pick one and and then you stop.

We're at the very earliest stage and so we're meeting people who have ideas, who have dreams. And what we've found over the years is is uh you guys know is things change. And so you might start with an idea you're going to we don't we don't fund intentional pivots, but people iterate. People get into a market.

They see where there is opening and where there's too much competition and your go to market becomes different. Your product might become different. Um, and so I think uh we don't ever close ourselves off to things. We don't try to fund direct competitors ever.

We think that's uh just just misaligned with the the deal you're making with the founder. Um, but I think we're open-minded to what we fund and uh where it's coming from. And I think that in this moment you're seeing sort of everything up for grabs still.

And whether that's within verticals, whether that's in the tech stack, um it doesn't mean, you know, go fund foundational models today, but I think other than that, um we're pretty open-minded. And then foundational models that are not perfectly horizontal, I think are probably still on the table.

Is there a new mafia emerging? I mean, we've lived through the PayPal mafia. There was a bunch of entrepreneurs. You guys are sponsored by the mafia, right? So my main goal with our new funds, we I counted only four of your sponsors that we've invested in. So Ramp, Privy, Bezel, and Graphite.

I would like to get uh the full lineup. Yeah. So we're going to take our money, we're going to give it to companies, they're going to give it to you, and and that's uh we call it the new circular economy. We tried to fund the circular economy. Circular economy. Our audience will buy the SAS and run their businesses.

I think we just main strategy. Our LPs were really excited about that strategy. Perfect. Perfect. Well, thank you. Uh what do you what's your what do you think is your most underrated portfolio company? Oh, that's a good Now I have to pick a f like a You basically have to pick a favorite.

No, no, but but but there's companies there's companies that that uh some of my favorite acquisitions are companies that like haven't been in the news for 5 years and they just get acquired for like $800 million and you're like we have one of those which is is really cool called ID.

mme which uh he was on banger company. I know I know him. Yeah. He was on Invest like the best after like 12 years. It's the craziest origin story. So that's like a a evergreen version of that and then one day they'll they'll like win. Uh sort of more modern version.

What Rogo is building I think is not getting enough attention. Um they're I I think Gabe came on if he didn't one day. Yeah. Yeah. Blake Hall, founder and CEO of ID ID.

I was at a conference and he had a whole deck about like the business and he just ripped it up, threw it out like minutes before and just told his life story and everyone was just like this is the best conversation ever cuz he like worked in the military like saved lives.

It was a crazy just like you know this is like elite business leadership. I have so much respect for him. Do you uh I feel like in some ways it's harder harder to predict the future than ever.

like in 2010 there was like this sense of uh I think we're going to have a bunch more internet companies in 2020 and I feel like there's a general sentiment in the industry of like we can't predict anything after 5 years like we might get you know crazy acceleration and AI progress and then everything changes right so it's a little bit fuzzy out in the future do you have any sort of uh I reference like uh there there's I I'll botch it but like there's a Bezos quote which is like in the future people will want like cheaper things faster, right?

And like I can I can like build a business on on those like with that with that goal uh for a long long time because do you have anything like that in early like in terms of how you do I have a Jeff Bezosworthy quote to share with you today?

No, more so like if you're evaluating you're evaluating something as like is it purely like yeah I don't know if this is going to be a market in 10 years but this is amazing. I think to your point um predicting two years out feels really hard right now.

You're seeing such rapid build iteration from the biggest companies and that includes the new wave of AI native companies, OpenAI, Enthropic, we saw the browser get released. You're seeing more and more like first principle build technology get released.

At the exact same time, you're seeing like the modernization of Google, of Meta, of Apple, of Amazon in real time and and Microsoft, they feel stronger in many ways uh than they did for a good 5-year period.

So trying to predict 2 years out when all of that's happening in terms of the startup world, I think is really uh difficult. At the exact same time, when we're investing, we can't do things that we think are shorting the future.

So you have to play for something that is 10 15 years out and not like we think this is going to happen but we can thread a needle for 3 years and build a business. That's a terrible way to invest and we call that short the future. I love that. That's really really good.

Um so we look at everything as like if everything this founder is saying is right is this interesting big enough to like fascinating to us and that's what an investment is is uh joining a journey.

Um so we try very hard to look at it from you know if if this existed is this right or cool and um not shorting the future such that it's like obvious why this won't exist in uh a reasonable amount of time. That makes sense.

I think the last time you were on or maybe one of the times you were on we talked about how there used to be there was this golden age of aqua hires where like great teams could sell to Twitter for like $10 million and they hadn't raised much so it was meaningful outcome for the founders and then they now we do aqua quits right that's what we're up to yeah the the yeah I mean obviously the the wind surf uh uh thing no it was more the like go to Facebook when you're you started a company from that company thing Yeah.

Yeah. That whole thing. But it feels like we maybe are in a new golden age of aqua hires where like I was advising a company uh a founder like last week who launched a product. It's like was exciting but like clearly doesn't have product market fit yet and he's like you know talented and has a great team.

So he's getting fielded all these offers that will be like not a meaningful outcome for the investors but like you know will be very meaningful for the team. And it feels like there's more of that right now in this moment when people are like I don't just need to like be AI native.

I need like as much AI native talent as I possibly can, I'll pay a big premium for it. Yes. Um and and that's healthy, right? The the sort of decade we had of people just staying in long-term like not going anywhere, startups without sort of recirculation of talent, I feel like was a negative moment.

I think the um like if you go back to the origins of of say Facebook or Uber or Airbnb um in that moment there was more aggregation of talent on those early teams than sort of in in the next wave of startups.

What's interesting about this moment in AI and these very significantly funded companies, a lot of the the research labs and people coming out of the foundational models by getting the funding at the scale they're getting and by bringing with them 8 10 20 people from their previous uh company you're actually getting depth of talent that is capable of building something big probably in an easier way than starting from scratch.

And so I think there's a balance to be had, but I do think um depth of talent is probably the most underrated component of a quality startup, right? Your 50th person on your roster is amazing.

And I think one of the things about RAMP that they've done so magically is this combination of hiring, retaining, uh acquiring, inspiring, let letting people go, bringing them back. And if you go to like 50, 100, 300th person at ramp, there's just an immense amount of talent from top to bottom.

Um, and that's I think how you build uh sustainable growth that uh you can keep iterating and and launching new and uh interesting products or marketing uh stunts or uh excellent marketing campaigns, right?

And and I think you're seeing that um from a company where you're seeing depth of talent across all the different um departments within within RAMP as an example%. Yeah. Uh chat wants a jersey check. What are we watch? What are we rocking? We're we're wearing the uh New York Rangers hundth 100th year anniversary jersey.

It's a baby blue. You look fantastic. Beautiful. We we haven't won a game at home yet. And so uh hopefully we're going to bring some luck to us. Well, good luck. Thank you so much. Congratulations, guys. If you if you know any sponsors who need money, just let me know and we'll take care of that. Perfect.

We'll make some introductions.