My guest today is Ben Sun, co-founder and general partner at Primary Venture Partners. Primary focuses on investing in companies at seed that were founded in New York and has the largest seed stage portfolio impact team. Some of his investment include Jet.com, Coupang, K Health and Mirror. Previously he co-founded community connect, which was one of the first social networking companies. We discuss the evolution of social, why he's so bullish of companies coming out of New York, being anti thesis and a macro analysis of the current seed market.
Questions I ask Ben:
What was your initial attraction to entrepreneurship?
How did you go about founding Community Connect?
What made you decide to become a VC?
How did Primary come together?
What was your reaction then to Facebook starting off in high school
I understand you invest in New York companies, which we will get to, but how did you end up investing in Coupang?
Why the focus on New York? How has Silicon Alley transformed in the past 15 years?
Why seed investing?
New York City Summit?
Process to figure out if a person could be the right founder?
How do you approach this current market when it comes to price?
It seems like lots of VCs are building out services and a platform for portfolio founders. How do you think about Primary's advantage when it comes to your own platform?
Are you finding that many investors that traditionally invest in Series A or when a company has PMF are coming down to seed?
I know you are an anti-thesis investor, would you mind unpacking that?
How do you process and analyze when founders pitch ideas to you?
Has any of your processes changed when it came to COVID?
What's one thing you would change about VC?
What's one book that inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally?
What's one piece of advice for founders?