I'm Kent Lindström, co-founder of 8bit Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests in the software startups of the future. We focus on AI, cyber security, and fintech. I'm going to take you behind the scenes in Silicon Valley. This is the Something Ventured podcast.
All right, welcome back. This is the Something Measured podcast. I am Kent Lindström. I am your host. My guest today is Mark Suster. How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Kent. Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much for doing this. The AI told me definitively when I asked that your name is pronounced Suster and it gave me a little pronunciation guide as you big ass USS and I thought to myself that seems like kind of a shifty AI there. I'm going to go check myself. So I know it's Mark Suster.
I appreciate you saying that. You're in rarified air of people who get it right first time. So much so that I was actually surprised. I was like, wow, well done you. I usually tell people it's like my mom's name, which happens to be Sue. And she owned a bakery, which is also true, and she likes to stir things. It's Suster.
That's so funny. I went on YouTube to find, you know, hoping to find somebody saying, 'Hey, here's Mark Suster. He's my guest today.' I must have seen 10 videos and people are so adept now at chopping up videos. So they start with these cold opens. So none of them had your damn name at the beginning.
It's funny. I never correct anybody, so you could never know for sure. I just over the years learned most people get it wrong, so who cares.
I think I found somewhere where you said it. In any case, Mark has been a founder, built a couple companies, sold those companies, which seems pretty good. But is now a venture capitalist at Upfront Ventures, which is in Los Angeles. He is behind the blog Both Sides of the Table, the both sides I assume being a venture capitalist and a founder, and is a driving force behind the Upfront Summit, which as venture summits go is probably one of the coolest or most famous ones taking place in LA.
I think one of the most interesting things about your background though, you went to UCSD.
I did. Nobody goes to UCSD, but I guess two of the best guys in venture went to UCSD.
I mean, you may know this, but it has one of the top computer science programs in the country. It's incredible on sciences. We're one of the top medical undergrads in the country. We're very good on premed, on sciences, on AI. So it's a wonderful academic university.
When I went there, which was 86 to 91, so I'll let people do the math on whether I got out in four years or not. When I went there, it was a kind of a stress box. People don't understand that UCSD is the same thing as Berkeley and UCLA. It's part of the UC system. And they just immediately think San Diego State, which also is a good university, but UCSD is highly academic. And when I went there, it had one of the top suicide rates in the country just because it was a super grinding kind of university. I was not that student.
Kind of like Cornell. Did you mistakenly think it was a party school before you went there?
No, it was the opposite. In fact, I just spoke to this lady last night. Her name is Christy Burton, a longtime super close friend of mine from high school. And we went on a trip. We knew we had to go to the UC system because back then it was $1,500 per year. It was state subsidized. My parents didn't have a lot of money, despite my father being a doctor and my mom being an entrepreneur. So I had to go to a UC system because they were cheap. So I had my pick of which one to go to and I decided on UC Santa Barbara. And Christy and I in high school drove down to UC Santa Barbara and we just partied the entire weekend, including going to see Otis Day and the Nights who were playing at a fraternity party. I'd never been to a fraternity party. And at the end of that weekend, I chose to go to UCSD without ever visiting it. And I never told Christy and she signed up for UCSD for the exact same reason. So we ended up in college together.
That's funny. So for those of you around the world listening, UCSD, you're from California, San Diego, is in a town called La Jolla, California. It used to be called UCLJ actually when they first started, but nobody knew where LJ was. And you would think it's a half block from some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. You would think that would be a college town, a beach town. It's not. It's an incredibly hard academic biotech. It has a good theater program too, I think. But it's mostly this biotech thing and engineering.
So my wife went to Brown undergrad and when we first visited La Jolla and I showed her my campus and I showed her my dorms, I was ninth floor of Tioga Hall, ocean view from my dorm. And she simply said one thing to me. She said, 'Why didn't my parents tell me this existed?'
This is so funny. So man, Elad Gil, what are the odds? I always joke with people on this podcast that every venture capitalist went to Harvard or Stanford and then they always say they fell into venture. They have no idea how they did it. Harvard, Stanford, and sometimes Princeton. I went to Northwestern and like nobody went to Northwestern, actually over 100 venture capitalists went to Northwestern, but you're in rarified air. So you become a venture capitalist. But how do you kind of animate into that? Because most venture capitalists have not been founders and this is something I've looked at for a while because I'm a founder turned venture capitalist. There's a lot of people in a category where they call themselves operators, which means they've worked somewhere and that's great. But if you actually look at people like Marc Andreessen, who built companies and then became venture capitalists, it's a little more not unheard of, but a little more rare than you think. How did you make that transition? I mean, they're very different jobs.
Yeah, it's funny you say so. The world has changed a dramatic amount, Kent, as you know. I would start by saying my first job out of university was as a computer programmer. Again, I was talking with Christy about this last night. She didn't know this about me, but from 1987 to 1991, I worked in a computer store in Sacramento, California and I taught programming in high school.
Well, the big thing that I had was my parents got an IBM XT. And of course I also had access to Apple 2e and then Apple Mac. But my parents had an IBM XT and the really big innovation of the IBM XT circa 1985-86, I don't remember exactly which year it was, was that it had a 10 megabyte hard drive. So you no longer had to swap two floppies. By the time I got to work in the computer store, I was able to afford my own, to build my own computer from a brand called Leading Edge and it had 30 meg and I just couldn't believe I had 30 meg to play with. It was unbelievable. Mostly what I did is I built macros initially. I learned how to program in Lotus 123 macro language. Then my professor showed me actually if you did it in an independent language and you used a compiler that you could publish a program. So all throughout high school, then throughout college three days a week I worked in a computer store in college and had a programming job in college despite studying economics and political science. So when I graduated I was first a programmer. I did programming in COBOL on mainframes and then moved into database design DB2 and then moved into an area that was not really important in the early 90s which was middleware. And middleware was if you had a client and a server, so a desktop and a mainframe. The middle of the transaction had to handle things like what happens if the connection goes down? What happens if the database goes down? What happens if we write a record into a database, but then the network goes down and the client never knows that we wrote the record. So we built these layers called middleware. And it was around the time, I think a little bit later than that, TIBCO became popularized. But all of my point being in the lead up to the internet, the internet itself, the network and the middle component became the most important thing. So that's what led for me, I moved out to Europe. I lived in Europe for 11 years. The first of it I was working with large telcos on launching internet offerings starting in 1995 through 1999.
