Do the Right Thing
Shopping for one of his favorite agricultural products, Sam and Sandy enjoy their first visit to a Boulder dispensary in 2015.
It’s hard to learn to Do the Right Thing when you’re a venture capitalist. There are a lot of constituencies that demand your attention:
Your duty is to your entrepreneurs, because all your success as an investor derives from them.
Your duty is to your Limited Partners, because you have a fiduciary responsibility to manage their money, at all times putting their interests ahead of your own.
Your duty is to your Partners, because without a cohesive team making investments together, your Fund’s effort falls apart.
Your duty is to your portfolio company employees, whose careers and livelihoods are in your hands as the lead investor in the startup where they’ve committed their human capital.
Your duty is to yourself, to your family and to the happiness of the people who care about you the most.
Your duty is to your community, because the companies you finance create unintended consequences that can be harmful to those around you.
It is common in our experience as VCs that sometimes these duties are in conflict. What might be best for our companies may not be best for our Fund’s economics. What might maximize my return might not be best for my investors. The hard work and dedication that an investment requires of me might interfere with my family’s happiness. The successful product my company makes might pose an unforeseen risk to my community.
How we balance these duties defines us in our careers. One of my intellectual heroes, Nassim Taleb, says "Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties."
Sam Dryden was a great Venture Capitalist and Philanthropist who pioneered the genetically-modified seed business with his partner, Mark Wong. I officed with Sam and Mark from the start of Boulder Ventures, and we were climbing partners, co-investors and friends for more than thirty years until Sam’s death in 2017.
Sam’s world was complicated. There’s no free lunch in the ag business, and the competing interests of seed companies, trait owners, distributors, farmers and the public over issues of economics and food safety affect us all. Sam and Mark created this ecosystem at Agrigenetics, Monsanto, and Emergent Genetics, and they successfully managed these conflicts throughout their careers together.
Because of his experience with the issues and consequences around agriculture and technology, Sam was also an influential advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation and ran the global food initiative at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But the most impressive thing about Sam was the way he interacted with the people he met: with humility, compassion, and a sophisticated understanding of the complex ways his decisions affected them.
Throughout my progression as a VC, I’d spend time with Sam and ask him what to do when a conflict arose. We’d talk for hours about all of the possible outcomes from our actions, how to balance the risks, whose interests were at stake and why. Sam was especially good at finding ways to align the interests of different parties, so that the choices we made benefitted everyone.
But when the discussion was over and we had to make a decision, Sam always gave me the same advice: Do the Right Thing.
