November 2023
Matt Compton
Each year the Oregon Venture Fund invites venture-backed CEOs in our region – and their primary VC investors – to an afternoon of connecting, learning, and professional development. We call this event The Funded and it provides an inspiring venue for CEOs to develop their craft, connect, and learn from their peers. This September, we convened 35 CEOs from diverse industries, company stages, and backgrounds at the beautiful Stoller Family Vineyard in the Willamette Valley. The event was carefully designed to foster collaboration and mutual learning, allowing CEOs to tap into the collective wisdom and experiences of their peers during the event and then throughout the year.
The Agenda:
This year’s focus was The Pursuit of Excellence. It was an opportunity for CEOs to share their stories, insights, and strategies for achieving and sustaining excellence in the areas of Strategy, Talent, Product Development, Organizational Design, and Delivering Operating Results. We were fortunate to have several experts in the field to come and share their best practices, as well. This year’s lineup included:
Kristen Hamilton on How to Build a Rocket Ship: Principles, Funding and Talent
Scott Roth on Four Lessons on Scaling High Performing Teams
Monica Enand on Building and Delivering an Operating Plan
Colin Nederkoorn on Pursuing Product Excellence in Startups and Growth Companies
Many thanks to each of them for sharing their knowledge and experience.
Peer-to-Peer Learning & Networking:
The heart of The Funded is the opportunity for CEOs to share their best practices and insights and to learn from one another. We’ve found that by creating an environment for open, transparent sharing of wins, failures, and learnings, attendees can most effectively gain practical wisdom and actionable insights from their fellow CEOs. The format includes interactive sessions, panel discussions, and workshops that facilitate peer-to-peer best practice sharing. We also have unstructured networking sessions throughout the event that often lead to new partnerships, informal mentorship opportunities, and access to new customers.
Actionable Topics, Panels & Success Stories:
Our ambition is that every attendee walks away from the event with a specific action they can take or insight they can use to improve their business or their own performance in the next 30 days.
This year some of this year’s nuggets include:
Are you getting better at your job as fast, or faster, than your company is growing? Interesting framing, isn’t it? Think about this... If I’m leading a company that’s growing at 70% per year, I need to be 70% better at my job next year to keep up.
How do you continually assess the quality of your leadership team relative to the market? By benchmarking your leadership team by regularly meeting with top CROs, CMOs, CTOs, etc. from companies you respect throughout the year, even if you’re not actively recruiting. This is an excellent long-term recruiting practice so that you have a personal connection with top leaders BEFORE you start active recruiting for a given role.
How do you build buy-in and commitment to your operating plan? This is our plan. Not the CEOs plan. Not the board’s plan. Consider using the symbolism of physical commitment (e.g., stand up if you are bought into and committed to this plan).
Where are you on the product maturity curve? In the early days, your product will suck for a bit but you have to sell it confidently. Focus on the one feature or scenario that will fuel your growth. Products succeed when they have a clear differentiation that customers care about. It can be small at first but needs to be easy to understand.
Are you efficiently interviewing for the right candidate or just having random unstructured conversations? Without a clear consistent rubric for candidate evaluation, you’re almost randomly selecting hires based on feel, which is fraught with bias and unlikely to identify the best candidate.
What are the key factors for assessing ability and fit of candidates for a leadership role? Conventional wisdom has been to hire the smartest possible person you can find with a personality you like and domain knowledge in the space. The new rubric is about hiring a person who is smart enough, has the technical skills required and then differentiates around their ability to impact an organization. This ability to impact tends to be driven more by soft skills like empathy, leadership, and team building.
The Funded is more than just an event, it's an annual touchpoint for our community where entrepreneurs can continually learn and grow, inspiring each other to pursue excellence for themselves and their businesses. This gathering fosters a spirit of innovation, collaboration, and shared success (and failures), where all boats rise across our region’s startup ecosystem and CEOs can openly collaborate to compete.
If you are a venture funded entrepreneur and we haven’t met you, please reach out to Matt Compton at matt@oregonventurefund.com. We hope to see you next year!
The 2023 Funded event was made possible with the support of our generous co-sponsors: Jane Ullman with Silicon Valley Bank and Ajay Malhotra with CBRE.