Establishing Workable Partnerships with Kindra Tatarsky

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Kindra Tatarsky. Kindra, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Kindra Tatarsky: Thank you. Great to be here.

Matt Blumberg: I want to start by asking you to tell the audience what Touchdown Ventures is, because you guys have a really interesting model that's not a standard VC model.

Kindra Tatarsky: Great. Happy to do so. So Touchdown started nine years ago. We were founded by two people who came from Comcast Ventures and one person who came from a DFJ fund. The idea is to partner with corporations to help them set up their funds and then collaboratively run the fund together. So that three months' setup period is designed to go deep with a corporation, understand what their pain points are, and how startups in the ecosystem can help them. And then we run the VC side of it. They bring the strategic angle of it, and it really is co- run with them. We work with 20 different corporations across five different sectors. Lots of synergies within the sectors, but also across them as well.

Matt Blumberg: Interesting. So managed corporate venture capital.

Kindra Tatarsky: Exactly. We call it venture capital as a service. Corporate Venture Capital as a Service.

Matt Blumberg: CVCaaS.

Kindra Tatarsky: Exactly. You got to do it right. Startup world.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Well, and it makes sense because corporate venture capital is tricky, and you guys probably offer a layer of normal to interface with founders and entrepreneurs.

Kindra Tatarsky: Absolutely. I think of our role of translators oftentimes.

Matt Blumberg: Right. All right, so that's a good lead into my question for you today. So you help large firms invest, create new companies. Those new companies all are going to have some partnership, business development or product development relationship with big companies. So you have a lot of expertise in how the teeny- tiny startup works with the Fortune 500 company. What are a few things that CEOs who are trying to set up relationships like that should keep in mind?

Kindra Tatarsky: Okay, first thing I would say is just pause and realize that it takes time and have empathy because you are talking different languages. It's always important no matter what you're selling, but especially when you're talking to big corporations, pausing and thinking about where they're coming from, what their experience is, and how you can best help them and continue to repeat that mantra again and again.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, for sure. Take a beat. My experience is it can take a couple of years. All right, so we take time. We have some empathy. What's next?

Kindra Tatarsky: The second thing I think is to... With this goes back to just one- on- one startups. Don't try to find a problem, don't have a solution looking for a problem to solve. Solve a problem that exists today. And I always tell the startups that we work with that, we look at solve this problem right here, this point of friction. And once you're in the game with the corporation, then you can add on all these bells and whistles. You're trusted, you've got your MSA, hopefully you've got a partnership, you've got people to advocate for you. But if you're talking about doing this shiny thing that means nothing to them, it's going to be a real struggle.

Matt Blumberg: So that's interesting, particularly at this moment in time where everybody's talking about AI and it feels like if you're a startup with something magical on AI, you should just throw that out to a big company. But it has to solve a very specific problem for the company or for its customers.

Kindra Tatarsky: Think about it. They've got a budget, they've got their deadlines, they have their limited bandwidth. Goes back to the empathy point. Understand that AI is really cool, everyone wants to be part of it, but now there's so much noise that corporations are saying, " I don't know what to do with this." And so that's where we can help somewhat on the translation, but being very crystallized on what it is that you're solving for the corporation is really important.

Matt Blumberg: Right. Okay. And what's the third one?

Kindra Tatarsky: Third one is don't overpromise. So we will talk to companies as early as seed and pre- seed the realities until you have your MVP until you've really started to build those relationships. Maybe series A, those are nebulous terms these days, but really have a product that's in market that can solve a specific problem, hit the ground running with that problem, and then build from there. Don't try to do it too early. You've got one shot. So if you come in, you overpromise, you miss, probably the reputation is going to be that they're not going to want to work with you again. So don't lose that shot. Make sure it's the right one.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, not overpromising is always important, but I think that's probably a good capstone to this conversation, which is sometimes with big companies you do have one shot and that has to work.

Kindra Tatarsky: I think that's right.

Matt Blumberg: All right.

Kindra Tatarsky: I would say for our role, we very much take the VC lens, so talk to us as early as often as possible and we'll plug you in at the right point. Even if you're not fundraising, we can make commercial introductions at the right time. So that's one of the things that we try to help with.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Good to know. Kindra, thank you so much for being here today.

Kindra Tatarsky: Thank you.