Ex-Brex exec Sam Blond is already leaving Founders Fund simply 18 months after he joined

Sam Blond is leaving Founders Fund, in addition to the occupation of enterprise capitalist, simply 18 months after he joined the storied Silicon Valley agency.

In a tweet on Monday, Blond expressed his gratitude on the probability to work at Peter Thiel’s VC agency and defined, “Full time investing / being a VC isn’t the proper match for me and I’ve determined to return to working.” That possible means he’s both accepted/about to simply accept a place at a startup or one other tech firm, or is within the technique of founding one. Reached earlier right this moment, Blond informed TechCrunch he had “no remark exterior of the publish for now.”

Earlier than becoming a member of the VC agency, Blond was greatest referred to as the previous Chief Income Officer at Brex. Brex shouldn’t be a Founders Fund portfolio firm, though Founders Fund is an investor in certainly one of Brex’s greatest opponents: Ramp. So Blond’s bounce to the VC agency raised just a few curious eyebrows, particularly as a result of on the time — September, 2022 — Brex had reached decacorn standing with a $300 million elevate. That’s an odd time for a prime salesperson to bow out. Usually, startup workers are salivating on the riches to come back by way of an IPO or one other exit when their firm is experiencing such success. Previous to that he was VP of gross sales at Zenefits, the as soon as high-flying-then-troubled HR tech startup that was backed by Founders Fund. Trinet purchased Zenefits in 2022.

The departure is a publicly pleasant one. “Sam is a improbable operator and he’s been a fantastic useful resource for our founders. We hope to have the chance to work with him once more,” Founders Fund spokesperson Erin Gleason tells TechCrunch. And possibly there’s a clue in there that the VC agency could in the future again no matter new factor Blond is doing – or not less than take heed to the pitch.

However that is the second splashy departure of a Founders Fund companion over the previous couple of months. Keith Rabois shocked the startup world when he left in January to return to his former agency Khosla Ventures.

It’s pretty uncommon for senior companions to go away their funds for different funds – particularly prolific dealmakers like Rabois – as a result of their earnings are tied to the outcomes of their investments, and such investments can take years to mature. The state of affairs creates some strong golden handcuffs. It’s extra frequent for many who come from a startup operations world, like Blond, and who’ve invested with their very own cash, to go away a VC function after a short while. Investing different individuals’s cash is a really completely different ability.

And Founders Fund is a bit uncommon in the way it operates, too. Whereas all Silicon Valley companies give lip service to being pro-founder and founder pleasant (in any other case, no founder would promote them a piece of their firm), Founders Fund has some extra stringent guidelines about that.

As Founders Fund companion Trae Stephens informed TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos on the Strictly VC LA occasion final week, “We’re founder absolutists,” he stated. The agency’s companions hardly ever take board seats, “we all the time vote with founders. And on the level that an organization not has a founder as CEO, we’re out. We don’t spend money on non-founder led companies.”

Nonetheless, the agency doesn’t disqualify its companions from concurrently being founders of their very own startups, too. Thiel famously based Palantir, as an example. Rabois based OpenStore and Stephens co-founded Anduril. Many different VC companies even have companions who concurrently run startups. If being a founder and a VC isn’t mechanically mutually unique, which means a need to be “an operator” could not absolutely clarify why Blond took his go away.

Aside from what he’s stated publicly, we don’t know the opposite causes. Nevertheless, many VCs want to think about themselves as a “value-add” companion, which means they wish to be concerned in serving to the enterprise they again, and at Founders Fund such involvement is frowned upon.

“The extra {that a} VC says, ‘I’m going so as to add worth,’ the extra it’s best to hear them say, ‘I’m going to harass the ever residing crap out of you for the remainder of the time that I’m on the cap desk,” Stephens informed the Strictly VC viewers. “So I feel our strategy is extra, you already know, we’re going to spend money on the corporate as a result of we imagine that that founder or that group of founders are the individuals which might be going to develop this enterprise.”

And that signifies that a VC’s profession there is determined by selecting winners whereas having little or no say in how these decisions function.