‍Summary

Peter Misek, managing partner at FRAMEWORK, joins us today for our latest episode of Framework Focus. Peter shares his unique journey into venture capital, the foundational values behind Framework, and the firm’s approach to data-driven investing. Peter shares insights on navigating challenges as a fund manager, emphasizing the importance of teamwork, adaptability, and the value of data in creating a repeatable, scalable investment strategy.

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Transcript

Monica Johal (00:00)

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our first episode of the Framework Focus series. In this series, we will be meeting with various Framework team members to discuss their personal experiences working in VC and their thoughts on the latest trends in the startup space. Our first guest today is none other than Peter Misek, managing partner here at Framework Venture Partners. Welcome, Peter. Thanks for taking the time to sit with us today for today's interview. I wanted to start off today's conversation with some questions about your career and background for those who are new to Framework and first-time listeners. 

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Peter Misek (00:19)

Thanks for having me.

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Monica Johal (00:28)

To start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career journey that eventually led you to start Framework?

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Peter Misek (00:38)

Absolutely. So modest beginnings, was an entrepreneur in my teenage years, due to some family illness, then experienced, unfortunately, food and housing insecurity and was able to put myself through school and get an accounting degree and designation. In the mid-nineties had the privilege of working for, Deloitte and Touche, Deloitte and Touche then transitioned into an almost 20-year career on Wall Street, and Bay Street in the city of London. Had the privilege of working for Hambrecht and Quist in San Francisco and working with HQ Venture Partners, which is really where I got exposed to venture investing for the first time. VCs at the time were really coming into their own. The dot-com era was starting to explode and some really big, well-known brands of today were being born, including Google. So it was a lot of fun. In the late nineties, I met Nenad Meravetz and Steve Schlenker from DN Capital. They were starting a fund and they were asking for some advice and some help. And I was really privileged to become a founding venture advisor and venture partner of that fund. Had an opportunity to work on a lot of deals over the coming 15 years and really get to experience what awesome investing looks like in scaling companies, et cetera. And so in 2014 decided to launch DN Canada. Unfortunately was not able to raise DN Canada, but one of my lead LPs, BDC Capital allowed me to join their firm and through some hard work and a lot of luck, was able to spin out in 2018 and really take the lessons and all the mistakes that had occurred over the prior, call it 20 plus years, and try and crystallize that into a repeatable, scalable investing framework, which is why we called the firm Framework. so three pillars to our business now, data, operations, and then coaching and mentorship.

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Monica Johal (02:31)

Thanks for sharing that, Peter. I'm sure many of our listeners will find your story very inspiring. I wanted to dive a bit more into your experience specifically as Managing Partner here at Framework. So to start, my first question is, what have some of the biggest learning points or challenges been managing a fund? And what are some of the things that have been the key to its success?

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Peter Misek (02:54)

So the key to success, I will start with first, is the people. I think the team here at Framework is phenomenal. I'm very privileged to work within an unbelievable investment team, an unbelievable operations team, and just really lucky that the enthusiasm, the energy, and the gray matter being leveraged and utilized is just, in my view, world-class. 

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So it's pretty cool. In terms of what we do and how we do it, some of the learnings would say the biggest learning that I would take away was that this is really hard. You're going to run into difficulties. You're going to run into challenges. You're going have to have hard conversations and to try and do that in a way that's respectful, but also firm is the toughest balancing act and as well-intentioned as you can be, and as much as you want the best for the individuals involved, they'll often make choices that aren't necessarily optimized and there's nothing you can do about that. 

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So letting go is probably the, the next biggest lesson is that you can only control those things that you can control. And when you're working with diverse human beings, you're going to get a different range of responses. And it is really important to surround yourself with an amazing team, which framework we have that allows you to offload things that you're not very good at. Having amazing people around you allows you to fill a lot of gaps in your own skillset.

It's been a great journey. We're on it in a very, very cool and exciting way. And we've backed some of the best companies, frankly, in the world. And it's exciting to work with them. It's exciting to invent the future. It's exciting to allow these companies to have an impact and play a small part in their role. So lots of fun times ahead.

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Monica Johal (04:39)

Thanks Peter. So shifting a bit to the investment side of things, Framework has a reputation for its strong focus on data-driven investing. Can you tell us a bit about your approach to this and how it's shaped your investment strategy?

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Peter Misek (04:53)

Sure, so one of the things we would have observed or I've observed again over 20 plus years of doing this full-time and part-time is that there are patterns and rather than using gut feelings, et cetera, the hypothesis was, was there a way that we could capture and crystallize data to do a couple of things. One, remove the biases and prejudices that are inherent in all human beings. 

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And two, create a repeatable and scalable investing process. And so the idea of what is now Otto was born more than 10 years ago. Imagine being able to see thousands of companies at a single point in time to compare them and then to leverage that data for the benefit of them, the companies that you're interacting with and for any of the operational challenges that you may encounter. And so the data side is really fundamental.

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It's not that we don't believe humans are important without humans we don't have any startups to even invest in, and really you don't want to downplay the human side. It's why we have the coaching and mentorship side that we're so keen on and believe a fundamental foundation for our firm. But the data side is really important when you want to make hard decisions and investing in a founder is a hard decision. And too often those decisions are tainted by either people's own points of view or history, et cetera. And the objectiveness is removed. And so rather than removing the objectiveness, being data-driven allows us to put objectivity back into the process. 

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And some really cool trends show up. And so what we're doing here at Framework is trying to build the largest matchmaking service in the world that's free and really benefits the ecosystem in a unique way. Clearly, we're going to capture some of that benefit by seeing all these companies and helping all these other funds meet startups and leveraging that data for the benefit of our portfolio in an anonymized way. It really is a combination of data operations and coaching mentorship.

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Monica Johal (07:07)

Awesome. Sounds like you've learned a lot during your time here at Framework as managing partner and I think it's great you're sharing this today so that others can benefit from your experience and your insights. I know listeners today would also be interested to hear about your thoughts on current trends in tech and the VC space. So you've seen a lot of companies across a lot of industries over your career. What excites you about the companies you interact with at Framework and have you had an industry you've always been drawn to?

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Peter Misek (07:33)

Yeah, what excites me is the energy, the perseverance and the determination of founders. You meet these exceptional people and we're in a very fortunate position that we meet so many of them and interact with so many of them. And you get to catch them at that point in the journey where the future is unwritten. And so you have this ability, hopefully, to make a positive impact.

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And if you look back on your life and you say to yourself, what are the most important things? I would say that for me, it's going to be family number one, you know, my wife and children still believe in a relationship with me. Two, have I left the world in a better place? Have I had a positive impact? And this is the legacy of Framework. Framework has the ability and the mission to positively impact the world by taking this data and harnessing it for the power of innovation for the power of our founders and marrying it with all these very important tools, coaching and mentorship being super important and to try and, you know, create a better world. The most exciting sector right now is AI. I've talked a bit about that, I think we've reached the Oppenheimer moment, but stepping back for a second on how Framework plays into it. 

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Framework invests in vertical SaaS companies. And so these are software as a service companies that focus on specific industries and they transform those industries. They make them more productive, they make them more lean and they make them more valuable for society as a whole. AI is fundamentally altering these. It's breathtaking. It's exciting. It's scary. The impacts are unknown. And the hope is, is that those people that are being involved and the systems and tools we use, of always that positive aspect, the idea that humankind has got a bright future when we work together and we unchain ourselves from the past and unchain ourselves for our own biases and prejudices. 

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The sector that I've been drawn to most historically has been really AI, whether initially it was data and data-driven decisions or algorithms, machine learning, or now – LLMs and generative AI, that's always been an area of massive interest. I'm really excited to participate in that. And then FinTech, I had a startup in the FinTech space called SoundPays where they were leveraging the idea that you can use sound waves to transmit payment tokens allowed me to make a lot of mistakes and learn what the journey of a founder is like and really learn from the ground up what it takes to get even a modicum of success. And so then when you watch these companies scale to, you know, unbelievable heights, a hundred million plus in revenue, thousands of employees, it's just so exciting. And then even when you've had companies that don't do well, watching the dignity and the sheer resilience, the determination of these founders to get through to the other side and some resolution, it's a bit awe-inspiring. And for somebody who came from humble beginnings and didn't have much to begin their professional life with.

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Monica Johal (10:57)

Great. Yeah, that kind of segues into my next question, which was to touch upon disruptive tech. And it sounds like AI is the focus right now. How do you see its trajectory in the next few years?

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Peter Misek (11:09)

So I think AI fundamentally is going to alter how we interact with each other, with technology, and how we shape our productivity going forward. So firstly, strongly believe that a form of AGI is in the near term. How we create safety mechanisms, and policies to manage that will be vitally crucial.

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But for companies, which is our focus, the vertical SaaS area that we focus on, harnessing that for productivity and revenue gains will be enormously important. For individuals and employees and society at large, for productivity to truly benefit everybody, there has to be a comprehensive strategy on how to take all of this talent, this human resource, and empower it, retrain it and channel it into other areas. Otherwise, we will have some pretty big social upheaval and disruption. And so for AI, it really is our Oppenheimer moment. We really, really need to be thoughtful. We need to be focused, and we need to be deliberate in how we manage both the potential but also the risks.

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Monica Johal (12:25)

Yeah, totally agree, Peter. Just shifting the conversation a little bit back towards VC specifically, are there any particular challenges or areas in venture that you think are under-discussed in the industry, but you would consider critically important?

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Peter Misek (12:41)

Go to market is probably one of the most underrated and yet vitally important parts of the startup ecosystem. Go to market here means marketing and sales. How do you monetize? How do you create revenue? How do you sell to your customer base? A lot of technology can be amazing, groundbreaking, and thoughtful, but if no one buys it, if no one sees utility, if no one understands the problem that it's solving and or the joy it's creating, then it's all for not. And so there's a lot of incredibly brilliant, smart, technically savvy people that underestimate the importance of go to market. And so in an ideal world, go to market looks like the following. You have an amazing product. It solves a really big problem, such a problem that it's a 10x or more improvement on the current process.

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And that if you were to remove it, it would cause a physical response and an emotional response. And you've created this feedback loop where your product can get better as your customers engage with it. And what that does is it creates a virtuous cycle of improvement, a virtual engagement cycle, and it allows you to create a long-term defensive mode. And so a lot of technical founders and technical teams truly underestimate go-to-market. And our focus here at Framework is to make sure that we highlight that, but also leverage existing models- and pun-intended- frameworks to help you manage, scale, and truly create customer delight on your go-to-market motion. So go-to-market, is one of the most critically, if not the most critically important and vital elements for any startup.

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Monica Johal (14:34)

Thanks Peter. So to wrap things up today, I just wanted to end off the conversation with some fun questions for the audience if you're up for it. Okay, so the first question is, if you weren't working in venture capital, what would you be doing?

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Peter Misek (14:41)

Absolutely.

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One of two things, hopefully pursuing an athletic career. had the benefit of being athletically inclined as a young person and played soccer and hockey at a very high level and would have loved to have been able to pursue that. Unfortunately, my circumstances didn't permit it. I didn't have the time or monetary means to do that. And so I had to focus on school and working in order to pay for everything. So I would have loved to have done that. And the second thing would be to pursue my passion for physics, and really spend time in areas such as quantum entanglement or cosmology, et cetera. And so would have had a lot of fun pursuing either path, I'm sure.

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Monica Johal (15:28)

Nice. So for my second question, what do you enjoy outside of work that keeps you balanced and energized?

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Peter Misek (15:35)

I get a lot of energy from my girls. My daughters are an unbelievably talented, intelligent, wonderful set of individuals and watching them in whatever activity they're doing is a great joy. And I feel very lucky that I can do that. 

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They make me extremely proud and It's hard when you think about it because they're really my heart that's walking around in the world. So anything good or bad that happens to them is amplified 10 times. So I get great joy in watching them traverse the world. Playing golf is an incredibly joyful thing for me and really hanging out with friends and family.

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Monica Johal (16:20)

And then finally, for my last question, can you recommend a book or podcast that has influenced your approach to leadership or investing?

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Peter Misek (16:28)

Yeah, I think there's a couple things. So firstly, there's the Happiness Lab that's available on Apple Podcast. It's a professor of psychology at Yale, she's absolutely breathtakingly intelligent, phenomenal, thoughtful, and just really cool to listen to. And then Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell is something that I just find the thoughtful approach to understanding events and or issues really thought-provoking. So I strongly recommend that. And as far as books are, I try and explain to people the passion of what interests you should guide their books. But if people are really curious, strongly recommend The Ascent of Money by Naill Ferguson. Really recommend historical biographies. You know, read about Alexander Hamilton. He's had some great plays, obviously made about him. Read about famous people and the things they've gone through. 

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One of the books that I found unbelievable and it was made into a movie was called Hidden Figures. It was about the women behind the NASA program. And these people, these women, were the original computers. They did all the mathematical calculations required for NASA to succeed. And don't watch the movie, read the book first, then watch the movie. And the book is just mind-blowingly amazing. And those women, we all owe them a huge debt of gratitude and their intelligence, compassion, grace and honour are pretty humbling actually.

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Monica Johal (18:01)

Thanks Peter, I have to add some of those to my list for sure. That concludes today's episode. Thanks Peter for joining us today and thank you everyone for listening in. If you'd like to learn more about Framework, please visit our website framework.vc and Peter, is there anything else you'd like to add before we end things off for today?

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Peter Misek (18:18)

Just want to wish everyone all the best and say thank you for listening.

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Monica Johal (18:22)

Thank you!

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