10 Apr IU Alumni Tony Conrad of True Ventures to Share Thoughts on Entrepreneurship and Empathy at Venture Summit
IU graduate and prominent venture capitalist Tony Conrad clearly loves what he does for a living—and his enthusiasm for the entrepreneur’s journey is infectious.
“Entrepreneurship is a full contact sport,” he said during a recent interview with IU Ventures. “It can be overwhelming and complicated. My job is to put entrepreneurs in the best position for them to achieve their dreams.”
On May 17th at the Venture Summit, Conrad, a partner at True Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, will participate in a fireside chat in Alumni Hall with Julie Heath, executive director of IU Innovates, a new initiative that advances entrepreneurship at Indiana University. During that talk he hopes to share some of his thoughts on the importance of empathy when working with entrepreneurs.
Registration for the Summit, which is limited to 250 attendees, is now open on the IU Ventures website.
“The way we work with founders is around empathy—it’s not about us,” he said. “Starting a company is brutally hard and the emotional EQ aspects of that are so fundamental to the outcome. And people don’t talk about that. But it is important to create a space and a relationship that is safe for an entrepreneur to be honest.”
Conrad reflected on the importance of soft skills over being the smartest or cleverest person in the room and the role in which VCs can play in having a strong relationship with their founders.
“We have seen a broad range of success but no real pattern to it, fortunately and unfortunately,” he said. “We would love to discover a pattern if there was one! But what makes it fun is that there is no pattern to it. At True, we feel like you have to create a safe environment for the founder because otherwise you get the spin and not the honesty. That honesty is important because then you can then have a real conversation with a focus on how best to navigate.”
True Ventures is investing heavily in AI and Conrad sees AI impacting every single company.
“AI’s impact on our industry is probably a once-in-a-career-type impact,” he said. “I’m kinda bummed because I’m at the back part of my career and this is going to be an amazing decade for entrepreneurship. Every major player is at risk and will have to create their own innovation or acquire a lot of companies. This will be a golden era for entrepreneurship and venture for the next decade. AI today is like dial-up in terms of computing power—and we all know that will change quickly.”
Conrad looks forward to the upcoming Summit, meeting with students, and answering their questions.
“I love the questions students ask,” he said. “The questions aren’t as polished, they are more authentic and they are really curious about the answer. A lot of Q&A and social engagements can be transactional in nature, but when you are around students they listen and care about the answers. It is a real gift to be able to interact with that level of inexperience at a formidable time in their lives.”
Conrad remembers his own inexperience from his early days at IU. He initially struggled to find his footing and was a little intimidated by some of the students coming from urban environments. He came from a small farming community in Indiana where only nine of the students in his graduating class went on to college.
“I didn’t feel well prepared,” he said. “The whole experience became very academic, very quickly, because I had to fill in the gaps from my high school education. But after studying incredibly hard my first year, I found the right balance between my academic life and personal life.”
Conrad joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity, worked at the Daily Student, and got involved with the IU Steering Committee, where he was the co-chair of both the Little 500 and Homecoming. He credits his time at IU for helping him to hone his work discipline, going back to his first year and the strong work ethic he cultivated at IU.
“I learned a lot about myself in that first year, maybe more than at any other time in my life,” he reflected. “This shows up today in how I approach my work. I learned life lessons about being in control of your destiny that helped me a lot in founding businesses and in my three successful exits. It takes a lot of courage and discipline to create a company or have it acquired.”
When asked to summarize his advice for entrepreneurs in two sentences, Conrad laughed. But after a short pause, he delivered. “Only work with people you love and don’t let the job decide where you want to live,” he advised. “Figure out who you want to work with and where you want to live and the rest will work itself out.”
Registration for the Summit, which is limited to 250 attendees, is now open on the IU Ventures website. Registration is $100 and includes all Summit programming and networking opportunities.