Austin Clements - Blending vision and execution to seed the next generation

Austin Clements is a partner at Slauson & Co., a Los Angeles based venture capital firm that provides pre-seed and seed funding to a range of founders. He's a Kauffman fellow and has a strong interest in economic empowerment. He was previously Chair of Pledge LA, and alliance between LA's venture capital community, the Annenberg Foundation, and the Office of Mayor Eric Garcetti. He also holds a number of board roles.

We start by talking about his upbringing in LA, his time at Morehouse College and how his taste of business there left him determined to find a job in venture capital. We hear how his initial search came up dry, but how he persisted and fulfilled his goal eventually.

We talk about the difficulty in threading the needle of supporting deserving founders and sifting through 100s of prospects to find the gem.  Austin's philosophy is to get behind people, that are delusional with their vision, but pragmatic with their execution. He says that they want people that have a vision that's almost unsettling about how big it is, and what they want to grow their company to be. But they also need to be very pragmatic in the sense of they know what the first few steps look like.

There is more information on Grid110, an affinity group with which Austin is involved, here (https://www.grid110.org/).  See here for his Medium article "The Delusion around Inclusion" (https://medium.com/@austinlac/the-delusion-around-inclusion-34bc30e89694).

This series is brought to you with the kind support of Wellington Management, one of the world’s largest independent asset managers, focused on delivering long-term investment excellence for clients and their beneficiaries, as well as Nile Capital Group, a sector-focused, operationally-oriented private equity firm based in the Los Angeles Area.