Brex chief revenue officer Sam Blond is bringing his sales knowledge to startup investing at Founders Fund.
Courtesy of Founders FundThe sales executive behind one of fintech’s buzziest billion-dollar startups is turning venture capitalist.
Sam Blond, chief revenue officer at Brex, is joining VC firm Founders Fund as a partner. Blond, who already resides in Miami, will work from the firm’s growing office in the emerging tech hub.
In an interview, Blond said he decided early in the year to make the move to full-time startup investing. He interviewed with several firms, but ultimately went with the one whose partner, Midas List investor Keith Rabois, had helped welcome him into the local tech scene. “I’ve always been impressed with Keith and, reputationally, Founders Fund,” Blond says. “When I decided that I wanted to get into VC, it was obvious that Founders Fund was the top option for me to explore.”
A University of Missouri graduate, Blond cut his teeth in the startup world at EchoSign, an e-signature business acquired by Adobe in 2011, then went to Zenefits, the splashy and controversial benefits and payroll company once led by Parker Conrad. When a licensing scandal pushed Conrad out the door in 2016, Blond followed. After a stint at quality assurance startup Rainforest QA, Blond joined Brex in 2018. At the time, Brex had only a placeholder website and less than $100 in sales, Blond says; four-plus years later, the business has several hundred million dollars of annualized revenue.
As an angel investor, Blond has made more than 20 investments, including sales software maker Scratchpad, restaurant platform Owner.com and customer service provider Gorgias. An early adviser to supply chain unicorn Flexport, Blond is known for helping entrepreneurs with everything from high-level strategy to writing copy for sales emails, says Desmond Lim, cofounder of small business hiring software startup Workstream, another of Blond’s personal portfolio. “He’s seen every single stage of sales,” Lim says. “And revenue is still top of mind for every company.”
At Founders Fund, Blond was on the firm’s list of potential partner targets, Rabois says, even though his role at Brex put him in direct competition with one of Rabois’ major investments, fintech startup Ramp. Blond’s decision to join EchoSign, Zenefits and Brex as one of these companies’ first 20 employees demonstrated to the firm his success at unconventional thinking, Rabois says. “Voting with your feet is even better than voting with your money,” says Rabois.
Blond becomes one of eight partners at the firm, where Rabois, fellow Midas Lister Brian Singerman, investor Napoleon Ta and billionaire cofounder Peter Thiel serve as managing partners. Blond’s fellow partners also include Scott Nolan, Trae Stephens and Matias Van Thienen, as well as operating partner Lauren Gross. Asked whether Founders Fund has any plans to hire a woman investment partner in Miami or elsewhere, Rabois said the firm “thinks in terms of intellectual ability and talent,” not “demographics.”
Blond’s appointment means another senior investor at a prominent venture capital firm for the Miami ecosystem, where partners from several firms moved during the pandemic. Founders Fund is one of the most vocal historically Silicon Valley-based firms to plant a flag there. Blond says that while he expects to invest mostly in early stage enterprise software businesses, he will take a generalist approach that is geography agnostic.
Expect more chief revenue officers and sales leaders to join venture capital firms in upcoming months, says Jason Lemkin, Blond’s former boss at EchoSign and the founder of the Saastr Fund, one of the other firms that attempted to recruit him in recent months. Lemkin believes that sales executives are in high demand as investors and advisers.
“Startup CEOs view sales as a science they don’t understand,” he says. “I think we are suddenly seeing the rise, or the re-rise, of the chief revenue officer as the ideal venture partner in this new age.”
