What we talked about
Ryan Baird joins Federico Ramallo on the PreVetted Podcast to explain how he operates across three business units and why each one starts with the same principle: focus on risk. Ryan leads Baird Augustine, a Silicon Valley cross border investment bank working with 33 family offices deploying about 20 billion dollars annually, and helps founders through “corporate development as a service,” from capital raises and M and A to advisors, board building, earned media, and executive recruiting.
Show notes
Ryan Baird spent years traveling to 19 countries looking for investment-worthy founders, and concluded he never needed to leave Silicon Valley in the first place. He argues that the 400 publicly traded companies headquartered there, worth a combined $22 trillion, create a talent concentration that no other geography on earth can match.
What we covered
- Ryan runs three business units simultaneously: Baird Augustine, an investment bank working with 33 family offices deploying $20 billion annually; Asymmetrical Alpha, which he says was the number one performing hedge fund of 2024 by focusing on space, robotics, web3, and AI; and Focus on Risk, a curated investor community he started in 2009 after realizing that most startup events are designed for founders, not for investors who want to hear from people actually worth their time.
- Focus on Risk events deliberately invert the typical format, investors are the primary attendees, and the only founders allowed in are breakout portfolio companies brought by their investors, who must explain on the record why this specific company is outperforming everything else in their portfolio.
- Ryan’s filter for fundable founders is straightforward: he looks for traction first, not pitches. He notes that pattern-matching founders who try to build “a slightly better Salesforce” are nearly always wrong because network effects make incremental improvement insufficient to get users to switch, the best founders are pattern breakers, not pattern copiers.
- He warned that founders underestimate how much their pitch reveals beyond the product. When a founder pitches poorly, investors conclude they won’t be able to pitch the next investor, pitch journalists for free media, or pitch top recruits, all of which compound into a structural cost disadvantage versus founders who can communicate clearly.
- On venture capital as an asset class, Ryan was blunt: the average VC does not beat the S&P 500. He recommends most investors stick to 20 to 30 publicly traded market leaders and let them compound over decades, and suggests that only people who have already sold a tech company have the pattern recognition to invest in early-stage startups responsibly.
- Laika, the platform Ryan led as CEO in the Philippines, was built on the premise that content creators should be paid for their data, giving 90% of advertising revenue to creators rather than keeping it. It grew to over 11 million community members and raised $35 million before running into issues with the Philippine government, a setback he views as a proof of concept rather than a failure.
About Ryan
Ryan Baird is the CEO of Baird Augustine, a Silicon Valley cross-border investment bank, founder of the Focus on Risk investor community, and GP at Asymmetrical Alpha hedge fund. He has operated across venture, family offices, and institutional capital, including serving as CEO of Laika in the Philippines.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryandbaird
- Website: https://bairdaugustine.com
Episode 113 of the PreVetted Podcast.