Today, I am speaking with Romeen Sheeth, the president at Metasys Technologies, a workforce management advisory firm based in Atlanta. Romeen is the host of the Square One Show, where he hosts conversations with founders, investors, and executives at the cutting edge of business. His past guests have included Andrew Yang, Sahil Lavingia, Hunter Walk, Keith Rabois and Allison Barr Allen. Romeen invests in 25 startups a year and in this episode, we go over his frameworks for operating and investing, why the 2020s will be the renaissance decade and why Atlanta is the rising tech hub of America.

Links:

Atlanta Tech is on Fire
The Top Lessons Learned Angel Investing $1 Million in 2020
50 Things I learned in the First 90 Days of Running a Company
Romeen's Thread on 2020-2030 Trends

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways

1. The biggest learning for me investing has actually been surrounding myself with world-class operators. A couple of my really good friends - Dave Tisch at Box Group, Arjun Sethi who runs Tribe, Steve Schlafman, Bradley Tusk, and others have been instrumental to the development of my thought process in investing. And that’s really important because you understand what “good” is really quickly. The toughest thing when you’re new to something or you have limited time to dive in because you’re doing something else is knowing what the standard is.

2. We’ve developed a higher ed system that’s frankly really out of touch with reality. It’s disconnected to the job market, with the skills you need to succeed in the real world and most dangerously it reinforces mindsets that I don’t think are necessarily pertinent to where we are today.

3. Jobs aren’t just about “what skills do you pick up, etc.” they’re about how you grow as a person. It’s always funny to me how on one hand we talk about how startups are unique and every startup has its own path, yet we then revert to generalized platitudes.

4. Phase I is all about access. One of the most difficult things about tech in general is being in the “in crowd.” And a lot of people have called this out for the not good thing it is and that’s a separate debate. But the first prong really is about did you even see the company. Because if you didn’t phase 2 and phase 3 don’t matter.

5. When you’re looking at a startup it’s so easy to ask what could go wrong or look at flaws. Getting a startup off the ground is a herculean effort. I think what people new to investing often miss is when they think about risk, they think about all the things you can see. E.g. does your product end up working, do customers like you, is your pricing right, is their competition, etc.