Oceans: The Power of Teams

It’s been 10 days of reflection, energy, and outreach from everyone who attended our annual investor meeting and from those who have reached out looking to learn more since our event. One common theme kept surfacing: The Power of Teams.

“A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a Group of People Who Trust Each Other” - Simon Sinek

Our event was filled with some of the best builders, operators, and investors in tech. And when I looked out into the crowd, all I saw were smiles. Smiles from peers who truly enjoyed being together in a room, inspiring each other, and discussing how the future of tech aligned around Teams. The energy was palpable.

As a society, we spent the past 3 years in various forms of disconnection and our event was what felt like a giant coming-out party. The feedback was consistent: people missed each other. They missed the energy of being together, building together, and inspiring each other.

In the room, there were people who loved being together because they trusted each other, whether it was from previous relationships, their current careers, or because they, thankfully, trust the Oceans team to bring amazing people together.

Check out Carolyn and Kirthiga’s posts - this is the power of teams and connectivity.

Teams Generate Outsized Returns

The energy was overwhelming but not surprising. The Oceans ethos is built around the ideology that Teams Generate Outsized Returns.

Trust, Teams, and Impact are often correlated.

There is a sea of cliches around teams but in the start-up world, the reality is that Founder life is incredibly lonely. The pressure is tremendous and while the best Founders often figure it out, doing so without a great team is next to impossible. With the right team, Founders and companies can go further, faster, and together. They can tackle bigger challenges and they can support each other when they are struggling or looking for an extra boost.

We at Oceans are committed to finding the alpha without arrogance and we know that the big tech companies of the future will be built by Founders who are committed to building the best teams. These teams will build through this turbulent environment like LinkedIn, Mailchimp, and Shutterstock did post .com crash and like Twilio and Slack did post the 2008 crash.

When I look back at 2008, I was heads down at FB with the best monetization team in tech and at no point did we pay attention to the crash. We were builders with support and capital from our investors who believed in us as a team. For many, it was truly the hardest of times, but as a strong team, we knew that there was nothing we couldn't do or build together.

The Oceans Team: We Are Built for This Moment

When we launched Oceans, we constructed a team of former operators specifically to help Founders build companies at the Seed Stage. As a team, we push each other (hard) and we trust each other's opinions because we are all playing to our strengths. We have done it before and we will do it again.

• Steven built Quattro from the ground up and exited to Apple. He sat in the board room with some of the most high-profile investors in the world at Foursquare.
• Glenn was responsible for hiring close to 10K of the world's best tech execs over 20 yrs.
• I had thrived as the Go to Market + Monetization as a lead at Facebook when we launched Mobile, Feed, and Identity.
• Brian helped Time Warner close ~$3B in acquisitions, including the purchase of Bleacher Report.
• Sara designed and implemented enterprise software for Fortune 100 companies and brought the operational discipline and rigor that we knew we wanted and desperately needed.

And Once We Proved We Had Product Market Fit, we added Henry and Sasha to scale our efforts and community and broaden our scope and perspective.

I am incredibly grateful for the team we built and those who joined us. The smiles, the trust and the ability for us all to invest in a better future with our time and capital makes going to work every day a complete joy.

hashtag#smiles hashtag#teams hashtag#oceansventures

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