Today’s Volume

I am very excited to welcome Dan Kimerling from Deciens as a guest author today. He is an Emerging Manager I think very highly of. He is a relentless builder, highly insightful, and executes a strategy that fits like a glove to him as a person and character.

Grateful for him to share his stories and insights with us today!

Volume #22 TL;DR:

• For some context, Deciens has approximately $300M of AUM, six employees, and is simultaneously wrapping up raising fund three while also deploying it

• Running Deciens is simply the most challenging, most brutal, most fulfilling thing I have ever done

• Similarly, I am often asked why I didn’t start another company after selling Standard Treasury to Silicon Valley Bank. I find this to be one of the oddest of the “normal” questions, as if starting Deciens is somehow not a company

• Imagine going a whole year without a single “yes.”

• “Excellence is the capacity to endure pain.”

Table of Contents

• What It Takes To Be An Emerging Manager - Stories …

• A Message From Sydecar

What It Takes To Be An Emerging Manager - Stories and Insights from Dan Kimerling

Benedikt asked me to try and convey the “love, blood, sweat, tears, and relentlessness” needed to build and run a small venture capital firm. For some context, Deciens has approximately $300M of AUM, six employees, and is simultaneously wrapping up raising fund three while also deploying it. 

Many bystanders, even well-meaning ones, have a misguided view of how much time and energy building a venture firm takes. They seem to believe it is something akin to a traditional notion of retirement – that starting a VC firm is the logical equivalent of a founder being put out to pasture. While that may be true for some, or have been true in an earlier era, I have found just the opposite to be true. Running Deciens is simply the most challenging, most brutal, most fulfilling thing I have ever done. Even a cursory look at my LinkedIn profile or CV reveals a near-masochistic passion for doing unbelievably hard things. 

To summarize, building and leading Deciens has expanded to totally and completely fill every minute of every day – even my dreams are about Deciens. It has taken over my life, reshaping the very way that I see even the most elemental aspects of being.

As an example, I have grown to hate Fridays. They are by far my least favorite day of the week. Why? Because it means that people won’t be working for the next two days. Much to my chagrin, most people want to take “weekends.” So, on Fridays, I cannot wait for Monday to come so that I can get back to work. (I actually work a lot on the weekends, but I just queue up the work to go out on Monday morning. Early Sunday morning is one of my most productive times of the week, as there tend to be relatively few distractions). As a founder, there are no days or weekends off.

After eight years of running Deciens, my wife has identified a similar issue with the month of August. I tend to become miffed and melancholy because I don't understand why others are not working. I want to yell into the void, “Get back to your desks!” and “Answer your damn email!” Recognizing this, my wife has learned that it is a good idea for us to go on vacation when others are doing so in an effort to distract me from getting irate at receiving yet another out-of-office message. As a founder, there is no room for out-of-office messages. And after two or three days of vacation, I am itching to get back to work. 

Similarly, I am often asked why I didn’t start another company after selling Standard Treasury to Silicon Valley Bank. I find this to be one of the oddest of the “normal” questions, as if starting Deciens is somehow not a company. I think this belies much of the misunderstanding around what it takes to build a venture firm, especially one that aspires to be one of the greatest of the modern era, knowing that the only way to be one of the best is to be different from all the others. 

Thinking back to raising Deciens’ first fund, I initially wanted to go out and raise $80M. Three years later, I wrapped it up with a total of $18.83M of capital commitments from 83 unique LPs. 

I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I remember one distinct period where I flew to New York 10 times in eight weeks. Making the cross-country trip twice in a single week is grueling – you become friendly with the flight attendants and gate agents and return home a shell of a human. My wife would pick me up at San Francisco International Airport late on Friday night, make sure the dry cleaning was ready, fortify my spirits over the weekend, and then I'd be back in an UberX first thing Monday morning. I distinctly remember stepping out of a meeting in Midtown Manhattan on a Friday afternoon during that period and thinking I “only” had a 10-hour commute home. And I raised nothing from those trips – $0. In fact, I lost money, because United, Marriott, Uber, Starbucks, etc, all had to get paid – not to mention the cost in time, energy, and emotion. As best I can recall, I believe there was a twelve-month period where I was pitching our first fund and did not get a single LP commitment. And I was pitching it to anyone and everyone who would listen. Imagine going a whole year without a single “yes.”

During this time, I started to learn about the lives of many of the greatest creatives. I read a string of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs of leading luminaries, and how they had to toil away for years on end with no one paying attention. I came to see that the lives of those who want to change the world – through their art, music, food, performances, buildings, athletic achievements, and investments – are more similar to each other than to those who merely tolerate a more pedestrian existence regardless of their chosen discipline. I developed a much more stoic and equanimous perspective to have the fortitude and resilience needed to push forward. I came to see that the most important things were having a differentiated product, ensuring the integrity of that product, and maintaining the integrity of the process through which I tried to sell it. Whether anyone would buy it was often more about them than it was about me. What mattered was making sure that there was no daylight between what I did, what I said, and what I thought. Or, to paraphrase David Senra, the public only praises people for what they practice in private.

Fast forward seven or eight years, and the fire inside me is burning brighter than ever. One manifestation of this is the 116 flights I took last year, according to the handy Flighty app. And if January is any indication, I'll likely fly more this year than last. My passion for this work, our team, our portfolio companies, and our limited partners is at an all-time high. I am not sure my colleagues or my wife would say that I am calmer, organized, or even-keeled – that is just not who I am. But I see the change that the journey has had up until this point, and I am excited for where it can take me, my family, my co-workers, their families, and everyone we serve.

A relatively new part of this journey started two years ago with the publication of Defying Orthodoxy. In this essay and a set of follow-up posts that we’ve been publishing, we have started to address the meta issues associated with venture capital, which are, in our opinion, manifold and getting worse. I hope that, in some small way, we can change the discourse around our industry and, in time, its behavior. If actions express priorities, I know that we are acting in a way that is differentiated, in alignment with our values, and gives us the chance to accomplish even our most ambitious goals – to be one of the very best.

As I look forward to the rest of 2025, our ten-year anniversary in 2027 and beyond, it comes back to simply wanting it more. The venture capital industry, and especially emerging managers, are going through an extinction-level event. The data on this is incontrovertible. From where we sit, this is par for the course in an industry that has been driven by booms and busts for the past fifty years. Many managers – emerging and established alike – will need to ask themselves a set of hard questions – some of them for the first time in their venture careers. For me, I will suffer more, work harder, and toil away longer – as much as is humanly possible – to make Deciens exceptional. The founder of Four Seasons, Isadore Sharp, creator of one of the most iconic brands, has a great quote: “Excellence is the capacity to endure pain.” Thankfully, I have learned to embrace the suck, for it is simply a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition in the quest for greatness. 

A Message From Sydecar

Dan’s journey in building Deciens serves as an inspiration to the many emerging managers overcoming the obstacles of growing their funds. His leadership, ownership, and relentless pursuit of excellence are values we share at Sydecar, and we’re thrilled to announce that Deciens recently led Sydecar’s successful Series A fundraise.

This milestone reflects the belief of leading investors in our mission and underscores our commitment to providing trustworthy, reliable, and robust support for emerging managers. Together, we’re building the infrastructure that powers private markets. To learn more about our Series A and what it means for the future of Sydecar, read the full announcement on our blog here.