Meet Matt Kraning, Partner at Menlo Ventures.

Matt's path to venture started accidentally through a stopover in Afghanistan. He was mid-PhD at Stanford when he stopped out to join DARPA, the Department of Defense's advanced research arm, and spent two years as their data scientist on the first operational DARPA program since Vietnam. When he came home, he co-founded Expanse with the people he'd met on that program, bootstrapped it on DARPA contracts, before eventually raising a seed round from Peter Thiel. He would go on to build Expanse into a category-defining business and exit for $1.25 billion to Palo Alto Networks

In this episode, we get into what that time in Afghanistan actually taught him about surviving startup hell, why he thinks founders need to be right rather than popular, how he tests for the ability to learn fast instead of a chip on the shoulder, and why he believes most VCs are a commodity and only a few actually earn the check they write.