“Morality is sort of a privilege of the people who have already succeeded. It's easy to be moral now when you already have the things you have. The question is, will I be a moral person if I were to go back 20 years ago and start there? That's a real test. And I don't think I've lived to that test as much as I would like.”
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · Startups & Venture · October 2026
The host asked Ganesan whether he had ever been inauthentic. He said he no longer says things he doesn't believe to win a deal, then added that this is easy to say once a single win no longer changes your life, and that a 25-year-old building a career does whatever it takes.
Transcript
mean, I think what I particularly appreciated about Brian is that he laid out his principles of what he believed. And he told people, hey, if you really want to engage in political activism, then Coinbase is not the place for you because we do not want to have political dialogue here. And if that's important for you, you should go and find a place in which you can do it. I think that takes courage to say. And I think, but it's being true to what he wanted to do. And to me, I think that's most important. Try to be authentic to who you are. And I think I appreciated him being authentic when I think it came at a cost, right? Definitely. He was catchigated in the press and maybe on Twitter. And he had people leave. But I think he ultimately said, we want people who are authentic to Coinbase values articulated by me, the founder.
Have you ever been inauthentic to who you are?
I think there are times when you say certain things to founders because you want them to like you or you want to win a deal that may not be truly authentic. What I'll tell you is that I have dealt with my own insecurities and feeling like an imposter. And I've gotten more comfortable in my skin now where I just feel like I just don't do it. And if it means I have to say something inauthentic to me to win the daylight, I'd rather not win it. But that's easy to say because I'm sort of at the point in my life I like, you know, that win doesn't matter. Of course, I like to win, but it's not going to change my life. So I always say, it's very different when you're a 25-year-old and you're trying to build your career. You do whatever it takes to win. And so in some way, morality is sort of a privilege of the people who have already succeeded. It's easy to be moral now when you already have the things you have. The question is, will I be a moral person if I were to go back 20 years ago and start there? That's a real test. And I don't think I've lived to that test as much as I would like.
Are you a better investor now you're richer?
Yes. You're not afraid as much. You're not afraid of failure. You're willing to go all in and go to the hilt. And so I just think you can go for broke more easily. It's sort of like, think about it on a poker table. The guy with a big amount of chips has so much leverage to win, right? They see more cards and this. And so ironically, this is why I think, you know, like the way our capitalism system is set up, the rich are going to get richer because they just have more opportunities to be the bully on the poker table.
Does that mean emerging managers are just in the old stat to Answom game? I don't see, and forgive me for this, I don't like binaries, but fuck it, Romedia, so you kind of have to do binaries. It depends, doesn't sell. $30 to $100 million funds are just the worst place to be.
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