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The entire point of Decile Group is to help power emerging VCs who break the mold. The types of managers who don't fit the stereotype of the VC with the right degree, the right gender, the right resume.
But even by these standards, Raoul Maier is unique.
There's the fact that his firm, Eudemian, is a reference to Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, a work that explores what makes life worth living via happiness, virtue, and action.
Virtue? Ok, you've already lost a lot of Silicon Valley right there.
When he was raising his first venture fund with no experience investing, it was brutal. "I can tell you, we were desperate at times," he says. "We needed every single cent."
So far, so normal. And yet, when he and his partner got a bad vibe from an LP or heard they were difficult from other managers, they would turn their money down. Even if they didn't know how else they would make it up. That's how committed they were to raising the right money from the right investors.
Finally, he credits growing up on his grandmother's small farm in rural Austria for giving him the values that have made him the successful investor he is today. A place with an emphasis on non-material values.
"She taught me about what's important in life," he says. "And I never forgot that foundation. If you don't have personal fulfillment, no amount of success or money will give you that. I think it's always important to know that, and also to talk more about it because it's lost in modern American culture, and it makes large amounts of the population miserable."
Hold up. We're talking about the same Silicon Valley venture capital scene, right?
Talk about contrarian: It's certainly working for Eudemian. Because they've also bucked another normal trend in venture capital. Their Fund II was significantly easier to raise than their Fund I.
"When I started Fund I, what motivated me was that people told me it was impossible, and they were actually not that far off," he says.
It took them 18 months to raise their first $10M fund.
And the supposed "much harder" Fund II? They doubled the size and their first close took only four weeks. "We had an extremely high re-up rate from our existing LPs and we got new LPs from their networks," he says. "We are already working towards Fund III at this point."
This purpose-filled Austrian farmboy seems to be onto something.
He credits those unconventional, hard decisions the firm made when they almost couldn't afford to, back when they were raising the first fund. "A huge trap in fundraising is taking whatever money you can get," he says.
It's not that everything went well for Eudemian in the early days. But what you do when things are hard is how you define yourself.
Their first seed investment became a unicorn in two years. That was great, until the Covid bubble crashed and so did that company's valuation. Along with IPO windows. And the transition to AI, which further impacted their pre-IPO portfolio.
But Raoul and his partner took it as an opportunity to build trust with their LPs. "We have seven core values at our firm and the number one is called 'Earn trust,' and it has a verb before the noun for a reason," he says. "Consistency and reliability are important. We have never failed to issue our quarterly report right on time. It always comes out on the same day. It always comes out in the same format. We're not sugar-coating things. We have highlights; we have lowlights. We name the things as they are. And that's hard. Some people get scared. But it's important to do the right thing for the long term."
A lot of this goes back to why someone with Raoul's unique background and outlook wanted a job in such a materialist industry as venture capital so badly to begin with.
It started when he came to Silicon Valley in 1999, and the dot-com bust notwithstanding, he knew he wanted to build something here. He had a deep conviction that technology would be the theme of the 21st century and wanted to be in the middle of it.
But not as a founder. As a VC, specifically. He knew he didn't want to work in a large organization because he felt it'd be harder to have a direct meaningful impact. He also didn't think he'd be good at scaling a company from a startup to thousands of people.
Second, he prioritized the ability to work with people he really liked every single day, and the luxury of being able to thoughtfully handpick them. "If you have an organization where you can literally handpick the people you want to work with, I mean, what a blessing in life," he says. "No amount of money can give you that." (Again, this guy gives people money for a living!)
"If you do venture capital right, then you can really compound on a great platform and you can have a voice," he says. "You can open up a lot of opportunities to have an impact on important topics. You don't usually get that in other industries."
This mission goes back to Aristotle and Plato and why they named the firm after it.
"They had a key insight about human life that we absolutely love," he says. "They asked the final question of what really matters and what will really make us happy and fulfill us, and it's to realize our potential. I think that's such an important insight that's totally lost on us in the modern world where everything is so superficial and everyone's chasing externalities and it makes people miserable. We want to bring that truth back. Potential without actualization is literally worthless."
That idea is how he reconciles what he learned growing up on the modest farm with his grandmother and the posh circles he runs in professionally today. "It works remarkably well because I never take any amount of the success we have externally as important," he says. "The only reason it matters is what we can do with it and the people we get to do it with."
Raoul's grandmother never got to see the way he took the lessons from her farm and married them with the most elite corners of 21st-century capitalism. Unfortunately, she died of cancer when he was in his 20s in what he calls one of the hardest periods in his life. But in keeping those values front and center with the way he raises his kids and runs his professional life, he says she lives on forever.
Core to the idea of Eudemian Ethics and realizing your potential is to be continually challenged. So Raoul and his partner embraced the challenge of Fund II and are setting an even larger target for Fund III. They joined the first cohort of Emerging Institute when they started to raise Fund II to learn where the gaps in their knowledge were.
"What we wanted was a Y Combinator for venture capital and we couldn't find one when we started," he said. "As soon as Emerging Institute launched, we were so grateful it existed we joined the first cohort. It was exactly what we were looking for."
He doesn't have a lot of time for the handwringing about which fund is harder to raise. Because the challenge of doing hard things is the point. It's why he's worked so hard to get here. To get to be the person who gets to make something of himself and gets to do that with other people he respects, likes, and admires. To get to all help change the world together.
“Are there ways in which raising Fund II is easier than raising Fund I? It’s like learning to crawl versus running a marathon. How would you describe the difference of doing one versus the other?” he asks. “There’s a narrative in the industry that every fund is harder than the prior one. People say Fund I is the hardest because it’s your first one. Then they say Fund II is the hardest because you have to be so much more professional. And then they say, oh no, it’s actually Fund III that’s the hardest because you have to have a real track record now. And then it’s Fund IV. I would say, life’s hard. Period. Right? Everything’s hard. And that’s great because that brings out the best in us. So I would say, be prepared for a tough run and never give up.”