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- What is your sweet spot, in what kinds of businesses do you like to invest?
Define sweet spot?
- What sort of themes are you interested in investing?
Well when one talks about sweet spot sometimes one means what stage do you like to get involved? what industry sector? Â are there certain trends whatever? Â So I’ll just cover all those if its ok?So as a firm we are what’s called stage agnostic. Â That means we’ll do seed investment for $500k, we’ll do an A round for $3m, we’ll do a B round for $8-10m. Â We don’t really go too higher than that because of our fund size. Â I prefer early stuff. Â I prefer getting involved before the concepts are too big because I like getting involved with strategy. I like getting involved with recruiting. Â I like the team dynamics.In terms of sectors, again as a fund & then I’ll talk about myself. Â As a fund, about 30% of our investment historically has been in technology for the financial services sector. Â That suited us very well, we’re one of only 4 players in the country that invests at that level in financial services. That has allowed us to have super sized returns. Â Our last fund was the 5th best performing fund in the country.
Thankyou, thankyou I should take all the credit for it, I take none! But we had BillMeLater we sold for $1B, we had DealerTrack which IPOd, we had Investnet which IPOd. Â We had a company in Europe PrePay Technologies which was sold. Â So a lot of good performance there. Â We invest in technology in the media sector, less content & more content distribution & add technology. Â We invest in mobile, mobile infrastructure, mobile technologies & we invest in software as service companies. Â That’s all encompassing of what we do.I personally don’t get involved as much in the financial services companies. Solely for the reason that my 3 partners have been doing that for 20 years. Â I don’t want to try & replicate what they already know.
But my number one theme & I say this everytime I’m asked, Pemo, is (& I don’t mean this in a flippant way, I mean it in a sincere way) I invest in great entrepreneurs. I don’t look for people who’re going to take ideas I have & run & implement those. Â I look for people who are passionate about a topic, an idea, a belief that there’s a market opportunity that they’ve researched. Â Or they have domain knowledge & they want to break down walls to make it happen & its a big market opportunity. Â And I’m about enabling that, not about trying to have a sector thesis around the types of opportunitities that I think will be good.
- What percentage of women startups do you get pitches for? Â And what percentage have you funded?
Let me start by saying the good news. The good news is that our best performing company of our last fund returned $323m to shareholders & that was run by a woman. Good news there! Â I will also say that just today & Monday of this week I saw pitches from women entrepreneurs that I thought were fantastic. And I point that out, only because it’s not the norm. Â So this is the bad news! Â I would say on average, 1 out of every 30 or 40 inbound requests, either introductions or people write to me directly to pitch a business are for women. Â Those are pretty bad odds!
- Have you noted differences with women entrepreneurs in how they pitch & build businesses?
I can’t immediately say, necessarily that I have spotted a difference in how they pitch. Â In the past 3 years, Ive been pitched by 20 – 25 women, again that’s not large numbers.
Yes I think it’s a numbers game?