Investing Style | Team | Focus Areas | Process | What We Look For | Ethics
INVESTING PACE AND STYLE
We make about ten $250k-$1m investments each year. We participate in pre-seed and seed rounds, and can lead or co-lead smaller pre-seed rounds.
When partnering with founders, we strive to be highly engaged but not meddlesome.
INVESTOR BIOS
Leo (
blog)
- Numerous Top 100 finishes in national math, programming, and science competitions in high school and college.
- 10 years of software eng experience: 2nd engineering hire at LinkedIn, 3 years at Google working on payment fraud detection, 4 years at Factual working on data cleaning and deduping software.
- Co-founded Susa Ventures ($750m+ AUM, seed investor in companies like Robinhood, Flexport, Mux, Expanse, Mashgin, and Andela)
Anna-Sofia ( blog)
- Author behind Foundations & Frontiers at Contrary Capital and Humba’s new How It’s Built series.
- Previously at 8VC, Founders Fund and Bridgewater
- Executive Editor of the Stanford Daily
Pratyush (part-time blog)
- Won US Spelling Bee.
- Professional poker player for 6 years, reaching #2 in the world for tournament play.
- Early employee at a crypto gaming company and Chief of Staff at Volley (YC-backed voice gaming startup)
Team’s previous fund and angel investments: CloudTrucks ($850m), Dusty Robotics (🤫), Hightouch ($1.2b), Mashgin ($1.5b), Placer ($1.5b), Scalyr (acquired), Veho ($1.5b), Vetcove (🤫).
FOCUS AREAS
- climate and energy
- robotics and manufacturing
- defense and cybersecurity
- bio and agtech
We’re open-minded and have spent time in areas like mining, BCIs, space, and so on.
PROCESS
Our process is typically 3-4 meetings. You’ll meet with Leo and/or Anna for the first 1-2 meetings, and with both of us for the last 1-2 meetings. Our preferred meeting length is 45 minutes – it’s less rushed than 30 minutes, and a good chance for both sides to ask questions.
In parallel, if we know domain experts or potential customers that are especially relevant to your business, we’ll introduce you to them during the due diligence process.
Finally, if you have a referenceable customer or LOI that we can chat with for 15 minutes, we’d love to do that as the very final step of our process.
A typical diligence timeline is 2-3 weeks.
WHAT WE LOOK FOR IN POTENTIAL INVESTMENTS
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to building or investing in startups, but below are some company and founder qualities that we love to see.
- Spiky founders – are you top 1% or even top 0.01% in something that you do?
- Founder/market fit – the more esoteric and challenging the sector you’re in, the more we like to see past experience with the sector and with your target customers.
- Deliberate decision making – we love founders that have navigated the idea maze and can articulate the reasoning behind major strategic decisions they’ve made.
- Not overly capital intensive – the less capital you need to get your product into customers’ hands, the more of a fit we will be.
ETHICS
Ethics and integrity are very important to us. We won’t invest in your competitors, won’t share your deck with them, and won’t share their decks with you.
As a matter of principle, we always strive to make recommendations that are in the best interest of the company, not ourselves.