Ramtin Naimi

Everything I do in seven years and one day, they're not entitled.

A seven-year time or adventure is nothing.

They get no credit.

Most of the excitement and adventure starts to happen in years nine and 10.

Yeah, you know, we hired a team.

We built a really cool backend platform from scratch.

We wanted to be seen as a very serious institution early in our fund's lifecycle.

Alex, my partner, has a much more traditional background than I do.

He's a Bridgewater, Columbia guy.

So...

very process-oriented, very analytical, very data-driven.

Early on in our fund, we basically built a CRM from ground up, which we're actually spinning out as a company right now because every venture capitalist has shown it too.

It's been like, oh, if this is a product, we would pay for it.

So the guy who built that for us, Will, is actually spinning that out into a standalone business.

There is a million ways to bootstrap your way into the venture capital world.

I've learned over time that investing in founders for me works a lot better than investing in markets.

I'm better at identifying what a good founder is and what a good market is.

There is genetic makeup that I look for in a founding team of a company.

And whether it's spread amongst one founder or multiple founders, I'm looking for a combination of very strong commercial ability and very strong technical ability.

I'm not technical, but Alex on my team is technical.