Ramtin Naimi

Andre is technical.

Will is technical.

They're more suited to vet the technical capabilities of an individual than I would be.

But when I mentioned the commercial aspect, I'm really looking for salesmanship in three different verticals.

Vertical one is ability to fundraise.

Seems simple, but building a startup company is hard.

And anything you do to put the odds slightly in your favor makes your odds of success that much more likely.

There are certain founders who are good at fundraising, certain founders who are not good at fundraising.

The founders who are good at fundraising get to build their startup company that much more easy than someone who's bad at fundraising.

That's obviously somewhat sometimes solved for because you could help with that as an investor.

But it's very beneficial when a founder has that salesmanship rigor.

And the next one is hiring.

Hiring in early stage startup companies is sales.

85% of the companies we finance are based in the Bay Area.

They need to hire engineers who can easily get a job at Meta or Google or OpenAI for $400,000 a year.

And the seed stage company is trying to hire that person for $150,000 a year.

It takes a very specific person to convince somebody a $250,000 annual pay cut is in that person's best interest in exchange for equity in this company that just has a concept of an idea.

So that's really important because recruiting is something that I think a lot of people underestimate how important is at the early stage, the founding stages of these companies.

And then next is selling a product.

Oftentimes, V1 of these products are like these half-assed, broken, glitchy things that no one would pay for.