Samir Kaji

speaker

769 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 28 Jul

Samir Kaji’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers · Unpacking "A Crisis Moment In Seed" · 12 Nov 2025 podcast

And I do think one of the challenges that's been brought up more recently from folks is YC, for example, is something that demands a certain valuation because it's considered part of this kind of factory of like, this is how we work.

a lot of the AI application companies, given how hot AI is, and if you look at the numbers of an AI company valuation versus a non-AI, the gap is widening by the day from seed to late stage.

So then when you think about this concept of, when I think about classic VC, and I'm going back 70s, 80s, 90s, it is three bucks.

It was always kind of doing things that people thought were weird or off the beaten path, but it was somebody that had some level of

a prescient understanding of what might happen and a belief in an individual before it became obvious.

Now things, there was a tweet out there where somebody said, well, if you don't have at least $2 million in run rate within 10 days, it's not interesting, which is antithetical to it.

So talk a little bit about this classic VC model in today's world, given that a lot of these things feel like they're moving toward, or at least we're training entrepreneurs to be more consensus driven from the get-go.

I want to stay on this topic a little bit longer on this concept of a Subaru

compounders.

And the whole concept, obviously, when we look at some of the size of some of these companies, if you think about just the top three venture-backed companies in the private markets, over a trillion dollars in private market cap, NVIDIA today is five trillion.

We would have never imagined if I asked you six years ago, if I made you a bet that NVIDIA is going to be five trillion or higher in market cap, you would have probably taken the other side of that bet.

And it obviously took a long time and it took artificial intelligence to be sort of this next platform shift from that.

And the strategy for a seed investor then is if you do take the super compounder, when you do invest in these companies that are fairly consensus areas, AI, these are priced in a certain way.

So the valuations of these companies are already priced in.

And then your hope is that of the 25, 35 companies you invest in,

one or two become the extreme super compounders to which all the other stuff that may not actually have durability to it doesn't really matter.

The challenge is there might be only a few of those per year, and maybe there's more than there was 10, 15 years ago, but still it's a very tough strategy.

The other side, which is kind of classic venture, is I'm going to invest in things that might not fit the super compounder pattern of life being really obvious.

But the risk is in a market today where a lot of the capital is isolated to at least a super compounder behavior, at least downstream, these companies may need more capital and there might not be that capital, even if they hit certain metrics.

How do you reconcile as a seed investor those two things?

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