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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, this will be fun.
So I usually don't start here, but I think your story is so interesting and all the different things that you've done in your career leading up to, you know, your fund now.
Let's go back in history and go through your path of getting into venture.
Yeah, it's such an interesting sort of eclectic background that you've been lucky to have, you know, from the public side to working with the Fed to working at Goldman Sachs.
And, you know, I was when I talked to entrepreneurs and I do consider people that are running funds, especially emerging managers as entrepreneurs.
You take all those experiences and it helps inform the type of firm you're building, the culture, what you're investing in.
Talk a little bit about how those experiences informed the type of firm that you want to build with Vanessa.
And maybe if we can tick off the culture, the thesis as two of those major points.
Yeah, and we're going to touch on, because you brought up a number of things there I think deserve a little bit more unpacking.
So one being consensus versus non-consensus in venture today.
The second is really the role of consumer products and consumer technology and how that's changed.
6% is a very low number.
When you look back in history, some of the biggest companies in the world have been consumer in nature, whether it be the Facebooks of the world, obviously.
And we'll get into what you're seeing from a shift standpoint with artificial intelligence.
But maybe coming back to this thesis of you want to invest in things that are generally non-consensus, they're early, consumer has been
relatively non-consensus, especially pre-revenue.
One of the things that we always look at when we're evaluating, or when I say we, I mean at my company, Allocate, is not just the thesis, but it's really the GP thesis fit.
Similar to when you're looking at a company, you have somebody that has technical chops, that really understands, plus somebody that has that business mentality to understand consumer
How does that then align with the way you built your team and maybe some of the conversations you and Vanessa had leading into partnering to make sure that you were the right group to be able to execute on this thesis?
You know, what I really like about the story there is kind of this notion of like running a firm like a startup, right?
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