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
And, you know, whether fund one could be like a seed round fund two series, like you're continuing to build, it's not just raising a fund, but it's building a firm.
And in a world where the feedback loops are so long, like it is, you invest in a company, it might be 10 years before you know, number one, if you're a great picker, because it takes time to see those companies continue to mature.
And so these interim KPIs to determine like directionally is what we do working is really interesting.
When you think about the different things that you're looking to solve against from a KPI, there's the sourcing, which is network is a big part of like seeing the right deals within a thesis.
There's the picking component.
And then there's once you see the deals, you have to win those deals consistently.
Now, maybe a non-consensus feels it's easier to win those deals.
But when you think about this event series and how you're tracking, do you believe that for seed firms, sourcing or winning are more important?
How would you sort of define what you're indexing on?
Yeah, something that we have thought about a lot, and I go back and forth a little bit on this, but venture, even from 2018, when you joined to where it is today is completely different.
And it's hard to even know what is a venture versus not venture.
You know, for example, general catalysts don't even refer to them as a traditional venture capital fund, but really private innovation finance.
Because they have all these different type of products now.
And we're seeing that across some of the mega firms.
And both you and Vanessa came from these larger funds in NEA and Lightspeed, which fundamentally are different business models.
Can you shed the light on the difference in your mind of the business model of a big firm today?
that is deploying billions of dollars and the mindset that you need to have as a seed manager to win in a space where you're competing with not only other seed funds, but now increasingly the bigger funds where consensus founders, consensus sectors may skip seed to go direct to the big firms.
So I think you hit the nail on the head, you know, particularly the bigger firms, which, you know, I do feel like they're a very different asset class than the pure play early stage venture where all of your exposure from an investor standpoint, an LP into a fund is going to be kind of seed in Series A, maybe a little bit of Series B. Whereas the big firms, you know, ultimately the entry point might still be Series A, some cases seed, but they look very different.
And the calculus at those bigger firms is, and I've heard this many times, is can I plunk 100, 200, 300, 500 million into this company?
some models that are capital intensive actually work well when you're dealing with that quantum of capital.
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