Luciana Lixandru, Partner at Accel, on how to spot global winners among local champions

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this Much I Know, the seedcamp podcast with me, your host, Carlos Espinal, bringing you the inside story from founders, investors and leading tech voices. Tune in to hear from the people who built businesses and products, scaled globally, failed fantastically and learned massively. Welcome everyone. On today's podcast we have Luciana, partner Xcel and co investor with us and one of our companies which really excited about, but I won't boil it just yet. Going to wait for you to tell that story, Luciana. But first of all, welcome.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here today. I have to say it's my first podcast ever, so I'm extra excited.

Ah, cool. Well, let's make sure it's a good one. All right, so first of all, one of the things we like to start off with is your background.

Absolutely.

So I know that you went to school in Georgetown and you studied economics, mathematics. But maybe there's two elements to that story that we probably need to cover. Whereas some of you, you might not know where Luciana's from, and that's probably an interesting story of how you got to Georgetown from where you're from. And second of all, what did you do after you graduated?

So I am originally from Romania and in fact, I'm originally from a relatively small town in Romania. I joke with my friends from there. It's the 18th largest city, about 100,000 people. And when I was 16, I still remember I had this idea, which at the time was crazy, that I wanted to study abroad. In fact, I want to study in the US and I'd never been to the US before. At that point, I'd never been on a plane before. So I started doing online research and I started studying for my SATs and learning all these words by heart. I still remember applied to a bunch of universities and was fortunate enough to be accepted at Georgetown and got a scholarship there. So I was able to go. And I always say it's the best four years of my life now since I met my husband. He doesn't like it when I say that because we weren't married back then, where we didn't know each other back then. But it was, it was really a wonderful experience academically and socially and frankly, just eye opening from so many perspectives in Eastern Europe, where in my family in particular, in Eastern Europe in general, if you want to be successful, you have to do something with math or sciences. It kind of is how it used to be, at least back in the day. So I always knew I was going to study Math. And I wanted to add something that was more specific to the school where I went. And Georgetown is very focused on international studies, so I added a major in economics. And I always thought I would go on and teach. And then all my friends, all my cool friends were going into banking and I thought to myself, well, I could move to New York for a couple of years and hang out with my friends and have my first job and go back to grad school after. And then, you know, life happened and I never went back. So I, to be honest, I got into technology serendipitously and I was placed into the technology team at Morgan Stanley in M and A. And I realized that I actually really love technology, but the big corporate world wasn't really for me long term. So after a year in New York, I moved to London. This was plus or minus 11 years ago now. And that's how I got into investing. First I moved to Summit Partners, which is a growth fund. I worked in their team here for a bit over two years and I joined Excel back in 2011, so quite a long time ago, end of 2011, to be fair.

Well, before we go straight to Excel and your time there, maybe we can talk a little bit about your time at Morgan Stanley and Summit Partners. I think I remember as well when I graduated that investment banking and management consulting is like sort of the stereotypical career paths that people kind of maybe have been oversold and over glorified when you're in school, but now you talk to people who went down that path and they highly regret it. And sometimes it's about the stories of late hours, sometimes it's the stories about, you know, the, the craziness that, that happens there. But maybe you can share with us a couple of things. Firstly, any of the sort of lessons that have served you well that you learned at Morgan Stanley. And second of all, any funny stories of your time you were there?

I have so many funny stories. Let's start with that. I didn't go through university thinking I wanted to get into finance. So it wasn't actually an obvious path for me. And I had never taken an accounting class, I had never taken a finance class. I had done pure mathematics and economics. So the funny story, funny, embarrassing, is that when I started I literally had to Google EBITDA because I had no basics of accounting. Yeah. So that was quite funny looking back, and had to get up to speed very quickly. And then, you know, some other funny stories is the typical long hours. I still remember one time I left the office at 11 on a Friday. And I thought it was so great and I was so happy to be out of the office only at 11pm on a Friday, jumping with joy. So these are a couple of funny stories. I have another funny story, but I'll share that a bit later because it connects nicely to why I thought one of the investments I made was so interesting. And then in terms of what I learned, I do think that investment banking was really good training, actually. In some ways I think that it's like the military. It just helps you be very disciplined, very efficient. Everything needs to be done very quickly and everything needs to be done correctly. So I think it gave me a certain framework and a certain structure for the work environment and for my working life, which was helpful long term. And Summit. Summit was similar in some ways. So Summit is a growth fund. They invest relatively large equity checks in technology companies a lot on the B2B side. When I was there, at least that's the area where I spent a lot of time. And Summit's model is focused on cold calling. So for over two years I find companies that I thought were interesting, many of them bootstrapped, so many of them did not even know what private equity was, what growth capital was, and literally Cold called them or cold emailed and tried to get introductions and explain why would be a great idea to raise an investment from Summit Partners at the time. And it was a very good experience in terms of A, figuring out what makes an interesting company with relatively limited information. Um, and B was helpful just in terms of presenting yourself and presenting your company in a way that's attractive to entrepreneurs who didn't need money. Some had mainly at the time invested in profitable companies. So that was actually great training as well. And I did, while I was there, I did always feel like, wow, there are all these interesting opportunities that are earlier stage, so they didn't fit that particular investment criteria. But in my mind had so much potential. So when I got a call from Excel back in 2011, for me it was a no brainer. And I still remember I met my partner Sonali after the first meeting. I felt this is the place for me, I have to work here. And now eight years later, I'm happy I made that move.

Well, this is as good time as any to talk about Excel then.

Yes, let's do it.

So Accel is one of the most successful VC funds in the world. So it's probably worth starting with some of the claims to fame of the brand and then maybe within the scope of the eu. How it differs from some of the other branches because I know that sometimes founders don't understand how funds that are international can operate and how decisions are made. Then we'll take it from there.

Absolutely, yeah. So at Excel, we've been investing in technology companies for a bit over 35 years now, have our roots in Silicon Valley started there. And I think as a firm what we did well was to recognized really early on that interesting companies would start anywhere, not only in the US and in fact not only in Silicon Valley. So we opened offices in Europe 20 years ago and we also have offices on the ground in India for the past decade or so. And I take a lot of pride in the fact that we realized that so early on because it wasn't obvious for a long time before the Spotify of the world and before the deliveroos of the world, and it wasn't obvious that Europe would create multibillion dollar outcomes. In fact, in the first years, some of the questions we got as a fund were is Europe going to consistently create billion dollar companies, not $5 billion companies? And now I think that Europe has proven that it can create $20 billion companies and even beyond. So it's been gratifying from that perspective. And we're still the only top tier US fund with presence on the ground in Europe. And for us, the mission which unites us in Sil and in Europe and in India is that we want to find the most ambitious entrepreneurs and the most disruptive products and help them grow globally. Oftentimes that means help them grow in the US and we don't think that if you start your company in Stockholm or in Bucharest like UiPath did, we don't think that you, you should have access to different type of capital. We think you should have access to the best type of capital that can help you scale and can help you through that journey. So from London, we invest throughout Europe as well as Israel. The key hubs are the obvious ones, but we also like Berlin, Paris, Nordics, but we also make investments in locations that are less usual, like Solingen in Germany or Aarhus in Denmark, or as I said before, Bucharest in Romania, where we made our first investment a few years ago. And we really think that these disruptive companies that can win on a global scale can start anywhere in terms of.

The stage that companies need to be at. You know, you're considered a fund that has the capacity to invest in multiple stages. But maybe do you want to ring fence the stages you prefer and what that means in terms of quantum of capital for initial investment?

Absolutely. We are a Series A investor at heart. We have three local funds focused on early stage, so really focused on Series A. One in the us, one in Europe, one in India. We do have flexibility to make seed investments. We do have flexibility to make Series B investments and we'll make those opportunistically. But really ideally we try to invest at the Series A. We invest in consumer facing businesses, B2B, FinTech. I would say those are the core three areas. And of course also gaming, health, tech and other spaces too. I would say initial check will be anywhere from 5 to 20. It's really hard to have, especially in today's environment, it's hard to have an average that is meaningful because rounds really are a bit all over the place. If you put a gun to my head, I would say initial check ideally is 10 to $12 million. Series A or 10 to 15, let's say.

Actually yeah, okay, that's helpful. So you joined in 2011 and you've had an amazing journey and today you're a partner in the firm. Now for many people who are not familiar with how venture capital works, they don't understand potentially the journey there. Maybe you can walk us through what's the typical journey for somebody joining a fund and what was your journey to get to where you are today?

Absolutely. I love talking about that because it goes hand in hand with one of the core values that we hold very dear to our hearts at Excel, which is mentorship and growing from within. If you look at our partnership today, we have six partners in Europe and five out of six partners started in different roles and were promoted with Sonali's exception who actually started as a partner. And in my particular case I started as an associate end of 2011 and was promoted through the ranks and became a partner five years later. So we have associates, we have a VP title and a principal title. When you start writing checks and really get your feet wet to become a partner and then of course the partner title. For me it's just been a great cultural fit since day one. We have the luxury to work with really special entrepreneurs and interact with really special entrepreneurs. We have the luxury to see ideas that can become really large and really disruptive very early on. And this can be ideas that change the way consumers live their life. Like a deliveroo that changed the way I eat food, literally. And I can talk about that a bit later or like a UI path where we co invested and we can talk about that. That really changes the way that enterprises run their business. So for me it's just been a great fit since day one. And I feel it's a privilege to do the job that I do. And of course the job evolves. In the early days, it was much more focused on. Well, it evolves and in some ways it stays the same. In the early days, it was a lot of sourcing and meeting companies and finding the next opportunity, which I still do a lot of. I still do a lot of that today. Today it's a lot more time spent on portfolio work. Of course, I'm on six boards now, so that requires a bunch of attention. So I can't spend as much time meeting companies and sourcing as I did when I didn't have any boards. But the sourcing component, frankly, never changes in a venture capitalist career. And I learned a lot. I have to say I had the fortune of being exposed to all my partners quite a lot. And I think and hope that I managed to pick up what was a good fit for my personality from each of their styles. So that was really, really helpful. And I was fortunate enough to work on a bunch of really interesting investments early on. So as soon as I joined, Sonali asked me to help her with our investment in Avito, which is the largest classifieds platform in Russia. And that was a great learning experience. And from there, many others, Wallapop and Karwa and Algolia and Dr. Leap. And at the end of the day, you learn by doing. You learn by seeing your partners thought process in investing and seeing their process in general. And that was really helpful for me in the early years.

So another question that founders generally have is how to navigate a fund's process internally. And it sounds like because Excel has associates and principals that navigating it is not just about when's the first meeting, when's the second meeting, when's the partner pitch, when's the investment committee decision, when's the term sheet, but also which people guide you in that process? So maybe to clarify for many. And there's a lot of myths you know about don't talk to an associate, only talk to a partner. That kind of stuff. Maybe you can walk us through a Excel's process and how those titles, if you will, help move that process along.

That's a great question. And I think you're right. There are a lot of misconceptions. I would split this in say, check writers and and investment professionals who are helping a check writer but are not writing the check themselves. So check writers will be principals and partners. And the way we work is we each have A mentee, in my case. Right now, I work closely with an associate. His name is Julien Beck. He's great. And that means that I'll pull him into my meetings and the companies I think are interesting and vice versa. He. He's constantly looking for the next big thing and constantly keeping me updated about the companies he's talking to. I will tell you, I think our associates have a really good filter. So it does happen sometimes that a company speaks with an associate and doesn't meet a partner right away. But probably what that means is that it's just not the right stage for that company to move forward further into that process. So I think that our associates do a very good job at sales signaling. Hey, Luciana, or Hey, Sonali or Hey, Philippe. I think now is the right time for you to meet this company because they are a few months before their Series A, let's say, or they've reached a certain inflection point which makes them interesting for us. So all this to say, I think it's okay if your touch point is an associate. It probably means that A, they're keeping the partners updated in terms of those conversations. And baby, they'll schedule that meeting with a partner when the time is right for both parties.

And then within Excel, what's the flow usually look like? First meeting, second meeting, third meeting, fourth meeting. Let's just give it maybe a rough. I know it can always be very different, but do they have. Do founders have to meet? The entire partnership is. It is a decision split across us and Europe and there's like a collective investment committee.

Like we have a unique decision making model and I'll talk about that. But to start off, I'll say that every deal time frame is different, especially in today's environment when things are moving so quickly. I think we've moved from the average from a couple of years ago. Sometimes it happens. UiPath is a good example. It was a few months between meeting Daniel and signing the term sheet, but it was just the case that he wasn't actively fundraising when I met him. So it just took a little while to get to know each other and build a personal relationship. And when he did decide, yes, I want to raise a Series A, then we moved quickly. But you could also say it was a few months process. Actually it was much, much shorter than that. In other cases, it can happen that we meet a founder and they're fundraising right away. So then we move really quickly and get up to speed really quickly and do our homework and can shorten that timeframe. Significantly. So all this to say there really isn't a rule and if I give you an average, it's not going to be meaningful. Now, going back to your other question, which was about our process. We don't have an investment committee per se. We always have a partnership presentation at the end of the process and we always update our partners in advance. It's a very social group. So I'll go into my partner's offices, I'll brainstorm with them. I'll say, hey, this is what I like. These are my questions. What do you think? Will we send an investment memo in advance to make sure that the group is prepared and is asking relevant questions? And since the founder is taking time to present, but at the end of that partnership presentation, we don't have a voting system, the partner really is in the hot seat when it comes to the decision making. And the reason why we work that way is because we believe that it's very difficult to spot an outlier in the early days at the Series A. It's just outliers are not obvious. And I think if you go towards group decision making, you can miss some of these outliers. Now, that said, of course, we give each other feedback, we ask each other questions. It's an intellectually challenging conversation, intellectually challenging group. And sometimes we have all the answers, sometimes we don't. Then we go back and we do our homework and we come back, back to the group. But it's not, at the end of the day, it's not a group decision, it's a partner driven decision or a deal team driven decision. And it all happens in our office here in London or nowadays on, on the ground because, you know, I travel all the time. We travel all the time.

Cool. All right, well, let's go into three companies. I, I had mentioned three. I don't know. Do you agree with those?

Yes, absolutely. I am happy to talk about any companies in my portfolio.

Just so you know, guys, I had picked out Testing, ui Pat and Delivery as examples that we can play with. And I had a couple of questions for Lucian. Don't worry, I'll repeat these questions again. But the questions were around giving the audience a sense for what stage companies are when you meet them. So I had a few questions. I'll just read them out and then we'll go through each one for each.

Sure.

So what were the attributes of those companies when you first met them, when you brought them into the partnership? They were at what stage? So it might have been a gap of X number of Months or whatever. What stood out about them at the time? What was the key thing that won your partnership over? Was it the team? Was it the traction? What was it? And was there any quality difference, let's say vis a vis what you might have seen in the us and then the rest of the questions are more for after investment, but let's just maybe go through the three companies in that light. So I don't know, pick whichever one you want. Tessian, UiPath, Deliveroo. What were the attributes of those companies when you first met them and then when you brought them into the partnership for investment?

Absolutely. And I'll address your last question first before I dig into the companies in terms of differences between European companies and U.S. companies. And I want to be very clear, when we invest in a company in Europe, we invest in them because we think they can be the global winner, not because we're betting on them being the local champion. When we invested in Tessie and we thought they could be the global winner in email security, when we invested in UiPath, they were actually the third player in the space in robotic process automation. We thought they could become number one, etc. Etc. Now, going back to those specific examples, it's funny, I think with those particular three, there is a bit of a personal story that really made them stand out when I met them. So I'll start with Tessie and Tessie and actually I met at the seed stage. It was relatively small at the time, so they did have some revenue, but it was 20, 30k in recurring revenue a month. And it's one of the funny stories from Morgan Stanley. In my first year in New York, I accidentally sent the wrong documents to one of our clients. In fact, I sent documents that were meant for a competitor to one of Morgan Stanley's clients. Yes, I thought it was the end of the world. I thought it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me at that point in my life. And it really stuck with me. So when I met Tim, the CEO of Tessian, and he told me the story and their insertion point at the time, I was like, wow, this makes so much sense. It could have saved me. So Testeon applies machine learning to email security. If you think about the broader security space, most areas have already been disrupted by machine learning. With email, however, they're really the ones that are going after this and incumbents are still rule based and the insertion point is an insertion point that made me smile and resonated. It's misaddressed emails if you look at, especially in highly Regulated industries, in financial services and legal services, there are a lot of issues with accidental data leaks. Email being one of the key channels for these accidental data leaks. So when I talk to their customers, this just really resonated with the chief security officers and with CIOs of big banks of legal firms. And I thought, wow, that's a really interesting insertion point into the enterprise. And then the next question was, is this the right team to build an entire product suite around email security? And after spending time with a team, the answer was a resounding yes. I think Tim is fantastic. The CEO Ed, the co founder and CTO has done an amazing job building this product suite since this was a few years ago now. And they've grown really nicely and I'm very happy to have backed them at the seat and then continued investing at the A and at the B. But it was definitely a personal story that resonated with Deliver. I hate cooking, so I thought this is great. At the time I lived in Chelsea, which was I think the second, the first or the second neighborhood that Deliver launched and I became a consumer. I never really used just eat before because I couldn't find the type of food that I liked and I didn't like that. It was really unpredictable. Sometimes it would take 40 minutes to get your food, sometimes it would take an hour and a half. So in the early days I just thought, wow, this is such a great product. And again, I'll keep on going back to the entrepreneur and I don't want to sound stereotypical, but in early stage investing it's all about the entrepreneur. And Will is a really special CEO and again, I think he's done a great job at scaling the business across 13 countries now. Thousands of employees and I don't even, I can't remember the number of cities, many, many cities with UiPath where we're co investors. UiPath. It's funny, it's our first investment in Romania. I happen to be Romanian. I didn't know Daniel before I was introduced to him by his seed investor. But I still remember the first phone. Initially we connected over the phone because I was in San Francisco and I remember the first phone conversation with him and just the level of ambition and the scale at which he thinks and he thought even back then it was a small company. At the time it was a few million in ARR in annual recurring revenue. And I remember thinking, wow, there's something really special here. If they do half of what they have on their mind, this can be really big. And in UiPath's case. It was also interesting that it was the third player in the space. There were two other players that had been around for a very long time before the space actually took off. And our bet was that we'd back the underdog, but the underdog would really position itself as the leader. And the thesis definitely played out. If you look at Gardener reports and Forester reports and talk to customers, they're now up and to the. And so what stood out back then was definitely Danielle and the level of the ambition and the product. We did customer calls, and those were some of the strongest customer calls I've done in my career. They just loved the product. Everyone said how modern the architecture was, how scalable it was, how implementation times were a lot shorter than what was in the market, how it was easier to learn how to use a product. So that sort of feedback got me really excited about the potential. I guess so I guess a little bit of a personal connection. Well, here the Romanian connection. But candidly, it had obviously zero to do with investment. With the investment thesis.

It's not some sort of like, preferential treatment.

No, definitely not. Definitely not. And we still speak 99% English. The CEO and myself speak 99% English. We joke that it's easier to speak English when it comes to business.

I mean, Romania is one of those hubs that I think people underestimate because, you know, we've made several investments in Romania.

You guys have done pretty well with Romanian entrepreneurs, right?

Every single Romanian founder has done well. It's definitely something in the water.

I think I'm definitely looking for more Romanian entrepreneurs. Calling all Romanian entrepreneurs.

All right, so we went through some of the attributes that stuck out for you, right? The team that you really liked it. I think most people understand that chemistry is important and that a real needs. They're important. It sounds like from a. From a very tactical point of view, some of the things that you do include customer calls to sense check the product and how well it's received. I think the two questions that people tend to get stuck on before approaching somebody like you guys is what is the minimum revenue I need to have? And maybe an example of a company that you backed where there was zero revenue or where the revenue was clearly not the reason why it stood out, why growth in revenue was the reason why it not stood out.

There is no revenue threshold. I'll start by saying that. And in fact, there are many Series A's where there is no revenue. Yet. I'm trying to think in my portfolio of investments, the company that was earliest stage was Tessian and it was at the seed level. But they did have some revenue, as I mentioned, as a fund. I can give you examples of companies like Inside Stana, for example, that my partner Harry backed a couple of years ago. Now it's a great repeat founder that was going after a space that he understood and knew really well, but they didn't have any revenue yet when we invested and many others. Wallapop in Spain, they're now the incumbent mobile classifieds platform. They were not monetizing for quite some time after we invested. So those are just a couple of examples that come to mind. You don't have to have revenue in order to come talk to Excel. That's definitely a misconception.

So if it's not revenue and it's clearly a relational connection and ambition level, how do you manage to filter all the opportunities you have if not through if ultimately it's in some ways a subjective measure that helps you make a decision and some of the objective variables like revenue are not always the key variable. How do you guys filter? What are the things that maybe the associate kind of uses as sort of broad based filters to then really kind of focus your attention on the few winners?

That's a great question. And especially in today's environment where there are more and more companies and more and more startups, firstly we have a thesis driven approach. Since day one of Excel 35 years ago, we did these things called prepared minds and it comes from the quote, chance favors the prepared mind. What this means is a deep dive. We try to identify spaces that we think are going to be interesting and are going to be real categories in the future and then go out there and talk to all the teams that are addressing these spaces, no matter how early those teams or their startups may be. That's one filter. The second filter, frankly, is getting introductions from people like you. We work with a lot of seed funds across Europe and if you send me an email and say, hey, this is a great entrepreneur, this is a great company, of course I'm going to take that very seriously because there's already a great filter before I get that introduction. So I would say those are the two key areas to filter. There's also geographic coverage, but geographic coverage really goes back to making sure that we have relationships with those important angels and with those important seed funds who will give us that call and give us the heads up. Hey, FYI, one of my companies is really special, is doing really well. They should really be on your radar. I would say Those are the key filters. And then.

But before you elaborate further on that, you brought up one point that I think is probably worth exploring a little bit more about the deep dives. I would love to hear what deep dives are currently a focus right now for you guys. But before that, I'd love to hear one deep dive, one sector that you previously were really excited about that you've now dropped.

So I'll start with what we're working on now. And it's we have two different types of deep dives. So we have actually mini dives where we'll spend a month, maybe two months, but no longer making sure we cover all the key companies and the key spaces in Europe. And then we have what I call ongoing deep dives, what I call really large spaces where we're still seeing disruption, where we may have already invested in one sector, but there may be adjacent sectors. So for example, I think that enterprise automation is a very large space and we invested in Celonis a while back. Celonis is a process mining company. Celonis is like an X ray for your organization. It looks at all your processes and says real time. Hey, this is how you should run your processes in the most efficient manner. Then there is UiPath where we invested in after Celonis. And UiPath is active in robotic process automation. So UiPath actually executes on these processes across your organization. And we think that there are adjacent spaces around enterprise automation where there can still be very large companies. So this is what I would call an ongoing deep dive. Now I'll give you an example of a mini deep dive which is around the UiPath ecosystem actually. And I'm sure this is an area where you guys are, where I know this is an area where you guys are spending time as well. Robotic process automation is a platform within these enterprises. And this platform automates primarily or started with back office processes and now also focuses on some front end processes within this platform or adjacent to this platform. Enterprises can plug in various decision makers, you can call them AI tools, focusing on a particular use case. And we think that some of these decision makers can actually become really large companies on their own. Some Companies around the RPA ecosystem can address NLP, some companies can focus on data extraction, etc.

Yeah, so RPA is a platform, clearly something I love and rightfully so. I think I've just seen an emergence of businesses running on rpa. So I totally agree with you the way that, you know, there was emergence of businesses running on Facebook when Facebook became the dominant social platform. So, yeah, totally see that. And I think I mentioned at the beginning of the question that I was really keen to hear which ones you moved away from, because in some ways, you know, maybe it's something you keep passive because you were talking about things that you regularly monitor, areas that you actively deep diving into, maybe micro deep dives, and there's ones that maybe just no longer in focus. Which ones are those?

Absolutely. In our business, time to market is really important. So it can be that we spend time in a particular space and just decide that it may take another six months or another year until that space really flourishes, and then we revisit. For example, on top of my head, we spent a little bit of time looking at industrial automation and we haven't found that many companies that, that help make manufacturing processes more efficient yet. Do I think there's going to be more and more coming up in the next months, years? Absolutely. Will we revisit? Absolutely. But in the initial try, we didn't find any companies in Europe.

What other sectors do you think we can all look at and say they're gonna happen just too early? Because, for example, I've been taking some meetings right now around neural implants, you know, like neural interfaces. Another one's like quantum computing. We hear about these things. And I'm just curious to hear your thoughts. Which ones do you think are too early?

I actually think that autonomous driving is going to take a lot longer than people realize today.

Yeah, I could see that because, I mean, you look at some of the challenges. I was having a chat with a team that will remain unnamed who is engineering an autonomous driving vehicle. And they were sharing with me that the problem they have on the highway is not that the autonomous vehicle is going to go off a lane or something. They've gotten that mostly down. It's that as soon as other drivers, you know, human drivers, find out that it's a robot driving the car, they mess with it. And so it's like, how do you engineer safety around people messing with a robot? So I think, yeah, I agree with you. That's probably too early. All right. In terms of how you guys work with companies, you know, you made these amazing investments. What's day one look like? Do you guys sit down and take a board meeting and say, all right, guys, here's 500% growth I expect to see within a year's time and, you know, crack the whip. What is like a typical planning and growth session with you guys look like to deliver the results?

I'll start by saying that probably by day one Post investment entrepreneurs are really tired of me after, after spending time with me and me trying to convince them to take our money versus someone else's money. But jokes aside, I think that growth targets need to come from the entrepreneur because they have the pulse of the business and they understand best what makes sense and when it makes sense. Of course I do think that we can and should act as a sounding board. But I can tell you that from a growth perspective, my advice to company A can be totally different from my advice to company B. I think that every single company is really unique from so many different perspectives. It's definitely not one formula fits all. And I was actually thinking to myself a few months ago and I had two board meetings with two different companies within a couple of weeks. And in one board meeting I was trying to convince the entrepreneur to. Not trying to convince, but I was making arguments for the entrepreneur to actually maybe not run as fast as they were planning to run for various reasons. And one week later I went into another board and I was telling the entrepreneur, hey, actually I think you have the opportunity to invest a lot more in your go to market because your payback is so good. You have the ability to hire great salespeople and you have the capital and the opportunity is now. So actually it just makes sense to put fuel on the fire. All this to say I think really every market, every company, every entrepreneur is really unique. And I will say we are, we like to make this analogy. We, you know, the entrepreneur is a driver. We're just in the passenger seat and sometimes we can say, hey, check out left, the left here or the right here, or try to accelerate or try to go slower. But at the end of the day, the entrepreneur really has the pulse of the business. And I'll also say entrepreneurs don't become entrepreneurs because they like to follow the rules, right? They become entrepreneurs because they're so strong minded and they have a clear view about what they want to do and that's great and we love that.

One of the things that is increasingly happening in growth stage rounds is that the rounds are getting bigger and bigger.

They are.

And it's getting to the point now where there are war chests against the competitors and maybe used to hire people at ridiculous salaries. When does a company know it's raised too much money beyond where they are?

When it doesn't know how to spend that money efficiently? That's what I would would say. I think, of course, access to capital is probably easier than it's been in a very long Period of time. Does that mean you should go out there and raise all the money in the world? No, absolutely not. I think what it means is that you need to be very thoughtful about your plan. You need to be very thoughtful on what you can execute and how fast you can hire. You can hire talented people and, okay, maybe add a little buffer to that, but I think you need to have a clear plan in terms of how you want to spend that capital in an efficient manner.

Yeah, fair enough. Well, we always like to wrap things up with a few questions that maybe sort of put a nail into the overall podcast. So the first one is about advice. What advice would you give to founders, just in general? Things that maybe you notice are either problems that are not addressed early enough or things that an extra amount of investment in terms of their time and mindshare goes a long way.

Again, I do think that different advice applies to different opportunities and different situations. If I were to try to find one advice that really does suit most entrepreneurs, I would say being an entrepreneur is so hard. The only way to be successful is to be relentless. And when someone closes a door, find a window, find a crack in the wall, try once, twice, three times, until things happen. And again, UiPath is a good example. The company, for many years was doing something else until they went into rpa, and for many years, it was not a successful startup. So I would say just try very, very hard and be relentless. That's the first one. The second one, I would say maybe this is a bit counterintuitive. Sometimes the 8020 rule is just fine. Yeah, you don't have to do everything perfectly in a startup. It's okay to, in some situations, you know, get by, move on, execute and rinse and repeat and do better next time. Yeah, I think that's. That can be counterintuitive, but I do think it applies to startups in general.

Yeah, fair enough. And the last question. If you could have one superpower, think kind of like superheroes, what would it be and why?

Okay, this is very easy for me. Teleportation. Because my companies are all over Europe and now all over the US Because a bunch of them moved headquarters there. So I'm on planes constantly. And unfortunately for me, I am a nervous liar. So if I could just get there, that would be fantastic. Also, I live far from my family, so this way I could see my family as much as I please. That'd be really nice.

Well, I'll let you know when I find that company.

Please, I'll invest.

Yeah, exactly. We'll do it together. Excellent. Well, thanks for joining the channel.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right, guys, till next time. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, don't forget to subscribe on iTunes and SoundCloud and leave us a read with your thoughts on our show.