Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

investing via Zoom vs in person

23 Feb 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:50

In this segment of a YouTube discussion, a venture investor outlines the fund’s performance expectations—aiming for roughly 3x net returns on Series A deals and 5x or higher on seed and pre‑seed investments. The speaker explains that their due‑diligence conversations with founders, like Paige, are designed to gauge whether a startup’s trajectory can meet those targets, acknowledging that not every founder will be a fit. The conversation then shifts to the impact of the pandemic on deal‑sourcing, noting that while Zoom enabled more virtual interaction time, the investor still values in‑person meetings for building deeper intuition, especially when evaluating opportunities in new geographies. The speaker admits a personal learning curve in adapting to virtual assessments, emphasizing that face‑to‑face encounters provide a better sense of a founder’s character.

Chapters

What we look for are, for a Series A-focused fund, somebody that we think is gonna deliver a 3x net. Mm-hmm. And for seed and pre-seed, it's 5x or higher. Yeah. So when we're asking all these questions, we're really trying to understand, okay, Paige, what are you doing? And as we understand this, do we think that it's gonna hit these kind of targets? And you might not be shooting for them, and that's fine, but that might not be a fit for us. Mm-hmm. And just trying to understand all that. Mm-hmm. And what we've discovered during the pandemic is the use of Zoom. And sometimes that's great because you could spend more time with people virtually. But what we were talking about before is that historically we like to spend a lot of time getting to know people in person, especially if we're investing in a new geography or something that we're trying to understand. And that's frankly still a learning curve for us and for me personally, because I just get such a better feel for who people are in person.