One-to-One with a Venture Builder

Hello, hello everyone. I hope you are having an awesome day. My name is Daniel. I'm a part of the FI marketing team and we're back again with a really exciting event and one that I'm particularly really, really excited about because today you'll be talking, you'll be speaking one-on-one with a venture builder. So today we have Roman and Igor with us from AIM Ventures. Roman and Igor will kind of introduce themselves much, much better than I will, than I can. So they'll be joining us very, very briefly on stage. But before we bring them on, I just wanted to know where you're all coming in from. Let me know in the chat. I can see that we have participants from Doha. Awesome. We have people coming in from Philadelphia. Awesome, awesome. Austin, Vancouver, Puerto Rico, Dallas, awesome. So we have a pretty international audience here. So that's always very, very exciting. So without further ado, Roman and Igor. Akshay, if you could bring them on stage. And while Akshay brings them on stage, just a couple of housekeeping rules, folks. If you have any questions for Roman and Igor, please click this Q&A button that you see right under the chat button. And pop in your questions right over there. And once Roman and Igor are done with their presentation, I will join them on stage and we'll run through the questions. And do remember that once we're done with the event, with the Q&A and the presentation, we do have the networking portion. So hopefully you'll be able to speak to one another, the FI team, and of course Roman and Igor. Roman and Igor, let me know if you can hear me.

Yeah, I was good.

Awesome. So what I'll do is I'll let you guys share your screen and hop off the stage, and I will see you guys in a bit.

Great, thank you so much.

So let's check that everyone can see the screen. Yeah, and let's start our journey.

Yeah, sure. I guess everything's fine and everyone here, us, everything's great. Great, I see your lights. Great, guys. Uh, first of all, thank you so much for having us today. It's super excited to be here and, uh, very thanks to Founders Institute to hosting us today.

Uh, it's proud for us to, to talk Hi, Roman, apologies for cutting you off there, but I think your voice is really, really faint. The folks can't really hear you right now. Maybe if you could just test your mic.

Yeah, one second.

I guess. Can you hear me? Everything's fine?

Uh, yeah, it hasn't changed. It's, uh, yeah, it's super low right now as well.

Maybe now it would be better.

Yeah, that was great.

I guess that's because of my voice. Okay, we can start. So yeah, first of all, thank you, thank you so much. Thank you, Founders Institute, as I said, for hosting us today. It's a great opportunity for us today to talk about venture building and provide you and share with you more specific information about how it works, our approach, structures, how we communicate and collaborate with founders, and many things and many, many, many, many stuff about that. Yeah, the first of all, uh, usually, you know, we're starting with introducing ourselves and talk about who we are. And my name is Roman, I'm a CEO of Venture Builder AIM Ventures, and Igor, our head of strategies, and also founding partner. And today we're going to talk about AIM Ventures and venture building across the globe. Yeah, and I want to start— I'd like to start, uh, with, um, uh, yeah, to introduce you to first VC investor, the Queen Isabella, the first investor in Spain. And just to just imagine the hypothetical situation, um, where Christopher Columbus pitching his great startup idea names in search of India to Queen Isabella. And you know why I'd like to start with this, with this picture and with this hypothetical situation? I'd like to explain you and describe what's the difference between classic venture capital investing and venture building. And in this, in this situation, Christopher Columbus had a classic founder journey. He had a lot of mistakes. He pivoted with— because he is searching for India, but he found America. And but eventually he became a unicorn. And for Queen Isabella as VC investor, it was the great deal and great feat because that brings to her multiple return. And I guess the pitching of Christopher Columbus looks like something like old, old-fashioned painting, but this is the way how venture capital works. They provide you with funding, with potential networks, and mostly, more often, they are not entrepreneurs. But just explain the second situation, or the similar one but with a different tactics. Like Thomas Edison, he, he planned to invent electricity, but he doesn't understand, um, business stuff and, um, uh, other stuff in, in business area. And he found JPMorgan, or vice versa, whatever. And JPMorgan for Thomas Edison became not only an investor, but mostly as a co-founder and as a platform to create and to test and to scale this model rapidly with Thomas Edison. And as a venture builder in, in, in this situation, JPMorgan provides Thomas Edison not only with funding but also with great resources, with first network, with the office, with legal and financial support, with first sales, and so on. And in this situation, also J.P. Morgan was a great founder and a great entrepreneur who created a lot of companies. And invest in a lot of companies. Yeah, and this is the way how venture building works. Usually they provide you as a founder not only with funding but resources, and also they work with you hand in hand, day by day, to build, to test, to scale, to develop your startup. And usually, you know, venture builders are mostly entrepreneurs with a great experience. They understand all stuff about fundraising, all stuff about hiring the necessary people, and so on. I get this side. I pass mic to Igor.

Yeah, first of all, hi to everyone. I believe we'll have some time in the end to just to talk and discuss all the questions you might have, and we will be happy to answer them if we know the answers. So we also are founders. We have an experience in funding companies, not only one but multiple companies. And we clearly understand that generally the founder has a massive amount of challenges which he face every day, the building the startup from scratch. He need to understand the business model, he need to understand the market size to understand on which part of the market he need to play. He need to manage out all the legal and tax aspects of the company. He need to understand how to create sales. He needs to code the product if it's about tech. He needs to pitch and fundraise the capital to continue the growth. So it's really kind of a lot of challenges which one person in the beginning as a founder needs to do. And let's be honest, not so many people in the world, I might make even an assumption that no one in the world have the capacity and capabilities to combine all this stuff in one person just to make it successful. And that's not kind of really how it in the best way works. You as a founder are an expert and really the best in something. Like you might be a tech genius, you might be an expert in marketing or sales, and you need to focus on that. So building a company without all these skills and all these capabilities, which you saw on the previous slide, is impossible, but to manage the skills, to cover the skills, usually you require a team and in the best way, great team because the people and the great A-player team is the main asset and the main key driver of the success of startups, honestly speaking. And, but to manage this topic, to attract the people, to really bring them on board, especially if we talk about great team, A-players, which will help you to make, sorry, the team even stronger and more, and more successful, you need to have an investment. You need to have a capital because without capital, in many cases, you couldn't do that. For sure, you might work with your brand, you might use your reputation, you might really energize the people with your idea, you might be a talent magnet, but without investments, at the end of the day, it will be really, really complicated. So, and how the real landscape of investments in this stage is really look like? We're talking about pre-seed or MVP stage or even an idea stage. Um, there is not so many options, honestly speaking. There is your own capital which you earned before and you believe in your idea, you're ready to invest. There is friends and family, there is incubators, and angel investors. And honestly speaking, that's it. So, but let's be honest, not all the founders have access to friends and family capital. Moreover, I personally believe that it's a bit too risky because in the worst scenario, you will lose X% of your relatives who will never talk with you before because you just burned their money. And not all the founders have access to angels. There is a lot of platform who connect you to the angels, but We always take that the angel and any other investors is really critical how he's selected because he needs to bring you not only money, but expertise. And in many cases, angels couldn't bring expertise because they didn't have this expertise in exact industry, for instance. And in the end, without, besides of expertise and money, we usually believe that you need to have common values with the angel and he needs to be also an entrepreneur and help you to build this business model to the great product and a great company. And you might say, okay guys, but there is also venture and venture capital, which, which quite a lot of them is in the market. But talking honestly, until you have a team, a first product metrics like traction with the users, or with some kind of success metrics that you believe is a success metric to your product, Or you in the best, in the best way, you have awesome revenue, which is growing month to month. And you mentioned that raising venture capital will be really, really great challenge for you, especially if we talk that you are the first-time founder, because everyone wanted to— it's an ideal stage. Each VC want to have a second founder who made a great exit, who somehow promised them that it will increase the success rate to success to bring their capital back. So, but beyond this, all this capital, let's come back to the great team. You need a great team because we really believe that great team create a great product and they can change the world and they change exact industries and solve exact issues that they really attack by their product. Beside of that, you need to You need help as a founder with a lot of legal aspects and financial questions, which you face every day on your operational job. Besides all that, you need help with validating the idea. We see a lot of founders who came with an idea and we usually help them with some connections in the decision makers who might help them if it's B2B SaaS, for instance, who might help them to validate the idea in the customer and kind of help them to bring the right answers on their topics that we want to know about. You need to help with the software development. And for many founders who are not tech experts, more like kind of sales experts or marketing experts, it's really a challenge because you need to really kind of understand how to code the product, not to burn all the money which you just earn, if your own money or which you raise, if you raise some capital from friends and family, it's really a challenge. You need to, and what in the final step you need, you need a real kind of co-founder who will really jump on board with you, who will really kind of be super motivated, super energized, and want to go ahead with you just to develop your product. And what else you need, you don't need only co-founder. You need a co-founder who understands the real journey, that it will be complicated, it will be a lot of desserts, it will be a lot of dangers on this journey until you will come from startup to successful company and so on, so on. That means that you need to have a real founder who can give you commit to the long way of view, who understands this journey. So, and we as an Venture Builder, we usually work and really like to work with the two types of founders. Founders who come with an idea and an MVP. These, these kind of entrepreneurs already invested some time finding the right idea that they really kind of passionate about, that you really want to solve. And we here provide all necessary resources to, first of all, let's look on the different angles. Does this problem really such kind of crucial which need to be solved? How really can prove that? How really we can understand the right go-to-market strategy, not to burn all the money in the product, to show the faster track records, what kind of different resources really founder needs from kind of any angles. For instance, he's a tech guy, we need to support him with a sales kind of co-founder with sales expertise, or vice versa. And the second type founders is when founders, um, um, when we see the founder with some niche expertise, like kind of We know, we see quite a lot of people who spent, I don't know, 10 years in some industry and become really kind of great expert in some industry. And he understands really deeply the pain points, the losses which in this industry exist and which might be solved. And we, in this case, analyze with him the potential pipeline of the models in this industry, just make a scoring of these models, understand what kind of success criteria we really put on the top to make this idea really kind of be successful. We test them, few of them, because we know that not all our ideas are great and not all ideas will be successful and not all ideas will kind of prove that on the test step. We scale them. And when we find the right product-market fit, in each different model, it might be different kind of criteria. It might be first X clients, kind of nice CAC/DAF, any other track record if it's B2C product and so on. We need to really carefully determine in each and every product and company what this kind of success rate and success criteria for scale is. And we provide necessary resources, again, making really customized, making real kind of understand the real needs of the founder and help them with our expertise and really kind of day-to-day job with him or her to understand what exactly we can provide and what exactly this founder need. So we talked quite a lot that we provide different type of resources, but let's make kind of in a few points what kind of real resources it is. We split it on a few parts. The first one, it's industry experts and entrepreneur with an entrepreneurship background. We as entrepreneurs understand what kind of journey each of you is going. We understand that it's not kind of always a fairytale. It's a challenging journey, but you follow your dream, you follow your ambition, you follow your commitment to yourself that if you choose the idea which you believe in, that you can change with this idea a little problem in the world. We're really happy to join the passionate founders with the journey and take all the risks, take all the pain which we know it will happen in this journey. We also provide the industry experts who can help us to answer all many questions which we receive on the different step of the product development and how to tackle these issues and the questions. We help with the market research and analytics. We have a great data team, we have great analytics team who can help to make more precise deep dive in the market structure, understand the segments of the market, in which type of segment we're really better to go and how to structure that. We really provide a skilled team, and this is our kind of really what we're proud of. We have a great engineering team, designers, engineers, product team who can really provide the high-quality tech expertise, how better to create the product on different stages. For instance, for validating hypothesis is one way, for kind of scaling, it's another way. And how to understand all this kind of variety of technologies which exist in the market and which technology in exact industry is better to use. Because we know that some industries, I can tell you, kind of, there is an industry which has a great legacy like automotive industry. There is exact stacks of technology which really used in many, many, many projects and products. And it's better to use them because there is libraries which you can use and so on and so on. We're helping with the system of recruiting the right people because we talk, I don't know, hundreds of founders every year and hundreds of founders and different type of passionate people who really want to jump in different startups. We just accurately collect this data, understanding whom we want to and need to match with exact people just to help him to provide the additional capabilities who need who might make him as a founder stronger because he will close these needs which he sees, like kind of tech guy needs a salesperson and so on. We provide a little financial support and we provide funds to validate the idea. Besides of the tech team, we can provide and we usually provide the funds to kind of invest in the first go-to-market and receiving the first track record. And what is— we believe that Sometimes even more important that we help founder to continue the journey with the raising next rounds because we quite often talk with the venture, with venture funds on the seed and pre-seed stages. We understand that they are our really friends because if we believe in this startup, we already commit and invest in the founder and the idea. They jump to our journey together with us and we're really kind of keep good warm relationship with them, just to be ready when the founder and the product is ready to go on the next level of his development and growth, from kind of our stage to seed stage, pre-seed stage, we're ready to help him with the kind of right connections with the, on the venture world. I pass mic to Roman. Roman, are you here? Yeah, it looks like it might be some issues with connection. So I will just in this case continue my pitch. If doesn't anyone hear Roman, can you hear me? I couldn't hear you. Maybe it's only me. Could anyone in the chat just text, we can hear? Okay, cool. Just maybe I'm not hearing. I'm gonna just go ahead. Roman, just stop. I believe the majority of participants in the chat just typing they can't hear you. Maybe it's some issues with a kind of platform. I don't know. Daniel, can you help us just as a host?

Hey guys, yeah, so it seems that I can hear Roman perfectly fine, but for some reason some members of our audience can't hear him.

Oh yeah, okay, does everyone hear me? I can join, I can join, continue this journey, no problem. Just Roman will help us in the roundtable discussion, you know, they're answering their questions. Yeah, okay, just I will finish, there is a few more really interesting slides which I will finish Roman, if you don't mind. Sorry, I will take your part of the journey, but I will do that. Okay. So let's continue with the presentation. So we kind of, here we want to just tell you a brief kind of flow, how we usually operate. We see a founder, we see, we combine it with idea and proper analysis. We understand that we need to give some kind of resources, capital, and the skills and the processes on top of that. After that, we test the idea, understand, does it really kind of meet the success criteria, which we just put before these tests? And if it's successful, we continue with the validation and supporting of the growing and providing more capital and fund to this journey, or we just resign the investments and just kind of put it to another startup or just take another pilot and this exact model. So it's kind of, um, kind of really validation machine which help us to use really resources accurately and kind of provide them and find the right exact business model and idea which really will works kind of perfectly. So, um, yeah, let's go further. Um, what we also see that we see that the startups which decided to start their journey using the frame of Venture Builder and backed by Venture Builder is more successful from different type of angles. Yeah, it's kind of from average internal rate of return for the funds which provide the capital. It's kind of from, let's say, time from zero to seed round in kind of months. You see that it's 3 times faster than classic startups way. It's because the Venture Builder really provides exact resources which can make this journey successful from the beginning. And as a real true founder, he takes this journey, takes all the risks and goes ahead with that. And kind of, we can, I can tell the examples of the companies which kind of was created by Venture Builder. It's Snowflakes, Hims Hers, Raw Company, One Dollar Shave Club. Everyone knows One Dollar Shave Club. Was merged by Unilever, $1 billion capital, and so on. So, uh, but at the same moment, you see that when the venture builder kind of jump on this journey, it creates kind of really proper stack size, which helps to keep the proper stack until the final stages of the startup. For instance, Sutter Hill Ventures, one of the most let's say, well-known venture builder in the world, has 22% of Snowflake on the IPO stage. You see that kind of this journey takes, I don't know, 7 to 10 years to come to this step. And Snowflake and Suckahill Ventures still has kind of big shares just to make their recovery and return of their investments. So here's one of these—

That's all right. Iger, did you hear me?

Yeah, cool.

Yeah. Can you I'm getting back to, to the French side. Yeah, thank you, thank you so much. Yeah, the core point, guys, uh, that's, um, I want to say about Venture Building and about Venture Builders, the, that as, as, um, other, uh, like other structures in Venture Building and startup building, uh, this model has, uh, some nuances. And one of the, one of these nuances is venture builder usually get higher stack equity stack than seed investors or angels. And you can see this slide, yeah, Igor already described that, that, uh, get, um, 22% at IPO. It's a huge one. Yeah. And the second point about venture builders, it's usually about deep dive and high level of engagement and execution. You can see it in my red eyes because it's, it's a hard— it's hard. It's always about execution. And, uh, we as a venture builder, we're constantly looking and seeking for, um, founders that can commit this, the, the specific level of execution and performance. Because, uh, of course By our side, it's all about resources, necessary resources in sales. Igor already said about it, sales, it team, which sweet spot for founders. We can provide all these resources, but with the founder side, it's always about execution, it's always about framing the team, and it's always about, uh, vision. And it's hard day-by-day work. It's not about, yeah, if you're talking about VC, VC just provide you capital and you frame yourself. Yeah, you got, you need to hire necessary people, you need to find the great team, the product team, the IT team and so on. But this side, if you're talking about venture builder, they— we provide all these resources, but we looking for the big level, the huge level of commitment into this model through, uh, founders. Yeah, and this is the key point, uh, about it. And yeah, if we're talking about previous slide, yeah, and about structure, how it built— no, no, in previous one. Yeah, uh, the Venture Builder usually try to accumulate all necessary stuff across them, like founders, like capital, like analytics, and so on, and try to use these, uh, these resources and stuff to fail much faster as possible, to try and try to find the product-market fit rapidly, much faster than, than the classic ways. You can see that in this in, uh, in slide with the metrics, because this way is much effective and of course more faster than the classic way of creating and developing startup. Yeah, I guess, uh, uh, that's it. We provide you overview and landscape about venture building, and if you, uh, have some questions, we were ready to take it. Yeah.

Thank you so much for your presentation, Roman and Igor. Folks, if you can look right at the bottom of your screen, you'll see an emoji button. So, you know, show Igor and Roman some love. I feel like they delivered a really, really insightful presentation. See, you guys are getting a ton of applause. Hearts, thumbs up, awesome.

Thank you so much.

So yeah, so what we'll do is we'll kind of get into questions that we have here. We have a ton of questions here, folks. If you want to ask, please do click the Q&A button, pop in your question there, and I'll bring it up on stage. Just to kind of start things off, right, maybe because there are a couple of founders, participants here who are interested in learning more about AIM, Ventures, right? Uh, what's, what's kind of like your thesis, right? Who do you invest in? Where do you invest? Uh, what's— what do you kind of look for exactly when it comes to a startup founder?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, if you're talking about our focus, I guess to clarify, our focus is M Ventures. We're looking for— our main focus is idea stage and pre-seed stage, pre-MVP usually, uh, because We, as we already said, that we day by day building with the founders hand in hand, and that's okay for us in idea stage. And even if founder doesn't have an idea, um, he or her can come to us and we can analyze and try to create some pipeline of the models that can implement in the— our focus area, our focus market, and we try to just test it together, scaling together. We have all stuff with it. Yeah, a bit more about our internal, internal kitchen. Uh, the first of all, why we do that? Um, as Igor already said, uh, we are entrepreneurs. I started my career as an advisor, after that banking, and after that VC And after VC, the split with VC, I started my own advisory firm for M&A and venture deals. Igor, the great entrepreneur with 3 successful startups, and also he's a digital director, former digital director of Allergan. It's a global pharmaceutical company based in the US. It's a public one.

Yeah.

And internally, we why we provide it and why we— it's all about passion because we believe in entrepreneurship and we always constantly continuously trying to create something together with our founders, with our portfolio companies, with our advisors, experts across our Venture Builder. Internally we have the huge team, it's nearly 80 it development and product development specialists, designers, software engineers, and so on, product managers. Yeah, we have our own advisory board with advisors across the globe from operations, from FMCG, from retail, and so on. Yeah, and our focus— we're looking for— our main focus, we're looking for AI B2B SaaS and health tech startups. Additional focus, it's retail and fintech because we have experience but not a lot in, in these areas. Yeah, and our target market is a Gulf market. We usually, we operate in, in UAE. Our Venture Builder incorporated in UAE and we are looking for UAE and Saudi Arabia mostly, but additionally we are looking for across the Gulf market, it's Oman, Qatar, Egypt, and so on.

Awesome, yeah, so just as a follow-up question, and we ask this question from all the VCs and Venture Builders who kind of join us for these events, in the last year or like 18 months, a ton of, you know, a ton of things have changed across the world when it comes to funding, right? Startup funding. Are there some trends that you guys have noticed and Do you guys like trends that you guys kind of look out for? And let's say that if somebody wants to raise, you know, in the next couple of months, what should they be mindful of with that regard?

Yeah, I guess I can start to answer these questions and maybe Igor after me. Yeah, we see the shift. If you're talking about raising capital, we see the shift investors mostly looking for profitable models, and they try to think about revenue and other financial metrics. It becomes better for investors. And by our side, we the same, we are looking for profitable models, potentially profitable models Of course, venture capital, it's mostly about valuation and scaling much faster as possible, but we're looking for this point. If we're talking about shifts in startups area, of course, it's all about AI because all companies across the globe are looking for AI and all companies try to create some strategy based on AI. If we're talking about the Gulf market, we see the potential opportunity, of course, in B2B SaaS, because a lot of enterprises in this region, they are looking for, they're looking for solutions for the internal issues, for internals, internal problems, and about human-driven models, like, you know, like platforms or marketplace for searching great talents to shift this, this, to transfer these talents into this market because, you know, they need a lot of specialists in AI, in product management, in IB, VC, and so on. Yeah, maybe you have something to add.

Yeah, I'm gonna say maybe two comments. In case of AI, we are a bit more— we really love AI, first of all. Yeah, but we, as I might say, we're a bit conservative in case of when founders only put in AI as a kind of north goal, north star. Yeah, there is a lot of things which I might really helps to do, and we see in our products when the founders come and state that, hey guys, we have We can use this data which we use by AI just to make this process 2 times, 3 times, 5 times more efficient. And that's great because you see the exact influence on the business. Let's be honest. Yeah. Which you can simply sell and explain to the market. Yeah. When it's kind of only statement like kind of we will use something kind of future, it's a different type of the model. Yeah. We know that there is like models which kind of want to change the world, but It's a different type of models. It's the first idea. The second idea, I believe that Roman mentioned the really important word that even if the venture market and the startups is still about, it's a sense of capitalization of the business, the revenue and the different type of key metrics of the product become more important. Right now, each and every startup starts fighting for the capital on the market with the different startups who also showing this metric. So we need to really kind of deeply think that it could be a balance between the valuation and the kind of key metrics which you show on the market. We really believe that here is a kind of big switch.

Awesome. Yeah. Thank you for that very detailed answer. I think, uh, A lot of what you guys are saying is similar to what we hear from VCs and Venture Builders across the world, but I think it's really interesting to get that, you know, insight from the UAE and the Gulf because we do always kind of get founders and just audience members from the area or, you know, just with the target market that exists there. So I feel like that's really important. So kind of going back to what you guys do as Venture Builders and just Venture Builders in general, We have this question from Neil, and Neil asked, does it make sense to approach a Venture Builder with just an idea but no tech team at all? I do believe I have a great idea but no technical co-founder.

That's a great fit, that's a great fit for us because, you know, as we already said, it depends on the model. Some kind of Venture Builders or Venture Studio can provide for founders founders only advice, or for example sales, marketing, and other stuff. But by, by our side, we're providing for founders it development team from, from the scratch. That's mean we, uh, our approach based on milestone achievement. That's mean we can test, and for testing we provide, for example, for 2 developers and 1 project manager and 1 designer just to validate. If we see the validation of this idea, we provide more and more resources. And it's okay for us, it's a great fit for us if founder don't have it background or something like that. It's okay. And yeah, it's a good fit.

Yeah, just kind of on that question, right? Because you guys talk to, you know, hundreds of founders every year, like probably every month, in fact, right? Do you see a, maybe like a difference in founders who have a very solid, you know, technical background and founders who don't? Are there like some key characteristics to kind of, you know, that help you kind of make a differentiation? In terms of like, you know, which type of founder might be more successful, especially in a venture building model?

Yeah, I can start from my side. You know, we are not like to put some clichés, let's be honest, because each and every person and talent is unique. So, but generally there is a kind of, I believe, some kind of dream ideas. If you are really deeply, deeply tech guy, You really believe that your product will sell itself because it's really awesome product. And in some kind of products, it's really might helps. But we believe that with a great established sales process, it will be sold out 3 times more successful than before without that. And if you are a salesperson, usually you start selling the product even if it's not so perfect because they're focusing more kind of on the sales and not only kind of product development because that let's have attraction after that, we will have more investment to that and so on. So I believe that here is kind of question of what you are more common with and what you are more comfortable with just to do because this is where you are talented. Yeah. And this is in this area exactly will be an answer of your passion area to develop and to invest your time. So I believe this is a difference. But again, I believe there is no kind of exact cliché which you need to put because we see really different founders who follow this cliché and absolutely not follow me. Because on top of that, you have, I believe, really great word which we use sometimes. It's business maturity. When you pass quite a lot of challenges and even fails, you receive this business maturity. And if you have this business maturity, some of your assumptions which you have and you dream about is already kind of broken. Yeah, you just understand that in previous examples it works differently. That's it. So you need to also put always the business maturity on top.

Yeah, I'd like to add something about my side. The first of all, yeah, Daniel, thank you for this question because it's It's complex. It's, it's a good one. Uh, we don't know what specific founder it's, uh, fit. It's complicated. And, uh, I'd like to say, you know, I like Naval Ravikant, and he said that, um, the great founder, it's mostly about, um, some synopsis of optimistic rationalist that looking for— he believed in his idea and he sell it, he like evangelist, but he in basis of this building and launching always the rational and the rationality to understand the next step to understand the vision. Yeah. And, uh, as I said at presentation, uh, we're on our side, we are looking for mostly executors, because executors and performers, uh, they, they understand how to add action. Yeah. And because the, this model bases on action, uh, I think. Yeah, in my side. So that's it, yeah.

Yeah, that's a super interesting word, executors, right? Uh, yeah, so folks, there you have it. We had a ton of people who were kind of asking questions about, you know, have been a technical person, a non-technical person. But what I do want to do now is I want to head into this question that I found super interesting. Uh, Jimmy Spikes, uh, asks "what if you have a beta and a solid team, how does your investment model work? Safe nodes, equity, all of that." I do kind of want to restructure this question a little bit for you guys. You have answered a ton of questions about the team and, you know, who you kind of look for. Maybe if you guys could speak about how does your typical venture model, venture investment model work, right? Like, whoa, let's say that I'm a founder, I'm about to join InVentures, like what is this deal going to look like and what should be my expectations?

Yeah, it's mostly about legal structure, I guess, because the questions about SAFEs, notes, and equity, it's legal structure of the deal. You know, it depends on the model and depends on the founder for sure, but the first step, of course, is it's typical stage in VC, we sign with the founder's term sheet, with the general conditions about our equity stack, our what kind of resources that we provide to founder, and so on, and other terms. After that, we usually sign in the joint venture partnerships agreement. That's because At the idea stage, we don't have any entity to create, to set up a deal, yeah, to structure this through this legal entity. And we sign this document with the details, with KPIs, and with other stuff and other specific terms about our relationships with founders. And if you're talking about the legal structure of the deal, uh, funding, Usually it's a convertible note because the SAFE, it's mostly about incubations and maybe angels, and it's popular structure. I guess you already see the CART report that SAFE is most popular instrument for structuring the deal, but by our side we usually use the convertible note with the specific terms about cap and dilution and other stuff. Yeah, I guess this is the specific term, the specific steps of our structuring.

Awesome, thank you so much for answering that question. There you go, Jimmy, a really, really detailed answer from Roman. With that, folks, what I want to do is kind of end things here and save the last 10 minutes that we have for networking. Roman and Igor, if you could maybe stick around for a bit longer. Thank you so much for taking out the time to join us and sharing your really, really great presentation. Folks, again, if you enjoyed what you heard, if you like all the stuff that you got here, show them some love. There you go. Of love again. Yeah, so thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you.

Awesome.

Yeah, so before we kind of close things out, do you guys want to, you know, share like a one last message with the folks here? Both of you, one last message.

Igor, you know, I believe that all great starts from from small. Just believe in yourself, be hard in execution, execute, execute, and execute. It will never happen from the first time, but it will sure, for sure happen if you will continue execution. So the key of success for our case, you might be Elon Musk and Warren, but unfortunately Elon Musk exists and he's not on this call. If you want to become a bit closer to your the message has, just execute.

Sure, sure, totally, 100%. Awesome.

So there you have it, folks. Uh, execute, execute, execute. I hope you all have an amazing day ahead. Thank you for joining us. Uh, before we close things out, we have a really exciting pitch event coming up. Akshay, if you could maybe share that in the chat, uh, you can, uh, you know, you can hear Military Veteran Founders pitch for $100K in funding from our panel of expert judges. So if you want to attend that live and in person— sorry, not in person, online— yeah, you can sign up for that through the link that Akshay has shared in the chat. So thank you so much for joining us, folks. Do stick around for the networking. I hope you all have a great day.

Thank you so much. Likewise.

Thank you.