Scaling Smart Redefining Venture Growth

Amazing. Well, so great to be here. Um, and thank you everyone for also staying for this final sess session session. We're going to be discussing venture growth and especially the next wave of it. What will it be be defined by?

Especially looking more at the data lens as well as on the diversity side. I'm joined here with Moore and Moore, you have such an interesting background. I loved our kind of prepping discussions around where venture growth has gone to, but I'd love to just kick off with a little bit more information in terms of, you know, what was really the catalyst behind starting I Angels.

Fantastic. Thank you everyone for having me. I'll give you a a short background. So, I'm I'm a tech girl. Grew up around tech.

Studied mathematics and computer science for my bachelor. I was a coder for many years. Um then after my MBA at Columbia University, I transitioned to strategy roles uh working very closely with uh uh leadership teams at companies like IBM and Amdocs. So that really gave me a lot of indepth uh uh and front row seat to how large organizations are working with younger companies looking for new disruptive technologies to embed looking at um at acquisition targets. Um and that's how I I first started uh I angels about 13 years ago with the mindset that we want to kind of institutionalize angel investing.

So you want to bring all the knowledge like the enterprise knowledge of how to work with young companies, how to help them grow through that growth mindset. Um and and couple that with the ability to create a very vast network of investors that can go together and have that really um influence on on the company and come in together and have a very strong material shareholder rights uh for the life of the investment. So so we started eye angels without notion. Um today we have about almost 2,000 uh investors, families, high net worth individuals from 60 different countries in the world. We've invested to date about 550 million dollars into approximately 120 companies, had 27 profitable exits, and throughout this journey, and this is always kind of like the the the jawdropper, um I am also a mother of five children and also married to a fintech entrepreneur, um Yonyi Assa, CEO and founder of E Toro, who also um IPOed on NASDAQ last year.

So, you can only imagine what my life uh looks like on a day-to-day basis. Um, but really happy for you to have me here and uh and to kind of deep dive into what's interesting next.

I love that. I feel like there's no better person than to discuss especially from a venture growth perspective the last couple of years and then having a forward look in terms of what that means for founders who are building you know currently um some of the challenges um especially with new technologies especially the AI wave um you know on how to build not only uh scalable companies but profitable companies right um so would love to just dive deeper into So when you're starting to look at some of the lessons learned over the last couple years, how does that project into you know what's to come really building as a founder today and what are some of the most important tools that you think founders today need to actually invest in as they're building ventureback businesses?

Okay, there were like 20 questions there. Let's try to kind of unpack it. Um maybe start from the top. I think what many people understand what and has happened with capital markets and just being here in the conference uh this this week everybody was talking about capital markets and what it looks like but it does have a lot of impact on private markets as well because if um you know if capital markets everything is going down or companies are now penalized for not being profitable companies and you can't IPO at 100x revenue you actually need to show profitability that completely changes the mindset of how companies are being evaluated um and what's the value of of companies and that trickles down all the way down the value chain to very early stage companies. So as adventure I I try to think of of of companies and try to see what is the end goal right and if they cannot IPO after three years at 100x revenue what can they do and then you have to kind of backtrack that to where we are today and what what can create outsiz performance for my investors and that's what drives me you know at angels I want to make sure that I'm going in at solid terms great teams but even now the whole like origination process is somewhat shifted because I want to see now from a relatively early stage I want to see much more validation to the product.

I want to be able to talk to customers or potential customers or design partners um to understand what is their willingness to pay. How fast can this scale? How sustainable is this business model? And it's no longer just investing in two guys in a deck. And I think it's actually like the same thing to do.

What we saw in 2021 was really kind of a roller coaster. What was it? It was a founders's uh like neverland and uh and now everything is going back still to kind of a little bit more conservative approach. Even for for my my founders, I always recommend, you know, try to be a little bit more uh conservative. Always have wiggle room.

What happens if the climate st stays um unattractive for for investment and you need to pedal through 24 months and not just 18 months or less? Um so you always really have to keep it in mind. And then I'm going to kind of weave that um I guess um diversity element into it. It's actually interesting that women do it very well, sometimes better than than men. That kind of um I'm going to do what I said to do and I'm going to be a little bit more conservative and a little bit true to my team.

Um and and that sometimes actually serves them better than and then having um very very ambitious dream or aggressive dream, but then you kind of find yourself in that pitfall that you can't raise. Um so it's not have been an an amazing uh few years for for founders but we do see a lot of recovery and it's definitely uh relevant to sectors definitely sector specific things that are much more um out in the outlook require FDA require joint ventures require facilities that's going to be harder things that are much more scalable uh and are leveraging AI and data now as we're kind of I don't I want to say embarking we kind of already embarked and we're already kind of 2,000 miles an hour on that ship the data era and the AI era. So I think that showcases a much stronger ability to to grow and and and gain cap and gain uh kind of market share in a much more constructive way. uh for us coming from home that's like the the bread and butter of what we bring is is usually um AI, fintech, enterprise software, cyber security, but I think AI is going to really trickle in all aspects of not only innovation but also to make sure that you're competitive and that your company's able to to grow faster than competition or at least and like in uh in alignment with what's going on because it's not only about product development. I don't know a single R&D team today that doesn't leverage AI to be able to code faster or test your product faster.

But it goes all the way through um organizational efficiency. It could be communication within the organization. Could be finance. Um it could save you money to be able to extend runway another three months or another six months in a small in a young company's um life. It's its lifetime.

Um but also customer uh interface or customer experience. just think that you know there's a lot of talk by the way about you know um uh Zed Jenners or about kind of like a younger audience and they really expect a certain um certain customer experience certain even um usability graphics and so um with that kind of click of a button tick tock generation whatever it is you really have to try to think how you embed these AI capabilities into launching new products launching a fantastic experience running social. So it could really help the business and it doesn't it almost doesn't matter what your actual business does and and with that in mind just think about all the implication about c cyber security about um uh infrastructure about everything that's required in order to kind of run that engine.

Yeah. Yeah. No, certainly. I mean, being a founder myself, I definitely have seen how impactful it's been building now and enabling our teams, right, to build just leaner and smarter and more efficient businesses with a lot less cost base uh that is previously took. I'm I'm very interested to understand as well as like you know you talk about the you know how founders or or or companies can leverage AI right in order to to get to better unit economics but what does that look like from the venture side perspective in terms of leveraging some of these especially historical data points in order to think about what type of companies should I invest in and what's the next growth uh trajectory there.

So I I'll kind of try to split it because I think kind of like with the last question we cover some of the AI element but data is really key because for for your engine to work well and to have a very uh small margin of error you're really reliant and dependent on huge amount of data and how accurate is that is that data really is um so I think uh I think there's kind of a you know a rush towards the data gold I would call it so that you can really amplify uh your solution and show your customers whether it's enterprise or consumer um how how you're kind of better than the the the benchmark. Um, and also I I think that there was there's a lot of um I want to say legacy systems where there's a lot of data and a lot of information, but they're not necessarily applicable and you just can't throw them back into the machine because either they're unstructured or they're scattered across multiple databases because there's been consolidation in specific markets and you need to kind of make sense of that. So I saw for example like a lot of solutions that are trying to take all that and kind of put it in a single form so that you can apply you know AI methodologies on top of those data sets. Um and I think I think from many companies that I've spoken to um where I ask them okay now like I have AI maybe I can just you know develop it by myself and they say like the data sets that we have and we've been working on this for two three four years are second to none. And if anyone even starts to figure this out now, it's going to take them two years.

Doesn't matter how strong is AI is. So I think that's really important to to remember and and just like you know something that always interests me and I've started to kind of research it a little bit more. I think it will have application in some exciting new sectors like for example uh in health or longevity because there's a lot of data that we can collect and and how can we apply that data to you know to towards uh medicine in a new way that was not possible two three years ago um because uh you can run things faster you can find new molecules you can stimulate and see how different people respond to different types of medicine um so all these calculations and kind of compute power that's enabled today that was got uh enabled in the past um are going to you know I think create some some great innovation in the coming uh few years. Uh so I'm excited about that.

Yeah, I think you're spot on. Um I recently met a founder who's actually just moved here to the region and is building ultimately um uh solutions towards cle cell anemia but it's because of that data availability now that that's possible. Right. Um just kind of moving on right again like you've been in the venture space uh for um quite some time so you have a really good lens of of where we stand in terms of looking at it more from a diversity perspective of representation. How have you seen that landscape change in terms of again seeing more women you know within the space as well and um where do you think we've gotten to in terms of uh ensuring that there's more diversity within that?

So I I it's it's a question I like to answer because I think on one hand you know being here and seeing like so many women in the audience is really you know inspiring. I think it's a very important dialogue that we have and a kind of a handshake and commitment that we we uphold to ourselves and to people that we come uh in touch with to kind of you know take it forward and make sure that we that we we we really support each other. um some some interesting like stats. I don't even know if people are aware but women are actually as founders globally they receive about two or three% of funding. This is crazy.

It's crazy. I angels were a women uh founded women led uh partnership. Myself and my my partner Shelley and all of our management team are women and people asked me if it's it was intentional and I said uh I always hire the best person for the job but I think I get a lot of inbound because we're women. So we have some I call it like the special forces of VC. We have like amazing amazing people working for us.

We also have men working for us. Don't worry. But uh but it's a really exciting journey to on one hand be very technical and very you know very uh relevant in terms of that discussion as as a venture capitalist but also be that kind of really cool organization where diversity is is is really u profound and kind of embraced for our portfolio at I Angels. By the way, about 20% of our uh portfolio companies have uh a woman on the founding team or leadership, but it's actually uh 43% of the best performing portfolio companies have a woman on the founding team or leadership. So, it actually says a lot about and specifically I think in this um in you know, as we're kind of embarking on 2026, um it's interesting because it's been very turbulent years and requires a lot of discipline and resilience.

Um, and uh, and when I see a founder, it could be um, it could be a a a woman or or a man saying, "Okay, now I have $90,000 in revenue. Next year I'm going to do three million and I'm raising two million. I can like close my eyes. It's probably like not going to happen." But, uh, but I think that, you know, women a lot of times they're more about like team building.

um they they're less ego-driven and and and I think we should really push them to do more because they're fantastic. Um and it's it's an era in light of everything that we share today that you don't have to be as technical as you needed to be perhaps you know when I started so many years ago uh to really be able to write code and everything you can write code today with natural language you can apply you know a lot of these disciplines to new markets to new sectors of uh of consumers um so I'm I'm incredibly supportive and I want to kind of uh uh embrace any woman that starts uh you know an entrepreneurial journey say that she she can definitely do it and uh there's room for everything.

Yeah, I mean I would uh I'm probably biased, but I would agree. I think women make the best operators. Um just to kind of close out um when you're looking at the next 5 to 10 years, what's the number one underrated sector that you think everybody should be looking at?

Okay, so a fun exercise I like to do because I have five children ages 5 to 15. I kind of try to think about the next 10 years and what life would look like and what is going to be like completely obvious to us right what is going to be like every day not necessarily something that you know uh like before the iPhone was invented but something we think is completely um normal to day-to-day life and it's also something I'm going to bring home kind of things you may have heard from the conference as well I think the way that uh finance is going to change the world um and and potentially again with AI support how people are talking from uh the fact that uh capital markets are going to be digitized, how the the world is becoming flatter, you can code with natural language, you can bring a lot of financial capabilities uh really easily and uh and and and for us it's amazing as we have 60 from investors from 60 different countries. Uh we want to collaborate more with the region. We want to make it as easy as possible to invest in technology to do crossover investments to create alignment and business strategy across the region. Um and and and I think the you know the AI revolution is really going to propel that.

Uh and that's definitely something to look out for. Uh would love for you guys to reach out if you want to learn more

about angels. Thank you.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much everyone. We would could be here I'm sure for a much longer time. Um I really enjoyed uh discussing these things with you. Uh please do make sure to uh reach out if you want to learn more about venture growth.

So thanks so much more.

Thank you. Thank you much for having us.