What city do you live in?
San Francisco, CA
Entrepreneurs can get referred to me through these people (I listen to these people)
David King
Elad Gil
Nils Johnson
Marius Eriksen
Georges Harik
Yandavid Erlich
Aaron Boodman
Dave Morin
Sundar Pichai
Linus Upson
—
These are a few peers whose judgment I trust, but I’ve worked with hundreds of people at Google, people working on infrastructure types of projects are also a good route.
Investment criteria (Markets, Team, Stage, Location)
Strong, scrappy and heavily technical teams that want to change the rules of the game. I don’t think there is a blueprint or specific pattern, but two classes of ideas/products I am particularly interested in are ones that leverage a discontinuity in technical ‘environment’ such as Cloudera or SimpleDB or ones that connect people and information in new/different ways.
How many seed stage investments do you expect to make in the next 12 months?
5-10
Typical seed stage investment amount
$25K-$50K
Who do you co-invest with?
I am just starting to invest – so far, most of my investments have been more out of personal relationships, but some of the people I enjoy working with and am likely to co-invest with given the right opportunities are:
- Jeff Clavier
- George Zachary
- Reid Hoffman
- Naval Ravikant
- Ariel Poler
- Dana Stalder
- Mike Maples
How do you like to add value beyond investing?
* Building world-class engineering teams
* Google/Twitter/Microsoft/Facebook/Yahoo relationships
* Blocking & Tackling of early stage startups – structuring the team, culture/values, financing and deal terms, recruiting, legal setup, etc…
* Tons of ideas (not that anyone needs any more distractions!)
In your book, what does a seed stage company look like when you invest?
Core team of two to five. If it’s a consumer play, some early traction and demonstration of team’s ability to develop a compelling consumer offering. If it’s a technology play, an early version of the product that demonstrates the team’s ability to execute at a superior level.
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