1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Lisa Chai, General Partner at Interwoven Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to see in a company? What is the stage of development of the company that you want to see before you’re willing to write a check?

Lisa Chai: We want to see some type of product that you’ve already developed like a demo. If you have a couple of pilot customers, that’s wonderful.

We’ll probably talk to one of them or at least get some use case to understand. If you don’t have revenues, that’s okay. As long as you have some of these pilot customers, and many of these customers use cases aren’t new to us. We understand it; so, we know how to scale.

When we choose our founders that we choose to work with, we look at our backgrounds and see where we have the domain expertise. Do we have connections with customers? Can we help? The more we have this alignment, we tend to lead the round or co-lead and we write bigger checks.

When we really understood that collaboration – working with the investment team and our technical advisors as well as the founders and their technical team, that has really worked out well for us.

Sramana Mitra: What is your geographical footprint in terms of the kind of companies that you want to invest in? You are based in New York?

Lisa Chai: Yes, we’re based in New York. We do have some of our key venture partners and advisors throughout the world. Right now, I would say we invest primarily in the US – around 70%. The rest are in the UK and Europe.

Sramana Mitra: Okay, but it’s not New York only. Is it all over the US?

Lisa Chai: Yes. All over. I don’t know how you think about this, but we tend to prefer to maybe get out of California because I think there’re so many great companies outside of California.

What we have found is that we build a relationship with a founder from different parts of the US or the world, but then they eventually move to California. I look at our portfolio company analysis and wonder why are these companies all in California? Half of them moved.

I do understand it; it’s something that we support if they tell us that we have to move there because our customer’s there, or our biggest investors are there, and that we want to be a part of that ecosystem to get the support and help from other founders. I understand, depending on what you’re building.

Sramana Mitra: Since we’re a global accelerator, for our purpose, pretty much all I want to know is that you invest all over the United States. You also invest in Europe, you also invest in the UK; that would give me the framework with which to work with you.

Lisa Chai: Exactly. Right now, if you look at our pipeline, it’s mostly global. We have companies in Asia. We’re not excluding certain countries. We just look at our expertise and the flow of companies that’s coming through where we really have a connection.

So, we are very open. We do believe that our investment theme is primarily towards global expansion. Some countries are more attractive because sometimes robotics and AI are relatively new in those countries. We really want to be picking the pioneers of those companies in the space.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Lisa Chai, General Partner at Interwoven Ventures
1 2 3