1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures (Part 1)

Amir Kabir, Founding Partner at Overlook Ventures, discusses his new firm’s investment Thesis around Risk. In addition, we had a great discussion on what younger aspiring entrepreneurs should do: jump into entrepreneurship right away, or learn a domain in a job.

Sramana Mitra: Today we’re going to start the session with a conversation with Amir Kabir, founding partner at Overlook Ventures. Amir, welcome to the show.

Amir Kabir: Thank you so much for having me today. I appreciate the invite.

Sramana Mitra: So, Amir, since this is the first time we are meeting, let’s start with an overview of Overlook Ventures as well as your background so we can get to know each other a bit.

Amir Kabir: That would be great. Happy to do so. Where do we start? Maybe from the beginning—that’s probably the most interesting part.

I’m originally from Iran, but my parents immigrated to Germany when I was a kid. I grew up in Germany for most of my life. Since I can remember, I’ve loved to build things. I built my own computer when I was a teenager, and that translated into a love for building businesses.

I started a few businesses—one in e-commerce to begin with. Then I was part of a software startup early on, where we built business communication management software. That was back in the day when things were still on-premise. We didn’t know what cloud and SaaS were—it was around 2007 to 2009, when Oracle and Siebel were very prominent.

We built that company, and it was eventually acquired by Actuate here in San Mateo, which is now part of OpenText.

About 12 years ago, I immigrated to the U.S. independently from the acquisition. I came here to start a new life and figure out if the American dream was real and to explore what the tech ecosystem looked like.

I landed in D.C. and started my career on the venture side. I worked for a fund called Route 66 Ventures, which was very early in investing in the broader financial services ecosystem. I was part of the team there for quite some time and then moved to San Francisco 10 years ago. I’ve been here since—just celebrated my 10-year anniversary. I actually just posted about it on LinkedIn, which is wild to think about. Time really flies.

For the past 10 years, I was part of the team that built out Munich Re’s venture arm. I was the third person on that team. We started with $50 million, and by the time I left six years later, we had over a billion dollars under management and had invested in a wide range of companies in the financial services space.

After that, I was a GP at an early-stage fund called AV8, where I helped build out the practice—always with the goal of eventually starting my own fund.

I resigned last year and embarked on the journey to start my own fund, which is Overlook Ventures. We’re actively fundraising, but we’ve already made several investments and I’m fortunate to have the support of amazing founders and GPs from the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: How big is Overlook Ventures’ first fund going to be?

Amir Kabir: The goal is to get up to $30 million. We’ve already secured a significant amount in commitments and are actively fundraising as we speak.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures
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