1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are investing in risk and data-driven risk products. This domain requires people who are working in some domain-specific use cases around all that. Otherwise, you don’t really have insights into the problems to solve, right?

Amir Kabir: Correct. That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: I would need to be inside an insurance company or a financial services company where that risk is in action and problems are visible so that people are solving those problems. So, are we saying that your target audience of founders are slightly older founders who have experience?

Amir Kabir: Actually, no. Most of the founders are young. To clarify, I’m not only interested in companies within the insurance or financial services world. As I mentioned, the last company that is developing the model to detect deep fakes and voice has not so much to do with financial services or insurance. It’s mostly a deep technical team that has worked on this problem before and developed similar models. However, the customers of that startup could be financial services companies, like call centers that could use that product.

When it comes down to regulated markets, I think interest is not enough because there’s so many other things that are important that you have to understand within that regulated market.

Sramana Mitra: You need real domain knowledge to be able to understand what to build. I mean, correct?

Amir Kabir: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: The deep fake example is almost an outlier. But there is a lot of opportunity for doing agent stuff, analytic stuff, machine learning stuff within the risk domain — in financial services, health, and insurance.

Amir Kabir: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: But to know those, you have to be in those workflows.

Amir Kabir: Correct. It doesn’t mean you have to be older.

Sramana Mitra: You have to be experienced — older or not. I’m not talking about ancient; I’m talking about people with some years of experience working inside companies.

Amir Kabir: A hundred percent. In general, most of the outliers happen on the consumer side because it’s a much different founding experience on the consumer side than on the enterprise side.

When you think about the Instagrams, the Facebooks, and the Snapchats — I don’t think you need experience to do that. It’s more an understanding of the consumer and maybe of concepts.

But on the enterprise side, I believe if you want to build a sustainable product, you need to somehow understand how these enterprises work — what the barriers to entry are, what is working, what is not. Specifically in regulated markets, tech alone will not help you succeed. And these are the things that I’m looking for.

Sramana Mitra: When you say you are looking for primarily technical founders, or at least one of the co-founders being technical — correct?

Amir Kabir: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: What is your experience of finding technical people who are inside companies with visibility into the problems and being able to pick up what to build? Or is it necessarily a business person who identifies the problem and brings a technology person along?

Amir Kabir: No. When you think about good examples — looking at the founders I have to date — some of them have worked at newer companies. Think about someone who has worked on the product side for Chime, which just recently went public. It’s not a very old company. They might have seen something within their world that could have been done better, and they decided to start a company.

Other entrepreneurs might have spent time in other companies and seen problems. That could be earlier-stage companies too — like someone leaving a Series C company who has seen the industry a bit, has seen the products, and now wants to build on their own.

Sramana Mitra: I’m probing this a little bit because this is a conversation that is actually happening in digital water coolers right now — LinkedIn being the number one of those.

As you pointed out, the Facebooks, Snapchats, and Instagrams of the world have been built by very young founders. But when you look at building heavy-duty enterprise systems, you need to understand what to build. And for that, you need to have seen those problems in action somewhere.

Amir Kabir: A hundred percent. Specifically, also selling into these enterprises. Selling into a regulated enterprise market — like banking, insurance, healthcare —is such a different endeavor.

Sramana Mitra: So different, yes.

Amir Kabir: Whenever I meet founders that are very ambitious and really want to build something, and are passionate about it, I tell them that they need to really think about how this is going to play out. Because a lot of them don’t really understand how these bigger enterprises work.

Sramana Mitra: What is your check size?

Amir Kabir: Check size can be anywhere from a hundred thousand to up to a million dollars. I’m trying to be very early. I’m also writing angel checks if it has to be earlier than that. So, we’re very flexible there. I’m really trying to find amazing founders that are excited about the problem they’re solving, have some experience there, and have a differentiated product or go-to-market strategy that can be compelling.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures
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