Sramana Mitra: I think proprietary domain knowledge is going to be the driving factor, and you’re focusing on something where the underpinning of your investment thesis is proprietary domain knowledge. You cannot do this without proprietary domain knowledge.
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Ray Wu, Managing Partner at Alumni Ventures AI Fund, discusses the fund’s investment thesis.
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LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes has worked at the cusp of real estate and digital marketing for 35 years and built three successful ventures. All of them are bootstrapped, organically grown, and capital efficient businesses. Here is our discussion from 2023.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?
Jason Hayes: I’m speaking to you from Dubai. I was born in the UK, brought up in Sri Lanka, and I’ve spent time living and working in the Barbardos and California. I’ve been in Dubai for nearly eight years now. I consider myself a global citizen.
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Sramana Mitra: So, you said you were looking for three things. Number one is the founder and really the founder-problem fit. What are the other two things that you’re looking for?
>>>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?
>>>Sramana Mitra: Okay. And what is the investment thesis of Overlook Ventures?
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Sridhar Vembu built Zoho with zero outside funding to a billion-dollar ARR SaaS company. I wrote the first piece ever written on him in 2007 in my Forbes column. No one had yet heard of Zoho. But VCs were already salivating.
Sridhar validated my philosophy of how I advise startups when he came to see me in 2007.
My philosophy has remained the same at its core.
Do not go to VCs as beggars. Go as Kings.