Sramana Mitra: Let’s do one more example of what you’ve invested in.
Jean-Philippe ‘JP’ Persico, Cofounder and Managing Partner at shuckerVC, discusses his firm’s investment thesis.
Sramana Mitra: Last question—when you write a pre-seed check, what do you want to see in the company? Nick Davidov: In the founder. At pre-seed, it’s often just one or two founders and maybe an idea.
Sramana Mitra: I actually have a much more interesting question to explore with you. We talked about Perplexity as a wrapper. Give me examples of other interesting wrapper companies. I think these wrapper companies are very easy to bootstrap and very desirable for people to build revenue on top of quickly. So, give me more
Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to the wrapper question. You started off by saying Perplexity is a wrapper on top of other LLMs. Nick Davidov: Yes. Perplexity is actually very lean. If you compare how much money they raised, they haven’t spent much of it. They still have the majority in the bank. That’s their
Sramana Mitra: You’re not the only ones who invest only in repeat founders. Most of the venture capital industry does the same. It’s very hard for first-time founders to raise money because of that. We help a lot of first-time founders, and it’s a real challenge. Let’s go deeper into your AI investment thesis with
Marina and Nick Davidov are Cofounders and Managing Partners at DVC, a firm that backs only repeat founders doing AI startups. We had a terrific conversation on cutting edge issues within the AI ecosystem.
Sramana Mitra: Interesting. I’m sure you hear this in AI conversations in particular. This conversation today hasn’t been as AI-heavy as usual, but in those discussions, domain knowledge comes up a lot. People who can extract real value from enterprise AI and workflow are those with deep domain knowledge. They understand what’s happening and where