1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures (Part 4)

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?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. And what is the investment thesis of Overlook Ventures?

Do Not Chase Investors Before Chasing Customers

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.

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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.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: David Evans, Sentiero Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: To your point about accessibility, you talked about the developed world that lacks people who can do certain things, and enabling them to do those things with AI or robots. That is one angle.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: David Evans, Sentiero Ventures (Part 5)

David Evans: Most of the literature and research that I’ve read says we need to start fresh and clean. That’s part of the reason why companies like Thinking Machines have raised so much money. We can’t just take what we already have and build on top of it. If that were the case, you’d just see OpenAI and Anthropic continue to build on existing models.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: David Evans, Sentiero Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are you looking for? If you were to project out what excites you, what kind of trends are you monitoring that you would like to see deal flow around?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: David Evans, Sentiero Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about your AI investment thesis.

David Evans: I’m going to build on something you said in terms of how do you get sticky, how do you know what to invest in? Generally speaking, we’re looking for companies that meet two criteria. One is unilateral where AI is core to the value proposition. If you just have a button that says, “Click here to do something AI,” we’re really not interested. AI features are table stakes.