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Amanda “Robby” Robson (Founder of Modern Technical Fund) joins GTMnow to break down how she evaluates companies at the very earliest stages and why discipline matters more than ever in today’s market.
Amanda has spent over a decade in venture before launching Modern Technical Fund, investing across verticals ranging from security and compliance to developer tools at firms like Norwest and Cowboy Ventures. Her investment thesis is centered on backing elite technical founders early and helping them translate deep engineering talent into real products, real customers, and real momentum.
In this conversation, we unpack how Amanda thinks about founder quality, market timing, and risk when there’s limited data and plenty of noise, which is more critical than ever in an AI-heavy investing environment.
Discussed in this episode
- What “technical founder” means and why engineering depth alone isn’t enough
- Why the best technical founders pair product judgment with strong commercial instincts
- How early-stage teams typically split engineering and go-to-market responsibilities
- Why TAM momentum matters more than static market size
- What valuation discipline looks like for first-time founders without traction
- How fund math shapes which deals make sense and which don’t
- Why some talented founders are still hard to back at today’s prices
- How she evaluates a company’s defensibility pre-product and pre-revenue
- What separates real AI companies from AI theater
- Why infrastructure and data tools often benefit the most from AI tailwinds
Episode highlights
14:10 – What actually defines a “technical founder” beyond coding ability
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=850
16:11 – Why product judgment and customer instinct matter early
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=971
17:05 – How early teams split engineering and go-to-market roles
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=1025
18:13 – When investor advice helps and when it gets in the way
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=1093
19:12 – Why calibrating the hiring bar matters more than providing playbooks
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=1152
19:52 – How network-driven support helps founders see what “great” looks like
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=1192
28:43 – Why valuation discipline sets the bar in today’s market
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=1723
29:08 – When first-time founders become too risky at certain prices
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=1748
31:33 – How early-stage defensibility often comes down to the team
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=1893
42:15 – Why TAM momentum matters more than static market size
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=2535
42:35 – How small markets quietly turn into billion-dollar categories
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=2555
51:23 – What separates real AI companies from AI theater
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=3083
52:33 – Why infrastructure and data tools benefit most from AI tailwinds
Watch: https://youtu.be/Z37Id1h_zFE?t=3153
Key takeaways
1. Technical founders win when engineering depth is paired with commercial product judgment.
Robby is looking for founders who can translate customer pain directly into product specs and see the product end-to-end before it fully exists. At the pre-seed stage, where there’s little traction or product to evaluate, the real signal is how a founder thinks about users, workflows, and problems. The strongest technical founders are customer-oriented builders who can connect technical decisions to real buyer value from day one.
2. Valuation is a fund construction decision, not just a price discussion.
She consistently frames pricing through fund math rather than momentum. A compelling founder at a high valuation with little traction can still be a poor investment if ownership and return potential don’t realistically return the fund. Especially at early stage, entry price shapes the entire risk-reward profile, which means passing on strong teams when the upside is structurally compressed.
3. Market direction matters more than static TAM.
Instead of anchoring on today’s market size, she looks for tailwinds that expand the number of buyers over time. Some categories look niche right before they inflect because regulation, technology shifts, or workflow changes make the problem inevitable for more companies. The key question becomes less “how big is TAM today?” and more “is this market structurally growing in urgency and adoption?”
4. Early-stage diligence is behavioral, and there are creative ways VCs do this.
Rather than relying heavily on warm customer references, she often has founders pitch members of her own network and observes how they engage, educate, and handle objections in real time. This reveals GTM instinct, clarity of thinking, and founder adaptability far better than a polished deck or curated reference calls.
5. AI investing requires separating real product depth from AI theater.
True AI-native companies either deliver AI as the primary product or enable AI applications through infrastructure, data, or core workflows. In a market saturated with AI positioning, durability increasingly comes from whether the product fundamentally depends on AI to create differentiated value.
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They’ve scaled with us across funds and into the future.
If your fund is growing in size or complexity, check them out at www.angellist.com/gtmfund.
Follow Amanda “Robby” Robson
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-robson-7227685b
- X: https://x.com/robby_mtf
- Modern Technical Fund’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/modern-technical-fund
- Modern Technical Fund website: https://moderntechnicalfund.com
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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/HackItMax
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VC 4 Episode Transcript
00:00
Max Altschuler: Modern technical fund. Its technical founders, only.
00:02
Amanda Robby Robson: Technical founders are just.
00:03
Max Altschuler: Like super hardcore about that.
00:05
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s really been the focus of basically my entire investing career.
00:09
Max Altschuler: Amanda. Robbie Robson from Modern Technical Fund. What is a technical founder?
00:14
Amanda Robby Robson: It’s an elite engineer, engineers that can be highly commercial and are really focused on solving customer problems. They can see what a product should look like from end to end.
00:22
Max Altschuler: How do you look at commercialization? How do you look at Tam?
00:25
Amanda Robby Robson: It’s less like the overall size of Tam now, like in the case of the compliance software market, I think Gartner said it was like 200 million or something, which is hilarious because now there’s like multiple billion dollar companies there. But the tailwind was there to increase the number of potential customers. That’s the thing that I look for the most are.
00:40
Max Altschuler: Anthem of Tam.
00:41
Amanda Robby Robson: Growth.
00:42
Max Altschuler: Not exactly from a company investment standpoint. How do you keep the bar high and deploy on schedule?
00:50
Amanda Robby Robson: I think really comes down to valuation and fun math. I won’t do anything that’s really over 20 million ish posts for first time founders that don’t have traction. Where there is an end product like that, just like won’t fly for me.
01:01
Max Altschuler: What makes an actual AI company versus just AI theater?
01:04
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. So.
01:07
Unknown: Oh!
01:15
Unknown: Let’s go.
01:17
Max Altschuler: All right, we’re back with another amazing, so fun episode of the GTM now VC series that we’re doing. Today’s guest is Amanda Robson from Modern Technical Fund here with Paul Irving today, my partner at GTM fund, Paul. Great guest. You’ve spoken to Amanda Robson before, well known as Robbie. What trend are we seeing here? In venture capital.
01:40
Paul Irving: And the ecosystem at large is, is, I think, in a pretty interesting place and that we’re seeing, absolutely both ends of the spectrum. I mean, just in last episode, we recorded, not long ago at all. We were talking about a16z, these $15 billion fundraise. And then Sapphire Ventures. And these are Clarke did a great thread on this. They’re one of the more active LP’s in the venture ecosystem over the last 20 years. Released some data just this week that, for the first time in their over 20 year cohort, there is fewer venture capital funds in the market as of 2025 than there was the year before. So there is more venture capital funds going out of business or no longer actively investing. Than there are coming to market and looking at some PitchBook data to verify that there’s over 10,000 funds on paper at least, investing in the US. And if you dig a little bit deeper, only half of those are actively investing. And it just goes to show, I think the haves and have nots of some of the ecosystem at large, but also how difficult it is, you know, they shared some data on graduation rates from fund one to fund two. And keep in mind, too, that these graduation dates, the really good data points. But these are from 1990 to 2021. I’m fascinated to see what these look like five years later. When you go through, you know, the market correction of 2022, 2023, we’ve seen some preliminary numbers at just how low the graduation rates have been for venture funds or new venture funds started over the last few years. So think since the post the 2022 correction to today in early 2026. But these are the historical rates which still, shows how challenging it can be. So fund one to fund two, just a 50% graduation rate. Fund one to fund four, which is the you know, you probably crossed the chasm to being a, you know, real fund who’s been operating in the marketplace for a decade or so, only 17%. And then the fund one to fund eight, where you have become a name brand in the industry, only 4%. So it’s it’s not not an easy road. And, I think we’re seeing both ends of the venture ecosystem in a really acute manner today.
03:45
Max Altschuler: Yeah. I mean, we were very fortunate to oversubscribed our previous fund. You know, certainly seeing that when we talk to peers in the emerging manager space that, most of them were not able to to do that, a lot of them had to kind of tweak their fund size downward to get to kind of a minimum viable fund. Over the past few years. And I think you’re you’re definitely seeing the haves and have nots when you get Andreessen with 15 billion, Lightspeed with 9 billion and some of these other funds that are I saw land from basis said somebody tweeted her fund was raised in a day. And you know, some of that just goes to show if you’re you’re in a certain set of the right companies and you get DPI quickly and, you build a reputation for being the person in a space that is, you know, certainly the space to be in right now. And, you know, props to LAN for being kind of early and very deep in the, in the AI space that it gets a lot easier for you. So I think there’s obviously this, this kind of haves and have nots. It’s certainly happening in the fund and firm building space right now as we go into a little bit more of like what’s happening in, in the day to day. Another thing that we’re seeing right now is the whole sass is dead conversation, and you’re seeing that in the public markets with, you know, hubspot’s down to trading. I think I got forex, multiple, don’t know what it is today, but, you know, Datadog, they have Zscaler, kind of the, the sass companies of the past few years that are kind of suppressed valuations. And it’s kind of a reminder back to, you know, this time in 2016, although that rebounded and you know, now we have I guess another boulder in the way which is AI up and comers that are coming up and essentially disrupting maybe not even the companies, but the notion that these companies are going to be worth what they’re worth in a couple of years if, you know, AI continues to trend in the direction it is, one of the interesting things that we saw recently online that I, I tweeted about was Airtable completely reinvented the company in the product from scratch. I thought that was so gutsy. You’re seeing a lot of companies, I think, in the incumbent Sass arena say, okay, we’ll inject AI into our product or we’ll do a copilot or something like that. And Airtable was one of the first ones that I’ve seen. It’s like, nope, that’s not enough. We’re going to have to rebuild this platform from scratch, leveraging AI. And you even saw with Microsoft how Satya kind of was like, yeah, Copilot is not enough. I’m going to go be PM of of this product. Until it is what it should be. I think there’s a lot of sass companies that been around since I was call 2015, 2017 to even 2021 that are going to have to take a look in the mirror and say, hey, what would we build from scratch if we were rebuilding this product today? And maybe that’s what we need to build. Maybe we need to cannibalize what we already built. What are you seeing? What are your thoughts on on that.
06:39
Paul Irving: You can look at it two different ways. I mean there’s the one part of it is and you mentioned it and Airtable has done a fantastic job. There’s going to be other companies and founders and executive teams that answer the bell, basically, which is a realization that just bolting on a few cool AI workflows on your traditional C based process, you know, enterprise software is likely not enough for a lot of these companies. And it’s not just the private markets that, you know, sometimes can be ahead of the curve or should be ahead of the curve. In a lot of these things, the public markets are reacting to it quickly as well. I mean, some data to back that up. The martech public software index and data is fantastic. I we had Alex Clayton on, you know, earlier in the series, but they did this really, great split. So they took the public market software index and they put it into two buckets. So companies with AI tailwinds and companies without AI tailwinds since since January of 2020, for two years, the companies with AI tailwinds, up 56% overall, those without down 22%. And that’s accelerating. They’ve never seen a wider spread from, you know, the top of multiple companies which have AI tailwinds. Your sort of Palantir is your snowflake. So there’s a number of others. And the ones that are facing serious questions about their business model, you know, they’re placed within the priority stack of vendors of their pretty, you know, particular corner of software and technology, given that there’s, you know, up and coming AI native companies that are trying to, you know, take that budget, take that share of, of, you know, mindshare within their particular corner of software. The optimistic way to look at it is if I was a founder today, if I was an investor today, if I was an operator joining a startup, there’s some hope in that signal in the sense that that’s the public markets validating that there is meaningful disruption happening in the private markets that’s soon going to end up in the public markets, not as death to B2B software, but maybe death to the old archetype of B2B software. And the current incumbents. Either answer the bell and you’re an air table, and you reorganize your product, your mission, your vision, and re accelerate as a result. Or you’re going to get caught by one of these new up and coming AI native companies that’s got a better product, better workflows, building and moving faster, different business model and structure. And, you know, those are the ones that if I’m an operator, say, you know, choosing where I’m going to work next or I’m an investor choosing the next great company, I think that’s as difficult it is for our public market investors or our friends that are public market investors. I think it’s a really exciting opportunity for the, you know, AI native startup ecosystem.
09:11
Max Altschuler: Yeah, absolutely. So Debbie Downer on the venture stuff, Debbie Downer on, stuff, not even going to get into who’s going to get jobs where once everything is AI ified. So, but it is a good segue into, you know, the Rabi episode of the podcast, because I think one of the things she talks about, at length and is, you know, really disciplined on is avoiding what she calls AI theater. So when she’s diligence in a company, how do you make sure that this is actually kind of AI at the core of the product, real infrastructure versus this hand-wavy kind of AI theater? Oh, this is, AI, but it’s really more of like if then statements are not as much of actual, use case or, deep use cases of an LM or kind of AI functionality and we’ve seen this before as investors too. I mean, I think this is kind of everywhere. I think it’s in vogue to slap AI on a product and say, hey, this is AI, but it’s another thing to really get in the weeds. She’s got a great network of technical founders and, technologists in different roles across businesses that she’s able to diligence these companies with. So she’s developed a great AI for it. Obviously, she’s been in a VC game for a while, but thought it was very thoughtful take on how she sizes up, ideals and I don’t know any any key takeaways for you? From the episode?
10:37
Paul Irving: Yeah. It was I just great first principles, way to approach it. Like she approached it from. Okay, what is my definition for an AI native company? Because people have different definitions. It seems like it would be obvious and it’s actually non-obvious. When you talk to different investors or different founders, they’ll give you a different answer. And I think what I liked about her definition was it’s not just young companies started within the last couple of years, and everyone there is AI native. That’s not necessarily true. It’s not people that are building their own models internally, even though those are quite clearly AI native companies. But it also can be a company. I think she use Superbus as an example, which is a great one. The product itself is not necessarily AI native, but it is obviously powering so many AI native workflows from a data perspective that you would treat it as an AI company in the sense that it’s riding the exact same tailwinds. So their product itself isn’t necessarily, you know, I ified with all these different workflows and doesn’t have to be per se as long as it’s sitting in the right part of the infrastructure stack for companies that are using it and becomes, you know, a vital part of the AI story for a lot of other, you know, of their customers and a lot of the rest of the ecosystem. What was cool about the way she diligence is it too, is she doesn’t do, you know, customer references traditionally because she’s got this network of buyers. She can go in and make an introduction to somebody who would be a customer, watch the founder, pitch live, get the response of somebody who is a almost fresh perspective, fresh mind, and not the customer who gives you a rosy reference because they don’t want to lose access to the tool, even though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, we see that all the time. I mean, it’s the power of having these 300 operators across AI and software and the technology landscape on GTM front side of things where, you know, it’s great to do the customer reference side of things, but what can be even deeper and more meaningful sometimes is, hey, let’s introduce you to somebody who’s sold in this category. Before, let’s introduce you to somebody who would be a buyer, would be a net new customer. You know, usually the founder loves it because you’re giving them either a net new lead potentially, or somebody who can give them advice on their space. But from our side of things, when we’re making investment decisions, it gives you somebody with, you know, expertise within a market and a fresh perspective on, hey, is this novel, is this interesting? Would you create budget for it? You know, how does the founder position and pitch it?
12:55
Max Altschuler: Good takeaways. All right. Let’s get into the episode with Amanda Robbie Robson from Modern Tactical Fund.
13:02
Max Altschuler: Thanks for being.
13:03
Amanda Robby Robson: Here. Of course. Happy to be here.
13:04
Max Altschuler: Yeah. So new font. Exciting.
13:07
Amanda Robby Robson: New fun. Though. It feels like it’s new ish because technically it, like, closed earlier this year. But, you know, writing the 2025 launch after launch.
13:16
Max Altschuler: Well, a deal so far.
13:18
Amanda Robby Robson: Actually. Nine nine.
13:20
Max Altschuler: Yeah. Sneaky sneaky. Last deal since sneaky last year.
13:23
Amanda Robby Robson: The Cayman.
13:25
Max Altschuler: Yeah. Oh, yeah. So how many do you think you’ll actually do from this fund?
13:28
Amanda Robby Robson: So the fund will be about 25. So I am actually I just passed the one year mark since first close. So I’m pretty much on pace. And then from a dollars deployed on pays to for three years.
13:39
Max Altschuler: Awesome. Tell us about the fund.
13:40
Amanda Robby Robson: So, I started the fund technically, like a year and a half ago. It started getting conceptualized, but really started fundraising for it and everything and kind of like mid to late 2024. My background, I’ve been in venture for a long time, for ten years. It’s funny because it’s basically been my only job, so I have no other skills. And then VC and like, what is that? It’s like all these different random skills together. But I started the fund because I saw this gap for technical founders and building something that was hyper tailored to helping them move faster at the earliest stages. And a lot of that through network. So I built on a network of technical buyers and technical sellers who work really closely with my founders on getting their first products to market, and it’s been super effective so far. So of the nine companies, for every one of them, we’ve be helped with a really key hire either sourcing it, closing it, or key design partners for some multiple or helped get some really good advice. Whether it comes to like pricing, go to market and actually do sales. Because we brought in, I brought in a bunch of folks onto my team as advisors who were the first like sales or marketing hires at awesome, like technical companies like Upland or Java. So yeah, that’s what the fund.
14:45
Max Altschuler: The love the network model. Yeah. It’s technical founders. And technical buyers. Was the marketplace or the network?
14:53
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah, the network. And it’s, all cyber data or dev tool oriented founders. And I’m writing anywhere from five educate $1 million checks and all super early so pre-seed or seed and then focus areas are the U.S. and Israel. But all these really companies are focused on the U.S. market from local to market standpoint.
15:09
Max Altschuler: And it’s technical founders only.
15:11
Amanda Robby Robson: Technical founders.
15:11
Max Altschuler: Are just like super hardcore about that.
15:13
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah, yeah. And that’s really been the focus of, basically my entire investing career. So when I was at Norwest, which is the first VC fund I was at, it’s a highly technical team like the partners I worked with were all like access and like networking. So like, you couldn’t get by if you didn’t understand technical founders. And I kind of found my footing being kind of like the business counterpart to the technical founders at the earliest stages. And so it just kind of happened that way. And I kind of built out my first three and a half years at Norwest working with technical founders. Was there Security and Dev Tool Ltd, Cowboy Ventures for five years and then created this fund.
15:48
Max Altschuler: I definitely want to go to your background at these other firms. But, my first question, I guess, is what is a technical founder like? How do you even size up some of these technical chops? Like, it’s one thing to see on their LinkedIn that they had a technical role. It’s another thing to be able to I mean, you’re pre-seed seed stage, so they may not even have any product yet that they built from scratch. So how do you size that up?
16:11
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. So it really it’s like two things that I would take that most people would agree and have the same sense of the first one. It’s an elite engineer, like an elite builder and also an engineer that has really good product sense, so they can see what a product should look like from end to end. And then the other piece that I really focus on are engineers that can be highly commercial and are really focused on solving customer problems. Probably the best example of a company that I worked with or a founder that I’ve worked with that’s like that is the CEO, Jordan Adam. He’s like insanely smart when it comes to product and engineering. But actually, I think like his superpowers, his ability to look at what a customer needs and translate that into product specs. So that’s kind of what I look for as someone who’s a builder, but they’re incredibly like customer user oriented.
16:55
Max Altschuler: And are the teams almost always only tech to go, or do you often find some one is technical, one is go to market almost always.
17:05
Amanda Robby Robson: At this stage I’m investing in, the split up, who’s leading engineering and kind of the main build and who’s doing go to market. But they’re they’re both technical. So usually the CEO and it’s not always like this, but like typically the CEO be the one leading go to market. So it means that they have to learn go to market. And I know this is a huge thing that you guys work on too with your founders, but that’s a huge part of the role that I can kind of play and help them with is figuring out what amazing go to market is like, and they have those instincts and they can really build toward solving customer problems. But a lot of the baseline things around how do you actually manage POCs or sales cycles or like how do you think about going after leads or messaging? I work really closely with my founders on that. But yeah, almost always like multiple engineers, like technical founders. And then one of them will take on this go to market role.
17:52
Max Altschuler: How do you then, I guess work with them on. So for example, you’ve got technical founders who you trust implicitly because you fund them. You did your diligence, they start to build, they go to market. Do you kind of say, hey, you go do what your instincts tell you to do. And I will support with my advice, my network, all that. Or do you say, hey, I’ve got nine portfolio companies and I’ve been an investor and I’ve seen kind of this playbook before and like, here’s what the best companies are doing and try and push that, you know, in the companies in the direction, hey, PG is really important for a product like this because of x, y and z acto. It’s like you should do PG even if they weren’t considering that before.
18:33
Amanda Robby Robson: Oh yeah, that’s a really good question. I, I will never I will first, I think that you kind of earned the right to like through trust and through giving good advice and through your own expertise to give that kind of directive advice for founders. Usually what ends up happening is they will have a sense of what they need, and they’ll have a sense of what they’re good at, what they’re not good at. And so I’ll come in and say, okay, like, for instance, I was actually just helping, one of my companies with a head of sales search, and they were and it’s really like probing and asking a lot of questions. So they were like, okay, here’s some of the candidates we’re looking at. I’m looking at them. I’m like, so none of them have been in exceptional companies. And if you look at your engineering team, they’re all from exceptional companies. They’re all like top one 5% engineers. If you look at these people’s profiles, they don’t really scream like top 1 to 5% sales leaders. And so then I introduce them to a few, like top, top sales leaders who were part of my like advisor network. And then that helps reorient them. And then I’ll also help with like the process. So in that case then helped interview a bunch of folks, gave my direct feedback, helped them kind of understand what greatness look like. And then there. But it’s not me kind of telling them, like, hey, you need to figure this out. Like they know what they know and what they don’t know, and it’s really helping guide them based on the things that I might know better by working with really world class tactical sales teams before. But yeah, it’s usually it’s a directive of like, hey, you need to go like do p.l.c.. It’s usually like they know what they need. They know that they need to like, find someone who’s amazing, but they don’t know how. So I really help with the how.
20:02
Max Altschuler: Yeah. Advice is a is a funny thing like that. I mean we definitely want to set our founders up to, you know, meet these crews and codes that we have in our network. And we also often vet exactly like who to connect to who that’s going to be relevant like that and what kind of advice they’re going to provide. What we like to do is more like anecdotes, you know, stories like, oh, in the past, like this was important. Or here’s what we’re seeing from the marketplace, things like that, without saying, like, you need to do this, this is the way you have to go and you should go in like we kind of are more like, hey, this is what’s happening in the marketplace, or this is, you know, what we’re seeing as a best practice, but we trust you. We invested in you. You make the decision, you know your space better. You know your product better.
20:45
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah.
20:46
Max Altschuler: I want to get into your background. So started out Norwest started the career nearest.
20:52
Amanda Robby Robson: I had done, two years in banking before that, but other than that, yeah, it’s all been mentioned. And actually, how I got into, banking on the West Coast was, like, really funny. And actually the skill that helped me a lot, I was I’m from Canada, so grabbing Canada was going Canada didn’t even really think about coming to the States. And I did a summer in banking in Toronto and realized that if you did, banking in Canada, you’d be working with metals and mining or oil and gas companies like, that’s all we had at the time is more tech now, but like this, like 12 years ago. So I just started cold calling tech like banks in on the West Coast. And like, shockingly, people were just very open to it and were like, who’s this random Canadian girl, who wants to work here? So that’s how I got my job in banking on the West Coast. So I did that for two years, and then I loved working with founders, and that’s how I ended up in.
21:38
Max Altschuler: One year in San Francisco. It’s really a small amount of time before you go from banking to VC, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. Easy layup and then Norwest, then cowboy worked with, alien. So what do you what are you bringing from that experience to now your own fund.
21:55
Amanda Robby Robson: Oh, it’s so much, so much from both Norwest and Cowboy, but I was at cowboy for five years, and I learned so much there that I think really helped me. Not just with, like, fine tune my investing because I was all focused on season. Pre-seed. There versus at Norwest, we’re doing kind of everything early stage, which range from seed to series A, series B, but I cowboy, we were just doing seed and I also had to I was a first sector specialist investor. So I came in to cover, dev tools and cyber and so learned a lot about.
22:25
Max Altschuler: How many sector specialists were there.
22:26
Amanda Robby Robson: So I was the first when I joined, there were two GP’s are both generalist. And then I came in as a first sector specialist. And then we brought in another sector specialist, Jill Williams, who covered fintech after. So that kind of became the model for like up and coming investors, for them to be a sector specialist. So but I learned so much about brand building and that’s why I started the Open Source Startup podcast, started building networks of CISO. CTO is my technical go to market network. And that whole brand building kind of exercise really helped a lot when it came to, you know, building not just my brand, but an independent, fun brand. And then also, everything around, like the fund model. So if you’re at a big find, like I was at Norwest, but kind of pick any you’re big funds, you have no real idea about the overarching fund model. Like, you just think about your own PNL, like, how are my companies doing? But like how boy and funding of like, my model is very similar to cowboys like 25 ish companies. We like, lived in the fund model. And you wanted every company to be able to return your fund when you first invest, and you’re looking at dilution along the way, you’re looking at following and you’re trying to like, make sure you have enough to cover your fall. And and so that experience has like, was so vital to how I did my fund construction, but also how I think about the fund math and the kinds of exits that this fund needs in order to, like, return the fund, hopefully have like a really good return profile. So yeah, that was like insanely valuable. You know, at the time it was like painful because I’m like, oh, I have to do anything. Yes.
23:49
Max Altschuler: Like, well what? So like, what exactly did you bring from like a brand standpoint? Because I think the branding is, is great. Yeah. For modern technical fund. Yeah. It’s I don’t know, I always think it’s make the future when you do it.
24:01
Amanda Robby Robson: No, I like that. Make that.
24:03
Max Altschuler: You sure do like events on that. Yeah.
24:06
Amanda Robby Robson: You know, it’s funny, I think, one of the things that I, I’ve, like, learned about brand from friends who are much better at brand than me is like, you can make a lot of brand things work, but you want it to be super authentic to you. And so when I started the Open Source Startup podcast, it’s so direct, like I’m a very direct person and actually the founders I worked with were also very direct engineers like to know, like the name to tie to the thing, and it’s like they understand it very quickly. So Modern Technical Firm is actually a placeholder name. I was like, I want to build a modern technical fund. And I was like, why don’t I like that literally, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then I even like coded up my website. It’s like the most direct thing ever. It’s like we invest in these regions. This check size here, the companies here, the quotes. Here’s it. Like here’s the network literally here are all LinkedIn’s of everybody who’s like a formal advisor. And it’s like there’s no fluff.
24:56
Max Altschuler: It’s very direct. The website is very direct. I like it. It was like, if we’re not the most impactful check on your cap table, then we fucked up. Yeah. Luis says it right there on the seems because.
25:08
Amanda Robby Robson: There’s just so many amazing people. I’m just like, it’s not a set any of it. I’m just like, I really.
25:12
Max Altschuler: Want some competitive. Yes.
25:14
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. And you want like, especially at the earliest stages, those key hires when it’s like a team of like ten or like key design partners, like that’s everything for a company. Like, I closed, one of our, like, best logo design partners for actually the company that I just invested in. And it’s like, so meaningful to them because that’s like life or death at that stage.
25:33
Max Altschuler: Absolutely. What about, people? So is it just you do you have is it is it you? And I say, well, we I’m like, it’s just that’s how it was from when I started the media company back in the day. And it was nice because I always play off to like, oh yeah, you know, legal won’t let us do that. It’s like somebody’s got it, but it can’t just be me. Right? But, so do you plan on growing a team? Building a team? What’s the what does that look like? And is there, you know, you fun ones. 22. Yeah. Where does that go?
26:03
Amanda Robby Robson: It’s a really good question. I’m just gonna be so real with you because this is like something in fundraising, like every LP, like as you. And they’re just like, oh, like, what does this become? And to be totally honest, when I started out, my initial thinking was, you know, I could one of two paths. I could either keep this being like a solo thing, or I could go and try and build the next great, like technical or into fun, like the next like build start cyber start, amplify, whatever the the last year I probably had the most fun and the most effective investing ever because for my check size with like pre-seed and seed rounds away, they are I don’t have to lead and I can still have this like the same return profile as like I found this much bigger. So I’m open to bringing other people on, but it would have to be someone, I think who has who can own everything. And and like, I think it’s really hard at the early stages to break up. The investor will be like, oh, I’m going to do new people who are going to source and or like, I’m just going to do the board work, whatever it is. Like, I kind of want to do everything I do. And if there’s a person who emerges that’s really special that I think would make a ton of sense to partner with and I’m open to doing that. But I kind of like love what I’m doing now. And I think that this is going to be like some of my best investing, some kind of like.
27:12
Max Altschuler: Do you want to keep the fund size the same, then wrap.
27:14
Amanda Robby Robson: Things.
27:14
Max Altschuler: Up like a two.
27:15
Amanda Robby Robson: So let’s get to come back to this. Like, hey, you said you were going to grow her fund.
27:18
Max Altschuler: So yeah, I mean, I don’t think they will, you know, take a test for that. But like, you think you’ll do every two year deployment, 20, every.
27:26
Amanda Robby Robson: Three year deployment. And I honestly, my current thinking is it’ll be every three year deployment. It’ll be around the same size. Like I think, 50 million is the dividing point where, like, once you’re over a 50 million fine, then you kind of have to leave it. And right now I’ve co-led a number of deals like Pre-seed, but you really don’t have that much flexibility because right now my ownership target is like anywhere from 3 to 6%. And that works with kind of a lot of things, but over 50 million. It gets tough to like return the fund.
27:54
Max Altschuler: So then so then you know people management thing doesn’t matter as much. You know you’ve kind of probably outsourced your contract fund admin and all that type of stuff like a lot of the small funds do. So it makes it very straightforward. You just focused on all right, I’m finding the best companies investing the best companies. My investors are happy. You know you know you’ve you’ve kind of got your re-up kind of built in there. Eventually you’ll have a line out the door. People who are on the waitlist. Yeah. You know ideally to to come in and that might push you to, to do a bigger fund or something like that. So that’s exciting. From a, I guess, company investment standpoint. You’re getting in it like pre-seed seed and you’ve seen what great looks like. How do you keep the bar high and deploy on schedule?
28:43
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. So I would say, in today’s investing environment, keeping the bar high, I think really comes down to valuation and fund math and Kenny’s investment, especially if you want it to return your fund. Does it all make sense? Because there are some really high potential founders that I see raising at like 30 to 70 million posts with barely anything built out, with kind of even a vague idea of what exactly they want to build. And they’re talented, but they’re first time founders. And to me, those can be really, really hard because like the risk versus potential return is just like really, really tough. So for me, I think about maintaining a bar in today’s world as, I won’t do anything that’s really over like 20 million ish posts for first time founders that don’t have traction, where there isn’t end product like that, just like won’t fly for me. So it honestly ends up eliminating a lot of excess stuff. I will and I have done a number of seeds where there was like a product, that already had a ton of validation traction or like second time founders that like had a really, really good exit before. But I think for me, like that is really kind of the bar really comes down to valuation because there’s some really talented founders out there that just don’t make sense for my model.
29:54
Max Altschuler: Should you do second time Andrew though?
29:56
Amanda Robby Robson: I do, yeah. Second time founders. We’ll do first time. Second time matters. We’ll do both. But I’ll do second time founders at higher valuations because that they know what they’re doing. And like there’s so many parts of early stage of like getting the product market fit because that’s really like the stages. De-risked slightly through the your like they have a team of people that they’ve worked with before they can pull from they know how to get a product to market they like they’re both technical and understand some of the go to market side says a lot that they’ve already, like, figured out. With first time founders, you kind of want to see it. They figured some stuff out if they’re going to be raising a higher valuation. I think right now, like it’s just kind of crazy. Some of the stuff that I’m seeing. Yeah.
30:34
Max Altschuler: Yeah, it’s a.
30:35
Amanda Robby Robson: Going to make money.
30:36
Max Altschuler: It’s a crazy time for sure. Yeah. from starting as a small operator lead role in fund to evolving to an institutional platform, AngelList has been a core partner in every phase of GTM funds growth. Their software first fund admin infrastructure allowed us to scale without sacrificing agility, from onboarding hundreds of LPs seamlessly to handling compliance, capital calls and reporting. As our fund size evolved, as we expanded from fund one to fund two, angels took care of the back office operations, allowing us to stay focused on what matters most investing in world class founders and building the strongest go to market, network and venture. They scaled with us across multiple funds and into the future. If your fund is growing in size or complexity, check them out atangellist.com/gtm fund. That’sangels.com/gtm fund. What are you looking at in terms of, you know, when you sizing up a company in terms of moats, like, how do you make sure that this companies are going to be cannibalized and this company will actually be able to defend itself?
31:33
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. It’s really hard, like pre-seed seed stage because, like, of all the things you can invest behind, like market tailwind, team product traction, like you don’t usually have a GA product or traction is just like the team in the market. Tailwind. So it usually comes down to why is is the best possible team to go after that opportunity. Like what edge do they have as far as knowledge network? Like there has to be something that they’re the best at for that particular opportunity. But it’s usually not so tangible because there’s nothing really there at that point. So for instance, actually there’s there’s a company that I announced, not too long ago, but they’ve been ramping really, really quickly called Run Reveal that I did with Cassano and Runtime Ventures. And what was so unique about that team, they’re building a security data platform, and I’ve looked at that space forever, because there’s really old school legacy companies like Sumo and Splunk that are huge. And like, everybody hates them. And the thing that was so unique about this team is they brought like a level of data expertise and data understanding. And just the way that they thought about managing data was so different from every other approach that I’d seen. So they understood, they understood security, but they actually are data experts, almost more so, versus so many other teams that I see going out of the space. They’re much more like security focused. So I think it’s like, why is that team have something special that allows them to take a different approach than what others have taken?
33:04
Max Altschuler: Yeah. And then what about when it is a little bit further along, like you, have you invested in anything that has head tech that you can put your hands on?
33:04
Amanda Robby Robson: Oh yes. But I would say usually if there’s tech that I can look at, it’s been open source founders usually. So there’s something that you can look at this community, you can look at, you can see how it deploys. And one of the most interesting things about investing in open source companies, like true open source companies, where they open source like a majority of what the value is going to be, or at least like a good portion of what it’s going to be, you can just see the quality of build and you can see how customers react to it and how they’re using it. If it’s core infrastructure, like if it’s actually like replacing or being used in kind of really important processes. So there’s just a lot there that you can actually work with.
33:42
Max Altschuler: What do you do then from a diligence standpoint for these founders? And what’s the what would you say, like the average relationship duration is before you make an investment in somebody, these people you’ve known for a year and you’ve been tracking them and, you know, and what does that look like? Is that like a couple of check ins, invite them to event, or is that somebody you worked with in the past, like, what does all that look like?
34:06
Amanda Robby Robson: It depends. I would say, yeah. Like it really depends every time, like I did a seed investment in a company that I’d actually looked at the Pre-seed for, and it’s an open to companies, Israeli company. And they actually actually we had announced it too. So I can talk about it called Metal Bear. So I’d already met the founders, and I’d kind of been tracking what they were doing and saw the projects I was using the project, so I kind of momentum on it. It was just a really interesting take on a hard problem. They basically eliminate the need for staging environments and engineering. You can code locally, directly in your full production environment, which is just like a really interesting concept. So I kind of been tracking it for a while. So there like that happens sometimes when you kind of meet founders, you think they’re really interesting and you track it. Actually just invested in my eighth investment within a founder that I had looked at his first company when I was at Norwest, and it was a really tough space. It was in cyber training, which is just like such a hard space. And he’s still got it to like an amazing exit, like got good traction. And I just like, he was like someone I would reach out to for security diligence on things. Because when I referenced him way back when he came out as like an A-plus, kind of like founder and guy, but I didn’t like what he was building. So it was kind of like a plus founder, like, see or the opportunity in my opinion. Yeah. So then I known him and then, you know, for this new company, I love what he’s going after and building. So there was already kind of a standing relationship there and references done. I tracked him. So there is a lot kind of background. I would say that almost all founders that I work with, there is some connections that we have. So it’s easy for me to get very trusted references, like the quality work that they done or just kind of like who they are. It’s very rare that someone is completely cold or we have no kind of like, overlap. And anyways, but then it’s up to me to make sure that I have the right networking connections at companies that are going to create kind of the next set of amazing technical founders. Yeah.
35:53
Max Altschuler: And because your check size is very strategic to most other leads. Right. So yeah, you can co-lead or lead a pre-seed, but not really a seed with, you know, million is your high.
36:03
Amanda Robby Robson: Millions of high points. Yeah. So for seeds today it doesn’t it. But it is really fun because I’ve never been able to be so collaborative with people. Like, I don’t feel like I’m competitive with anyone. Like, yeah, I’m competitive for allocation. But like, you know, if a founder wants me and usually it can make sense.
36:18
Max Altschuler: Absolutely.
36:19
Amanda Robby Robson: So that’s the part that’s been really fun because it just feels like you get more opportunity.
36:23
Max Altschuler: Yeah. So you have two other things that you work on. So open source podcast. Yeah. And then your was it the Angel network.
36:32
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. Yeah yeah.
36:32
Max Altschuler: Modern angels, modern angels. So how do those I guess provide sourcing support or diligence support or there’s you know, do you do leverage those for the fund?
36:44
Amanda Robby Robson: I definitely do. But a lot of times it comes in ways that are so direct, if that makes sense. Like they’re just very complementary to the work that I do. And I would say like there’s so many connections that I’ve made through both, folks who become regular angels, frequent angels into my company is, a number of people that I have on that open source podcast I became good friends with, and they’ve either invested in my find or something like they just become like, you know, part of a network. The Open Source podcast really started. I, built it with Tim Chan, who’s like an awesome solo GP. Honestly, one of the biggest encouragers of like me to go do this too. And we started because both of us were looking a lot of dovetail companies. Naturally, lot were open source like four and a half years ago, and we just didn’t find very good content out there. On how to actually build an open source business, because there were so many open source projects that people were trying to turn into businesses. It was kind of unclear, like the right model or license to use or when you monetize, like how much you open source. So we started interviewing founders originally for a blog post, and we interviewed like Aamodt and HashiCorp. We interviewed Ben Siegel. Matt lights up for this blog post, and we were like, wait, that conversations were way more interesting. The blog posts, like, maybe we record those and then we like start a podcast out of it. And then we just both enjoyed it so much that we’ve done 160 or 70 episodes now over like five years. It just keeps going. And it’s honestly just because we like it. But it it’s it helps with diligence because I get to see and like hear from all these founders on their stories, the opportunities that they found. And they’re all very relevant because I’m looking in a lot of other spaces to make investments, but then I also just make connections through them pretty organically. So there’s just like so many benefits that weren’t like, you know, intentional. They just kind of happen because you’re just like in the mix. And by the way, I feel like that is like the one thing like so many VC firms, myself included in like, firms I’ve worked at, try to like productize things so much and be like, oh, we’re going to have this like sourcing strategy or system or like data or whatever, and that’s going to be how we do it. But like the reality is you have to keep doing different things and keep meeting different people and like iterating and like both of those efforts have helps with that, like iteration of just meeting new people and like thinking about things differently.
38:50
Max Altschuler: And then Angel network, that’s 400 something angels that just want to potentially invest in what you’re investing in.
38:57
Amanda Robby Robson: Oh yeah. So that started oh, probably three years ago. And it started because I had so many dude friends that were angel investing the other, and they would have all these WhatsApp groups and trade deal flow and had all of these awesome, like, female operator friends. And actually it was specifically to I was having dinner with the, head of strategy at Figma and CMO at this like, public fintech company upstart, who two of my best friends and they wanted to angel mass. And so I’d brought them in a deal that we did a cowboy, but I didn’t know. I assume they were getting pulled into other deals because they’re both just like sick operators. And turns out they weren’t. And I was like, this makes no sense. Yeah. So I like basically got their info about check size, everything put in, Google Sheets shared it with other VC friends. And then they kept talking about this ever. And so many like people basically wanted to join it and it quickly turned into 100 women. I bought them all the slack group. I’m like, hey, this is not a this is not like us all needing to, you know, like do SPV and ambassador, but a network of people who can trade deal flow, who can bring people into deals. And it just kind of grew organically and it’s been pretty awesome because then I’ve also made some really good friends out of it. Like that is cured engineering. And yet anthropic like she was one of the original ones. I got into it and we’ve just become like such good friends out of it. And it’s like, yeah, a relevant connection. But also she’s just like an awesome person. So I think things like this just help very organically, like grow the network and they’re in service of the community as opposed to just like.
40:20
Max Altschuler: Nice little flywheel that. Yeah, I mean, you have the media extension on the podcast. You have the community extension with both the folks that are LP’s in the fund, but then also the Angel network, and those folks can all act as to your flow sources, diligence and, you know, portfolio company support, similar to kind of the model that we have. So, yeah, the technical side of things, of course, whereas the GTM side of things, when you look at companies and you’re sizing them up, you know, you’re talking about technical founders, but, how how do you look at commercialization? How do you look at Tam? How do you look at there? Yeah, the ability to to sell how this is going to be big. I mean, we had a company we passed on recently where, you know, I hate doing like, oh, the Tam is not big enough, but there’s there are still some times where it is not big enough. There were like 100 potential customers. Yeah. For this, they were selling to airlines. And it’s like, I don’t know how to reconcile that because each individual airline could be a big customer, but that eventually caps out. I don’t know what the exit potential is going to be. And you kind of end up in this like, this mess where I feel like the best opportunities are Grand Slam potential, but like single, double de-risk, you know, like at the worst case scenario. And then there’s the opportunities where it’s like glam Grand slam potential and strike out risk and like those are finished too. But if you have like a home run potential but strike at rest and it’s kind of like, well, this isn’t going to be that big of a company, but it’s also still super risky. So should I be looking for stuff that’s like high reward, medium lower risk instead of, yeah, you know, low reward, high risk. So how are you sizing these things up in terms of Tam commercialization and distribution?
42:15
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. So, I would separate yeah. The Tam question and then how commercial the founders are. So on the Tam question, there has to be it’s less like the overall size of Tam. Now like in the case of the compliance software market, I think Gartner said it was like 200 million or something, which is hilarious. But now there’s like multiple billion dollar companies there. But the tailwind was there to increase the number of potential customers. So that’s the thing that I look for the most.
42:40
Max Altschuler: And Phantom of Tam gross.
42:42
Amanda Robby Robson: Not exactly. Yeah, I think that’s a really good way to frame it because like for a while you only needed something like SoC two if you’re selling to big enterprise. And then slowly but surely everyone was like, well, there’s so much risk with our vendors and the data that they’re handling, like, why don’t we make every vendor have to have soc2? So literally every startup that wanted to sell to anyone, it was like a complete blocker for them. And they’re like kind of inklings of that happening. And so if you kind of could see that and you’re like, okay, what if like, are we on a path to the world, in the world, for there to be the need for every single company type tactical. Why it’s. Yes. Okay. Then. Like that’s rapidly growing. And I think that’s happening in AI a lot too. Like I remember one of my biggest, misses was I when I was at Norwest, I was following the scaling AI story and, had done a bunch of research in the background, because I think it was actually a series. It was doing series and series B and like, heard really good things about the team. And so had done a bunch of background research just to like, get a meeting with the team to basically say like, hey, here’s like basically what all the kind of like the market saying about you. And they were so concentrated because at the time it was all autonomous car companies, because that was kind of like the first big like I was very like autonomous focused, and it was heavy customer concentration. At the time, I couldn’t really see like, oh, but this is going to rapidly change. So this concentration is going to change is everybody needs AI and suddenly your potential customer out or like all these other companies. So I think it’s like having an instant insight on that from an investor perspective. That’s the thing that can kind of it’s like there’s something that’s changing to make a market really, really big. Yeah.
44:11
Max Altschuler: And then from a distribution standpoint, how does that channel through?
44:17
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. So it depends what their distribution they plan on their distribution being. So if they if it’s going to be a direct sale, which honestly like most companies will have some direct sale component to it, why are they the best at it or why can they be the best at it? So one of the things I do, I actually almost never ask if they do have like 1 or 2 design partners or customers or whatever. I never asked to talk to them. Some like one that’s like kind of annoying for founders, but then two, I don’t know them and I have my own network of potential customers and users who will give me the full download of it. And they’re not warm like they’re not. Yeah, you know, one of their friends. So I have them pitch. And oftentimes I sit in and watch them pitch and I watch how good they are at engaging them at like pulling products bags. So my most recent investment is in a very early Tam, but I think is going to rapidly grow space. And the founder, it’s funny because so many of the CEOs of my network were like, this isn’t a problem for us. Yeah, we’re not looking for tools there. And then they met with her and they’re like, gosh, so compelling. Like maybe, maybe they might just like, you know, for this kind of market, she has to be educating the market. And like she kind of has that. And I just fundamentally believe that this is going to become a really big problem in a pretty quick amount of time. Yeah. So I just try to like Testament and it’s like mutually beneficial because even if I pass, they’ve met a bunch of like customer prospects for me. So it’s like yeah, great. So I try to do that as much as possible. And yeah, I want to see what their distribution manages. And it doesn’t necessarily come down to like, oh, they already have a preexisting network of systems because like I can help bring that. It’s how good are they at engaging and like really impressing their like potential user buyer groups. So that’s where like having the network can really help.
45:55
Max Altschuler: We had very similar one just now. We invested in where we were like, I don’t know if there’s a need to have or nice to have. We’re kind of on that line. And the, principal at GTM, fun vibe of her. What would it be, brother? And, works for a potential customer company into a. Can you take a look at this? And, his response was like, I want to buy this now. Can I also can I can I write an angel check? Like, I was like, those are the responses you want to hear. So, yeah, we ended up making the investment, obviously a couple other data points, but those are. Yeah, that’s what you want to hear.
46:33
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah, totally. And it’s funny too, because it’s always so nuanced at the early stages because like, you know, like like, for instance, run reveal. It’s like a Sam. So a lot of security teams, like they’re very skeptical of other Sam companies because they’re like, yeah, we hate spikes you, but we haven’t seen anything good. And so there was like nuance of like finding the right potential people for them to talk to that would give me the right advice. I wouldn’t just be like, I don’t want to do this in. The funny thing is, all of the naysayers now are like, oh, wait, now I want look at this. So you kind of have to like, find the right people to do that kind of diligence or like hear the pitch. Yeah. And yeah, sometimes it’s hard because like I’ll get not like bad but I’ll get like less interested by our perspective on something. You really have to dissect that and like be like, okay, wait, I introduce the wrong profile person or like, you kind of have to, like, almost study your own diligence.
47:21
Max Altschuler: Yeah, well, your vertical ized. So are you. Do you feel like when you speak to the founder, you’re actually learning a ton from them, and then you have to go back and verify that? Or do you come with a prepared mind in a way where you are almost fact checking what they’re saying in real time?
47:36
Amanda Robby Robson: It’s you. I, I can’t remember the last time that I met a founder, and I was like, oh, is this a pain point? Is this like, usually what happens is like, oh, interesting. I know this is a problem, but I haven’t heard someone taking this approach before. And then usually I’m like, can it work like that? And then like I try to work through that with them in real time. And that’s usually the thing that I’m thinking through is like, is their approach going to actually work or be that different? But there are a lot of meetings where some of the went to me and I’m like, I’ve heard this almost exact pitch so many different times and like, there’s just doesn’t feel like something that new or different to me. So, so then that helps me kind of get through the ones that are less interesting a lot faster. The thing that’s tricky about beings vertical is they do a lot of cyber investing, right? That many like if a company becomes big, there may be like, I don’t know, 6 or 7 major categories you’re going to go after, whether it’s like identity, GRC and like or detection. And then some of them you can’t like I’m very mindful of conflicts. But then you get into this issue where like if they’re going to get big, they’re going to end up over really. Yeah.
48:36
Max Altschuler: Yeah. What do you think you’ll do.
48:38
Amanda Robby Robson: Honestly.
48:39
Max Altschuler: Very nice problem to have. It’s a.
48:40
Amanda Robby Robson: Nice from to have if they get really big but it’s like.
48:42
Max Altschuler: Oh I’m too many unicorns.
48:43
Amanda Robby Robson: So like at the beginning you kind of it’s even hard because you know like founders will have really big ambitions. So like a lot of founders of like well, I’m going to get there eventually and they’ll almost self-select you out of others like you have. Like I compete with.
48:54
Max Altschuler: Them one day it’s like, yeah, well, what? One day like five years from now, like, oh, that’ll be a great problem for everybody to have.
49:00
Amanda Robby Robson: Totally. I feel like if that we get to that point like and then the thing is companies will pivot. Sometimes you have to like manage it. But yeah, I try not to have direct conflict risk. But there are some times where like I have two companies right now where they’re both like actually one more than the other is like, we might get into that space at some point. And I was kind of like.
49:16
Max Altschuler: Some point.
49:17
Amanda Robby Robson: Gets up like, but anyway, they let me do it somewhere.
49:19
Max Altschuler: On the rainbow. Yeah, yeah. At some point, where are you getting your like news or learning from these days? So talking to people, listening to podcasts and specific podcast communities.
49:33
Amanda Robby Robson: Oh, that’s a good so honestly, real time news. I get so much of it from Alex. Like, I feel like that’s like the most real time because you don’t even get like just the event. You get all these different perspectives on it, and you can kind of sort through whose opinions you want. And I actually like to see both sides because it’s just like, helpful and like, you know, for me, kind of holistic, view of the situation. But yeah, as far as like podcast, there’s so many different like good cyber ones that I listen to is a lot of good content out there from like different founders. Now I feel like there’s almost too much content that I have to, like, speed through a lot of it. But yeah, I don’t know if there’s like very specific ones. It kind of is just like an amalgamation of, like different things. Like, I really like a lot of the new media outlets, like upstart Alex Conrad’s like, I love his deep dives. He’s really, really great. I love, Eric Newcomer seems like for general tech stuff, but with, like, a good, like a perspective on it and really, like, well-thought through writing. So I like.
50:29
Max Altschuler: Are there any cyber specific podcasts or, any Israeli, you know, newsletters or podcasts or anything like that?
50:36
Amanda Robby Robson: Oh, that’s a good question. There aren’t that many I would say necessarily like is really newsletters that I follow. There’s been a few. I mean, I was like, the war has been going on. There have been a few like individual podcasts that have like really summarized stuff really well. But I would say that like following all the firms, they all kind of like summarize what’s going on there, like, I do a lot of work with TV partners, for instance, like the TMA team is awesome and just like following them, seeing what their commentary is, seeing what things they link to has been really helpful. But then I would also say I’m on the ground perspectives from people, especially for that situation, because like, you can’t really trust a lot of the news out there. At least I’ve had a hard time. My founder’s perspectives has been like, because they’re just in it and they can tell you what’s going on. So that’s been probably the biggest thing.
51:23
Max Altschuler: So what makes an actual AI company versus just AI theater?
51:23
Amanda Robby Robson: Yeah. So I think it’s funny because so many investors now will say we only invest in AI. And then their definition of it is very different. And so I’ve been trying to come up with my own definition. I think like the worst definition are AI. Like what is AI native and native is companies built by founders that are like under the age of like 23, like they grew up with these AI tools, which I think is a terrible definition. There’s also, a definition that it’s a company that has their own model. And I think that is true for sure. Those are all AI native companies, but I actually think that an AI native company is a company whose core product offering is an AI product. And it’s not the kind of like an ancillary thing. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t non AI companies that are going to be really valuable. And I have invested and looked at companies that are applying AI to automate, like different parts of the process, but their core offering is on AI. And I think what’s interesting in the infrastructure space, I would say more infrastructure and data versus security, but in infrastructure and data, you have a number of companies that are enabling AI in different ways, but they’re not like, if you looked at like is their core product offering, I like, is it an AI product? No, it’s a database product or it’s a observability product, but it’s for AI workloads. So I think that’s kind of the way that I think about it when it comes to investing in AI companies, is that are these companies supporting the generation of AI native application companies that are coming out? And usually that comes down to them helping with something around data storage, observability. They’re really enabling these applications in different ways. And a lot of times they will apply themselves, but they themselves are more of like an infrastructure player. Like super base is a good example. It’s like enabling so many AI applications, but they themselves aren’t really like an AI application. They’re just an enabler.
53:09
Max Altschuler: Yeah, interesting. What are you, using internally and like, where are you? Have you AI ified? Yeah. Fund.
53:20
Amanda Robby Robson: It’s funny because I think, like, there’s so many different perspectives on this, I just kind of use it as I need it. Like, I tried a number of the AI products for the podcast and they were just like kind of, okay. And I like the at source guy that I was using. So I’d like been using him instead. I use an AI scheduling bot. That’s probably the one thing that saved me the most amount of time. I basically just like pull in this AI yeah, and they’ll do a bunch of scheduling stuff for me. So that’s been like the best use of time.
53:45
Max Altschuler: Like memos like.
53:47
Amanda Robby Robson: But for memos for me, it’s like I’m basically putting down my like raw thoughts, like why I think something is like going to be using it’s like a one page memo. Yeah. Because it’s funny, I used to do these, like, really beefy memos, when I was at bigger funds. And usually the reason you did that was so that your partners could, like, really understand and validate the things you were saying, but if it’s just you, it’s like, yeah, like, I want to record my thinking so that in the future I can know if I made a good or bad decision on the basis of like, was I lucky or was I actually right? But I don’t actually think that, you know, I have all those different places, like I don’t need all that. Like I’m gonna try to prove it to someone else. I’m just recording my point of view.
54:25
Max Altschuler: Yeah, I know we we definitely use a lot of it for competitive analysis. You know, it’s just just the smoothing and, like, copy and paste thing you’d have to do pre, you know, GPT to go find competitive analysis, Tam size and all that kind of stuff is now just like a well-written prompt or two. Yeah. In a GPT. And then you have like this, the whole thing is like written for you. So certainly use it that way. But it’s it’s almost always like verifying what we already believe, not like helping us get to. Yeah, a belief. You know.
55:01
Amanda Robby Robson: I think it is really dog tags usually so helpful with writing. Like when I suppose because I’m now trained it on my style of writing. And so I would never. And I think you can tell when someone something is like entirely like tangibly built, but it’s more like, oh, I’m trying to say this saying, can you make this sound a little bit better? And it just saves you time. So it’s kind of like this copilot helping with writing or you know, what I do a lot is if I have like a summary for one of the podcast episodes, I’m like, hey, can you put this into a LinkedIn post using my, like, solid language? It just saves so much time and you can like iterate on it too. But yeah, the writing piece is really good. But yeah, it’s almost like it’s not that great at it. Well, actually it’s not great at all at original thought. So there’s like absolutely it’s never going to kind of replace. And it’s funny because even on like, oh, you can be like this non-technical person and build a company, do whatever. It’s like, no, there needs to be like an original thought, original product, original thing built, and it’s not going to do that. So it can do a lot of like personal things, like personal tasks. But yeah, if you want to build or say or do something differentiated, it’s not going to give you that.
56:02
Max Altschuler: Yeah. That was another fantastic episode of the VC series on the GTM now podcast. Head over to Apple, Spotify, or YouTube and give us a like and subscribe and we’ll see you on the next one.
