The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

20VC: Turning $16.5M into $2.1BN; Lessons from the Greatest Venture Investment in European History: UiPath | Why VC is Not Being Commoditised | Why Price Does Not Matter | Lessons on Loss Ratio, Selling and Signalling with Cem Sertoglu

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Episode notes

Cem Sertoglu is one of the great venture investors of the last decade. Cem is famed for writing the first check into UiPath and over several rounds turning $16.5M into $2.1BN. Cem recently started Bek Ventures, a $250M fund that was 3x oversubscribed. 

In Today’s Show with Cem Sertoglu We Discuss:

1. Has Venture Capital Been Commoditised:

  • Why does Cem believe that VC has not been commoditised?

  • Why does Cem believe many VCs today are not even VCs anymore?

  • How does Cem advise founders who have offers from large multi-stage firms? What questions should they ask them pre-working with them? 

  • How do the best founders select the VC they choose to work with?

2. Price, Reserves, Loss Ratios:

  • Why does Cem believe that price does not matter?

  • How does Cem approach reserves and reserves management?

  • What does Cem know now about reserves that he wishes he had known when he started investing?

  • Does Cem care about loss ratio? Does he do scenario planning when making investments?

3. Making $2.1BN on UiPath: 

  • How did Cem meet Daniel for the first time? Was it obvious he was incredible?

  • Why did they only write a $1M check and not take the whole round with $1.5M?

  • Why did 40 of the best investors in Europe all turn down UiPath for the Series A?

  • What did doing the bridge round for UiPath teach Cem about reserves?

  • When was it obvious UiPath was going to be a mega hit?

  • How did they continue to concentrate capital with each round?

  • When did they first start to sell shares in UiPath?

  • What was their approach to the selldown of their position?

  • When the company IPO’d, how much of it did they have? 

4. AMA with One of Europe’s Best:

  • Does signalling exist? How does Cem advise founders on this?

  • What has been his biggest loss? How did that change his mindset?

  • What has been Cem’s biggest miss? What did he not see?

  • Why does Cem always believe you should manufacture arguments with founders before investing?

  • Why does Cem believe a high GP commit can actually misalign the GP and the LP?