Leo Polovets is the Co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures. Leo focuses on enterprise software and technical products at Susa. About two years ago, He also started Humba Ventures, a fund that invests in deep tech and critical national sectors like energy and defense at Humba.

Leo led Susa's investments in Mashgin, People Data Labs, Scalyr, and Treasury Prime. Having been a software engineer for 10+ years, Leo approaches challenges with an engineering mindset and supports portfolio companies in vetting and hiring technical talent. Prior to Susa, Leo was the second engineering hire at Linkedin, where he worked on the first versions of products like LinkedIn Jobs and LinkedIn Groups. Leo then worked on payment fraud detection algorithms at Google, and was also an early engineer at Factual, where he built data processing software. Leo received a bachelor's degree in Engineering and Applied Science (Computer Science) from Caltech.

We talk about lessons that translate from investing in traditional startups; explore lessons learned about market sizing, pricing, team dynamics, managing burn, scaling, valuation and many other topics in the deep tech space.

Shownotes:

https://humbaventures.com/
Leo’s presentation on “Exploring Startup Ideas” https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C-JFkqsY40tidqPD1OZbV3-OXPAyrsPIV5Q_00PkToQ/edit#slide=id.g221d008c440_0_35
Thinking about making money for scientific founders
Thinking about market attributes for a potential startup
Intro to Humba ventures
Investing in deep tech
Founder-market fit; Time to make money
Investment thesis
Communication: between team members, to investors and beyond
Working with startup teams: Commercialization
Pricing in deep tech: Think of value being created
How to ask for money for your product?
Aloha robot- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaaZ8ss-HP4&t=5s
Story telling
Manage your burn!
Scaling: Calibrating on talent; learning to delegate; firing Bs and B+s on the team
Keeping up with new technologies
Thoughts on valuation
What Leo likes to hear while being pitched to

Humba Ventures: Investing in Deep Tech Startups with Engineering Focus