Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Jeff Clavier, Founder And Managing Partner, SoftTech VC (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: On average, from all sources, how many pitches do you receive a month?

Jeff: It’s hundreds. It varies. I would say like five to ten a day on average. And then some days are busier so, it really depends. A lot of those sometimes aren’t qualified. What I’m always saying is that basically every week, I’m going to meet a team, an entrepreneur, people doing something.

At least one or two of those meetings are genuine investments that I could make. So I do fifteen to twenty deals a year and I see fifty to one hundred companies I could invest in, and that’s me filtering which ones are right for me and so forth. It’s a massive funnel. We see hundreds of opportunities, and we end up doing two or three deals.

Irina: Do you have any regular meetings? Where entrepreneurs have an opportunity to meet you.

Jeff: You mean office hours, like my friends at First Round Capital do?

No. But it’s a great idea. I like the concept a lot, but I haven’t gotten around to doing it. I do a lot of public speaking; I speak at a conference almost every week. I will advertise the fact that I am at this conference, at this panel, and then I will typically see five or ten people talking to me after that, pitching their ideas. And it’s a very useful exercise because in two or three minutes, I can say, “Look this isn’t for me, or yes, it’s interesting, let’s get together. Send me an e-mail.” In a short period of time I can filter a lot of opportunities.

Irina: When you decide whether to go forward with a company, what factors are most important?

Jeff: I look at the three typical factors: the team, the product, and the market. When you meet someone and you have two or three minutes, it’s more like, “Hey, this is what I’m planning; this is what I’m doing,” and they explain the product or the concept and what sort of market they play in.

If it’s something that is intriguing and I want to learn more, or if it actually fits some thesis or some idea that I’ve been looking at, then I will take the meeting and explore.

When I meet entrepreneurs and look at the deal opportunity at large, I’m going to really focus on the team. What’s their background? What have they done? What’s the dynamic between the different members, are they complementary?

Are there a couple of typical founders who are strong picks? Is there one guy who is maybe more like a business/sales/marketing person who can really push the product?

Because I invest mostly in the consumer space, I will ask, Do they understand consumer mechanics, customer acquisition, and customer retention. Do they think properly about the key metrics of the business and how to optimize them? Do they understand monetization? How do you make money on certain types of websites, and so on. How scalable are they, can they work, can they lead, are they really a good team?

This segment is part 4 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Jeff Clavier, Founder And Managing Partner, SoftTech VC
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