Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Saad Khan, Partner, CMEA Capital (Part 11)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Saad: Just because a venture guy doesn’t invest in something or rejects something doesn’t make it a bad company. In fact, I would argue that the vast majority of companies that have been created in the world were not venture backed and have been super successful.

Having said that, one of the things that I would say for any entrepreneurs who want to raise funding and thinks that they qualify based on the business they are building, the most important thing they can do is hire people who are better than yourself.

Going back to the point about how we look at teams and investing in exceptional people, I think it’s making sure that you’ve surrounded yourself with exceptional people. There’s too much great talent out there to be doing stuff on your own.

Whether that means hiring someone as a full-time employee to help you execute your plan or bringing on great advisors or bringing on great board members . . . there’s just so much.

The beauty of Silicon Valley is there’s so much fantastic talent floating around, people who have done so many different things, had so many varied experiences, and worked in the past for so many great companies that, I think, you absolutely should be taking advantage of that when you build your companies. Surround yourself with those people so you don’t do the same mistakes. [If you do make mistakes], make new mistakes.

By the way, I feel the same way about the venture industry. We have an opportunity now to leverage the talent of people who aren’t necessarily inside our firms but can have a great impact for our entrepreneurs and our portfolio companies.

We should be doing the same. In our case, we’re trying to do that. We bring to bear people who don’t necessarily work for CMEA but who’ve had success, who’ve built products, who’ve shipped products that have been used by millions of people, who’ve done product launches.

We’re making sure that they’re helping our entrepreneurs out from the beginning so that the entrepreneurs have that collective wisdom around the table.

Irina: How do you engage those people?

Saad: What’s amazing to me is that there are a lot of people who want to give back. People who’ve had success I’ve, generally, found they want to be helpful to their communities.

They want to mentor the next generation that’s coming up, and they want to put that experience to work. Part of it is that it’s not anything that we have to do to make them excited about it.

They already are excited. They were excited when they started their companies, and now they’re excited when they can help the next generation.

A lot of these people end up becoming advisors. A lot of them become board members. A lot of them end up becoming, in some cases, part of the executive team. And a lot of people are just great citizens.

So, we need all of those people, and we’re lucky to have them. One of the biggest assets – and the thing that I’m most thankful for – is having been around this business for a long time and been around hundreds of startups, for more than 10 years in the Valley. I’m blessed to know a lot of these people and have a lot of them as friends. That’s something that I want to make sure is working on the behalf of the companies I’m investing in.

Irina: What are your personal challenges?

Saad: It’s funny, on one hand the companies that I’m looking to invest in tend be things that have the potential to scale really fast and to be outsized hits very quickly.

What’s interesting to me is that the venture business itself is one of the most non-scalable businesses around. It’s a very services-oriented business.

The biggest challenge I have is that I can’t replicate myself and give enough time to all the people who deserve it, [be] in all the places I want to be and [meet with] all the entrepreneurs whom I want to meet, and all the business plan competitions that I’d like to help out with and on and on.

This segment is part 11 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Saad Khan, Partner, CMEA Capital
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