1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Tim Guleri was recorded in April 2018.

Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures, discusses at length his firm’s investment thesis, unique relationships with CIOs, and some of the industry trends he sees.

Sramana Mitra: We should start with you introducing yourself as well as Sierra to our audience. What is your investing focus today? How big is the fund? What are the things that you want to position the fund as that our audience should know about?

Tim Guleri: It’s a pleasure being here. I’m actually originally from India. I grew up in India and came to the US for my Master’s. I came to California and started my job in the semiconductor industry and soon went into a software company where I joined as an engineer and then went to sales and marketing. Ultimately, that went company public in 1995. It was bought by Siebel Systems. I got a taste of entrepreneurship and got a sense of how it’s done.

I started my own company in 1996 called Octane Software. Octane was in the customer service area as the internet was booming. I scaled that up very quickly. I raised venture capital, so I learned what it’s like to be an entrepreneur on the other side. I ended up selling that company to a public company called E.piphany for $3.2 billion. That was a very good outcome for our investors.

I then became a venture capitalist. The principal reason is, I feel very strongly about thoughtful entrepreneurs that take a while to build a real business. I had the pleasure of having great entrepreneurs-turned-VCs as my Board members. They’ve provided such a great service and thoughtful feedback. I felt that would be a natural succession of jobs for me.

I ran into Sierra Ventures. We are investing out of our 11^th fund. Sierra’s focused on enterprise-based companies, which is my passion and love. These are companies that are building hardware or software for businesses. We don’t differentiate whether it’s the top of the business market or the bottom as long as the hardware or software is for the business market. That is our investment focus. In terms of stage, we like to come early and stay late. We are very patient capital.

We like to be the first institutional check in these companies. Our size of investment is actually very flexible depending on what the business needs. We’ll write anywhere between $500,000 and $12 million. We ensure that we have plenty of reserves to help scale our companies. I’ve been lucky to take a couple of companies public. There’s a company called MakeMyTrip where I’m still on the Board. That’s a bit about Sierra and my background.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the Sierra fund now?

Tim Guleri: Fund 11 is $175 million. Our thesis is that we think that technology and the business investment climate is a secular trend in terms of disruption. These cycles where we try to capture entrepreneurship are probably two to three years long. We tend to structure our fund and invest them in three years. Then we raise the next fund. We are very lucky to have a very stable set of limited partners. It’s a relatively straightforward process.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures
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