1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shruti Gandhi of Array 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 Shruti Gandhi was recorded in March 2020.

Shruti Gandhi is General Partner and Founding Engineer, Array Ventures, a fund focused on deep tech, enterprise-facing ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Array Ventures. Tell us a bit about your background. Let’s get acquainted.

Shruti Gandhi: I was an engineer for a decade. Then I started a company for a couple of years and then switched to venture about eight or nine years ago. Array was founded with the belief that engineers often lacked the ability in fundraising and customer development.

We decided to start a firm focused on enterprise investing in technical founders and engineers and helping them build big businesses.

Sramana Mitra: You must know about the work of Engineering Capital. They have some of those same principles of funding engineers who are capable of doing deep tech but may not have quite the business-savvy and sleekness of being able to sell and fundraise. You take all that into account because they are capable of doing deep tech work.

Your thesis is something we understand very well. In our community, we work with a tremendous number of very good engineers and teach them how to market and sell. I didn’t go to business school.

I did my first company as a graduate student at MIT. I was a PhD student. At some point, I took my Masters and left to do my first company full time. I didn’t have time to go to business school. Frankly, I don’t know what I would have learned that I haven’t learned.

Shruti Gandhi: That’s actually me too. Getting a little nudge from someone who understood business and go-to market better goes a long way for someone like me. 

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about Array. How big is the fund? What stage are you focusing on? What kinds of companies are you looking to invest in?

Shruti Gandhi: We are now on our second fund. We have about 42 companies in our portfolio. We do about half a million to a million dollar checks. We invest in companies with technical founders who are solving problems using data and machine learning. We have companies in health, fintech, productivity. It’s across the spectrum. 

Sramana Mitra: Let me probe a little bit. If I understood correctly, you are doing enterprise-facing companies only across the business sectors. What do you need to see in a company for you to want to write that first check?

Shruti Gandhi: The thing we look for generally is that the founders are seasoned. Meaning, they’re operators. Our belief is that you can solve enterprise problems by being in an enterprise for a few years. Usually, the founders have experience of about four to seven years.

What they are experiencing is this agitation around the pain points that they are facing in their work that they just can’t get funding to solve. Oftentimes, they’re now talking to their friends and they’re saying, “Does this problem exist for you?”

That’s where they get the conviction to go leave their jobs and spin out as a company. At that point, they have about two or three friends that helped them build that conviction. The build-and-buy decision is down the road.

That’s where Array comes in. Let us help you figure out if these build-and-buy decisions will come to fruition down the road. We also do think through about the second wave of customers. That is how we think about investing in a company. To summarize, have a few friends who might buy your product. Then, we help connect you to the second wave of customers.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shruti Gandhi of Array Ventures
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