1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some case studies. Pick your favorite companies that have come together in this fashion. Tell us some stories of what did they start with. When they came to you, what did they have? What did you see that prompted you to get involved fully?

Cameron Kramlich: One company that we’re excited about is Cycle which is a container management platform. There, we have an unbelievably gifted serial entrepreneur who’s the CEO. He’s done an incredible job building a great business with incredible metrics. We’re helping him build out his team and a better sales organization.

Does it mean hiring more technical people when you have a pretty small startup? There’s also how do you put together a team so that you can add more features and have more stability. We’re helping them figure out how to grow their team and how to be happier so they can scale better and help their customers be happier.

Sramana Mitra: How did the connection with you happen?

Cameron Kramlich: We’re always traveling constantly. I’m in Nevada right now and spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley. Oleg is in Turkey. It’s great to have a Silicon Valley footprint. For a lot of roles, it’s not necessary and, maybe, not even ideal to have the whole team in one place. It’s a lot less risky if everybody is geographically distributed. We might be based in Chennai, Kerala, Ohio, or Zurich. We have a lot of companies in Eastern Europe and a lot in East Asia.

What makes all these companies similar is we can help build out their teams and have a footprint in Silicon Valley and get Silicon Valley customers. We met this company at an event for entrepreneurs here in Reno. Every time we see an opportunity, it’s a little bit different, but it’s all about figuring out if we can add value.

Sramana Mitra: You started addressing one of my questions which is the geographical extent of your work. You are operating globally, right?

Cameron Kramlich: Yes, but there needs to be a US component. I live near Reno. I split my time between here and San Francisco. I spend a quarter of my time in China. Right now, that’s not happening. We have one of our partners based in Ukraine. He’s now in Spain. We have people in Thailand. Our team is globally distributed.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to doing a couple of examples of companies that you have invested in that illustrate how you like to work.

Cameron Kramlich: Although most of our companies tend to be enterprise software. We like big problems, big solutions, and great teams. As a result, we are vertically agnostic. One of my great success stories as an investor has been a retailer in Alaska where they had a great problem. They identified that you can’t buy great stuff in small towns at a reasonable price. They figured out how to do it with a really unique business model. They’d go to Costco, buy stuff, and sell in these small towns.

They’ve built a massive business doing hundreds of millions in revenue by going to Costco, putting stuff on a credit card, filling up a semi-truck, and bringing it to a small town. The issue was both financial and team. They had to create legendary entrepreneurs, but they needed help with legal stuff and accounting. Part of the value that I brought to the table was in helping the company and the infrastructure needed to scale. That deal existed before Angelneers.

It’s a very similar strategy with all of our companies. If they don’t scale, we figure out why. This gets me but usually, people are too afraid to spend money. I don’t want to lower prices or don’t want to increase our burn a little bit. Oftentimes, instead of lowering prices, add that extra headcount so growth could be faster and fixed costs can be overcome.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers
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