1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll give you a bit of my comment. We see a lot of investors and we see a lot of entrepreneurs and their needs. One thing that I really like about what you’re saying is there’s a tremendous bias in the industry against solo entrepreneurs. The truth is a vast majority of entrepreneurs start solo. Along the way, they build teams and products. Even the founder of ServiceNow started as a solo entrepreneur.

I don’t believe that solo entrepreneurship doesn’t work. Of course, you have to bring in all the skills and resources around you, but you can do it step by step. The fact that you are open to working with solo entrepreneurs and building the team around them is actually a very interesting angle.

It’s an angle that is underserved in the industry. Everyone wants camera-ready teams to invest in. Even in pre-seed, people are looking for, at least, two co-founders before they’re willing to write a check. In that sense, your angle is an interesting angle to address a category of entrepreneurs who are not working as duos or trios.

Cameron Kramlich: Absolutely. Few people are solo entrepreneurs and even fewer people go to Stanford. Stanford is a great school, but there are lots of other great schools out there. You might not meet your founding team in undergrad or grad school. Part of what makes our unique model work is, we love people who want to build out teams. We have that social network that entrepreneurs might or might not have.

I agree with you 100%. A lot of the greatest entrepreneurs were solo entrepreneurs. You look at people like Larry Ellis. He had a Bob Miner. How did they meet? Steve Jobs was an entrepreneur from a very early age. It wasn’t until he worked at Atari that he met Steve Wozniak. What gifted entrepreneurs need is to partner with Angelneers where we can help them find their Steve Wozniak.

Sramana Mitra: Do you invest at the concept stage? Let’s say a solo entrepreneur came to you with a good market analysis. They have figured out that there is a market opportunity. Maybe they have domain knowledge, but they haven’t built anything yet. Would you invest in that?

Cameron Kramlich: No. Just because rarely does somebody who has that type of proposal has done enough work. Here’s the thing. Early on in my career, I was a part of a startup that ended up working out quite well. We had a business model and a great team. The more data we got, the more we realized that what we were doing was crazy and didn’t make sense at all.

We had this really stressful Board meeting. They all said, “Why do you waste your time in the first place? We think you’re close to it. The change you’re proposing makes a ton of sense.” Are we going to invest in somebody with a PowerPoint deck and 10 slides? No, and no one really should. Are we going to invest in people with who we see incredible talent and identified a problem and solution? Absolutely.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers
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