1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: India has been incredibly productive. Europe has started producing interesting companies. They want global customers and they want to set up shop in the US. European firms often prefer the East Coast. Is that a model that you are okay with?

Yanev Suissa: Oh yes. We’ve never been a five-minute-away firm. I grew up at NEA as a VC. We were always bi-coastal. It is the reality of the VC world. I do think you’re right about seeing the development teams being built elsewhere and more of the business and sales teams being in the US. I’ve seen that quite a bit.

SentinelOne was like that for many years and still has a significant element of that. We’re looking at an investment from India that has its development team in India and is now building its business team in the US. That is totally comfortable for most VCs. The one thing that I don’t think we got into yet is a lot of the venture funds have not figured out how to set up shop effectively in other places.

Often, the outreach needs to be inbound. The outreach of being in those ecosystems and environments is hard to do. Some firms have franchises. Some have built satellite offices. Some have tried to expand their existing offices. I think the trend of seeing these global companies is true.

Sramana Mitra: There are some corridors that are very well-developed. The Israel-Silicon Valley corridor has been extremely well-developed. The India-Silicon Valley is very mature. There are firms focused on bringing people through that corridor. These corridors are very well-developed at this point.

Yanev Suissa: They operate differently though. For India, a lot of the firms set up a firm. They have an office and a satellite office in India and an India team. In Israel, there’s a bit of that, but most of the funds have pulled back from having their own offices there. However, they still hunt there. As those ecosystems change, VCs adjust to being able to work with the best entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: How is your thesis evolving? You talked about SineWave as a thesis-oriented fund. You have found deals aligned with your thesis. What about looking out? What are you looking for?

Yanev Suissa: Our thesis has always been foundationally the same. We’re ultimately looking for a data-driven decision-making world for large enterprises. What gets you there? The thesis evolves within those parts as you go along.

For example in fund one, we were looking for the next-generation cyber security startup, which was an endpoint, which is why we bet on SentinelOne. We don’t see, going into fund three, that paradigm has emerged yet. We haven’t seen anything real in our opinion. We view security as becoming part of a systems-based approach. Security needs to be part of platforms and not an add-on. There will still be great security companies. We think it becomes more system-based.

We’re looking at a lot in the supply chain space. We think that data security systems will be incredibly relevant there and have always been. The biggest trend we’ve seen that’s been a huge advantage for us is, typically, VCs will tell you they invest in platform technologies that any company could use. It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in or the business you’re in. It applies to everything. We still do that. That’s a huge amount of our portfolio.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures
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