1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Marina and Nick Davidov, DVC (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Last question—when you write a pre-seed check, what do you want to see in the company?

Nick Davidov: In the founder. At pre-seed, it’s often just one or two founders and maybe an idea.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Marina and Nick Davidov, DVC (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I actually have a much more interesting question to explore with you. We talked about Perplexity as a wrapper. Give me examples of other interesting wrapper companies. I think these wrapper companies are very easy to bootstrap and very desirable for people to build revenue on top of quickly. So, give me more examples of what you’re seeing.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Marina and Nick Davidov, DVC (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to the wrapper question. You started off by saying Perplexity is a wrapper on top of other LLMs.

Nick Davidov: Yes. Perplexity is actually very lean. If you compare how much money they raised, they haven’t spent much of it. They still have the majority in the bank. That’s their superpower.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Marina and Nick Davidov, DVC (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re not the only ones who invest only in repeat founders. Most of the venture capital industry does the same. It’s very hard for first-time founders to raise money because of that. We help a lot of first-time founders, and it’s a real challenge.

Let’s go deeper into your AI investment thesis with a more specific question.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Marina and Nick Davidov, DVC (Part 1)

Marina and Nick Davidov are Cofounders and Managing Partners at DVC, a firm that backs only repeat founders doing AI startups. We had a terrific conversation on cutting edge issues within the AI ecosystem.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Vinit Bhansali, Takshil Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. I’m sure you hear this in AI conversations in particular. This conversation today hasn’t been as AI-heavy as usual, but in those discussions, domain knowledge comes up a lot.

People who can extract real value from enterprise AI and workflow are those with deep domain knowledge. They understand what’s happening and where they can add value by working through those processes.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Vinit Bhansali, Takshil Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The venture equation, which a lot of entrepreneurs struggle to grasp, is you have to go from zero to a hundred million dollars in five to seven years once you’ve entered the venture timeline. If you’re not doing that, then it’s hard to make the fund equations work.

There are some small funds that are doing Bootstrapping to Exit or Seedstrapping to Exit kind of deals. That’s a slightly different investment thesis, but they still need to find high-velocity companies to be able to exit them. Velocity is critical—without it, exits don’t really happen.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Vinit Bhansali, Takshil Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is interesting. I’ve tracked a company that pioneered selling diamonds online—Blue Nile. You must be familiar with them. The entrepreneur came from the diamond industry; his family had roots there. He had a key insight: in the U.S., diamonds are primarily purchased by men for engagement rings.