Advika Jalan: Head of Research at MMC Ventures

Luke Hyde-Smith (0:02)

Welcome back to the W1M Why Invest Podcast with me, Luke Hyde-Smith. And today we're delighted to be joined by Advika Jalan, Head of Research at MMC Ventures, which is an early stage venture capital fund investing in exceptional entrepreneurs across Europe. Advika's role there focuses on tracking technology trends, market mapping and supporting the investment analysis and research process.

Prior to joining MMC, Advika worked at Goldman Sachs as an equity research analyst, contributing to major European tech IPOs likewise. In terms of background and education, you hold an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and Indoor, and a Bachelor of Commerce from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. So very impressive indeed. In terms of your current work and studies and articles, you have written some excellent pieces on agentic AI, AI tokenomics, stable coins, plus recently co-authored a piece on forward deployed engineering, career patterns and retention models across modern tech companies. And you are definitely going to have to explain that. And I much look forward to getting into that later. So, Advika, it is really great to have you on the podcast today. Thank you very much indeed for taking the time.

Advika Jalan (1:21)

Thank you for having me, Luke. Excited to dive right in.

Luke Hyde-Smith (1:25)

Yeah. Okay. Well, look, I think one of the places we sometimes start these podcasts is a brief overview of the business. I don't think that everybody dialing in will be aware of MMC. So perhaps you could just give a brief overview of the business and how it's evolved over time.

Advika Jalan (1:42)

Yes. So at MMC Ventures, we are an early stage venture capital fund. We've been around 25 years now, and as you can imagine, over that time, we have evolved considerably. So about 10 years ago, we set up a research division within the fund, and it remains very unusual to this day for a venture capital fund to be so heavily research led. That's where my role as Head of Research comes in.

I basically sit in the midst of every possible information flow to think about how different technological and commercial trends are evolving, so that information comes from enterprise practitioners, researchers at universities and research labs, and of course, startup founders. That shapes our investment thesis. So we began researching on and investing in AI a decade ago. So we invested in Synthesia, one of the largest gen AI companies in Europe in 2019, even before the term generative AI was coined, and it's something that came out of our research.

What has changed since I joined is the acceleration that we have seen with AI. Ever since Chad GPT went mainstream in 2022, it has fundamentally changed the landscape because startups now are inflecting faster than ever. Like going from zero to five million in ARR, they're getting there much quicker, which means the funding rounds are also happening much earlier. They tend to be much larger. But we can dive into all of that in more detail. But what I have observed over the last few years is that heavy acceleration of everything.

Luke Hyde-Smith (3:31)

Yeah.

One of the things that we're going to get onto, what we've noticed is just how much quicker certain processes, certain analysis can be done, new business formation, etc. And that does appear to be picking up. And you're right at the forefront of trying to analyze those trends. So what an amazing opportunity and role you have. Before getting into that in much greater detail, how did you get into the industry? Did you always dream of researching AI technologies? And give a little bit of a flavor of your background.

Advika Jalan (4:05)

Well, honestly, as a child, I want to be everything from an astronaut to an actress, very wide range. So I had given up my library membership as a child because I'd finished reading all the books there.

Luke Hyde-Smith (4:18)

No way.

Advika Jalan (4:19)

Yeah.

Luke Hyde-Smith (4:21)

So you either read a lot or it wasn't a very big library.

Advika Jalan (4:23)

Well, it was a pretty big library, but I just read voraciously.

So I never particularly dreamt of a career in venture capital, but because I was always so naturally curious and hungry to learn, rather, that it made sense for me to get into research. That's why as soon as I finished my studies, my first job was with Goldman Sachs as a researcher focusing on technology and just felt like the right fit for me. I unexpectedly fell into something that I loved, so I was very lucky in that regard. From Goldman Sachs and equity research, I had the pleasure of meeting a whole lot of other researchers, which is how I came across MMC's research. I actually originally came across MMC's research back in 2019 itself, like the flagship state of AI report that we put out.