Demonstrate Ambition Before You Ask Investors to Believe in You

**Sudarshan Sridharan** (0:02)
As a founder looking to raise your first round, really what you need to do is answer a few questions around, like are you competent, right? Like, can you actually, have you done whatever you're trying to do before? Or have you, like, do you have the ability to hire the right team, right? So demonstrate competency, demonstrate like being in the right networks or right talent flows to be able to hire the best people to build and sell the product. And then it's like, of course, like you need to be high integrity, like people need to be able to trust everything you're saying, but then from there, it's like, what if everything goes right? If this is like completely successful, how big will this be?

**Gopi Rangan** (0:41)
You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur, a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision.
Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. My guest today is Sudarshan Sridharan. Sudarshan is a general partner at SF1.
SF1 is a venture capital firm based out of Silicon Valley. Sudarshan is based here in Silicon Valley. But he's originally not from here, he's from the East Coast of the US. We're going to learn more about his journey. He got into the investing world early in his career, and he has also been a founder a few times. He's very, very familiar with the startup ecosystem in multiple different areas. We're going to learn more about his experiences. And we will certainly talk about his investment focus today at SF1. Sudarshan, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.

**Sudarshan Sridharan** (1:48)
Thank you, Gopi. That was a great intro.

**Gopi Rangan** (1:51)
Let's talk about you. Let's start with where you grew up and before you came to Silicon Valley, you were in Virginia, right?

**Sudarshan Sridharan** (1:59)
Yeah, I grew up in Richmond, Virginia till I was 15
NPR was the thing you'd listen to growing up. So I was always just listening to the radio, very interested in what's going on in the world. I think when the Big Short came out, that was my big break because that was the instantiation of how to take what's going on in the world and actually make money on it. It just seemed like conceptually very interesting to me to be investing. And so I just got very deep into stocks and trading and just all sorts of assets. Growing up, CDOs and CDSs were like my big white whale. I didn't know that they were back in vogue until 2020 when Bill Ackman turned $27 million into like $3 billion or something betting on COVID. But yeah, like I had a finance blog, I would write really bad stock tips on. I did have an article on why people should buy Bitcoin. So that was in 2014 when I was like 14 years old. So that will probably have made up for all the other bad, bad trading ideas on there. But other than that, I mean, yeah, like I just listened to the news. Then I just built my stock portfolios and tried to trade and try to understand what was happening. I did not actually understand what was happening. It was just investing into a bull market that lasted for 10 years, probably just makes any 10-year-old feel like a genius.
Then when I was 15, I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, and I was my sophomore year of high school. So then I got a little bit more freedom than I was trying to figure out what to do and that's when I realized, oh, you don't just have to be investing in companies. They don't just pop out of thin air, like you can actually make them too.
So I had an e-sports organization that I started. We had YouTube channel and sponsorships and did competitive tournaments for a bunch of video games like Call of Duty primarily.
Then I started reading about what the UN was doing for financial literacy. I was like, oh, that combines everything I'm interested in, both the actual investing side and helping people just make their lives better. So I started a financial literacy app called Investor with no O. That did not go anywhere at all, but just gave me something to do. I got to meet a lot of people, got on Twitter, started just trying to meet other founders and came across YC Startup School on YouTube randomly. That's sort of how I just fell completely backwards into startups and tech.

**Gopi Rangan** (4:24)
Okay. You've given a lot here, but let me parse this out. So very early in your life, you got into investing and you were researching public company stocks at the age of 10, 12, and you shared those tips with the world. By 14, you went into crypto.