Don't Compete on Artificial Intelligence. Compete on Insight.

**Amir Kabir** (0:02)
I love when founders actually tell me, I don't know, but I'll figure it out. I was like, okay, cool. That is great. Instead of telling me the glorious story, is I think the better answer would be like, look, I have not maybe thought about this.
It's actually a good question. Let me get back to you on that.

**Gopi Rangan** (0:23)
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 Amir Kabir.
Amir is a very seasoned venture capital investor. He's the founding and managing partner at Overlook Ventures. At Overlook, he invests in the infrastructure of risk. What does that mean? What kind of companies does he get excited about? And how is AI changing the way he looks at startups these days? We're going to talk about all of those things. Amir, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.

**Amir Kabir** (1:21)
Thank you, Gopi. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

**Gopi Rangan** (1:23)
Let's start with you.
You are originally from Iran. You grew up in Germany and now you live in Silicon Valley in San Francisco. Can you walk us through that journey?

**Amir Kabir** (1:36)
Yeah, sure. So I was born in Iran and my parents immigrated to Germany when I was a toddler. So I grew up in Germany. Very fortunate to be in that position. My parents gave me and my brother. And I spent most of my life, all my life in Germany actually being curious about the world, to be honest, coming from a very academic family background. My mom is a teacher. My brother runs a hospital as a surgeon. My dad got his PhD in math. So very academic background. I was not so much fascinated by academics, more so much about what you can do and what you can build. So I started very early on building things I think the earliest was I was fascinated by Legos. I think that's one thing I still remember. I vividly played and built stuff. That building translated into the love for tech and computers. I built my own computer when I was a teenager.
That again translated into the love of building businesses. So I started businesses in Germany. Then eventually coming from an Iranian household, you have to have an educational background if you want it or not. So I did computer science, business as an undergrad, and went on and worked for a startup in Germany, which is an unusual combination when you think about the timeline back in the days, startups and Germany, and it's not really the two things that come to mind. But I was just again curious about new things and what people were doing.
We were building enterprise software back in the days on-premise. There was no cloud and AI, all the good stuff we have today. The company's product that we built was Enterprise Communication Management, something that is just given today when you think about CRM and everything that comes with that. The company eventually was acquired by Actuate here in San Mateo, which was a great outcome for a small software shop out of a small town in Germany. And I was always fascinated by the US, I think, and knew about Silicon Valley, knew about tech, obviously, lived to like the.com in Germany.
My brother was the first one who actually came to the US, but he returned back to Germany and my goal was always like, how can I make it out here? And yeah, believe it or not, like a little bit over 10 years ago, I basically sold parts of my assets. Irrational to most back in the days, what I was doing and was like, I'm gonna move to the US and try to figure out first, if this American dream is true, but second, how can I get into tech? And I fundamentally believe that I can build something meaningful from scratch. And so that's the journey to today.
And I landed in DC. I was there for two years and moved over here to San Francisco and I've been here since. And live in Soma here right now. So that's a short kind of overview about like the last couple of decades in my life. There's much, much more to it. But yeah, that's how we got here.

**Gopi Rangan** (4:42)
So early in your life, you tasted entrepreneurship, you built businesses.
But over the years, you've moved into the investment side. You were a partner at Munich Re and you made early investments in InsureTech even before that trend became very popular. And now you are the founder of a new venture capital firm. Why is venture capital interesting?