Inside the First Quant-Driven VC Fund | Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Chamaeleon

**Turner Novak** (0:02)
This episode is brought to you by Merge. They just launched their new Agent Handler product. Here's Merge co-founders, Shenzi and Gill, to tell you more about it.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
Your employees want to give AI access to every tool your company runs on. Starting today, they can, safely.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:18)
Introducing Agent Handler. One place for your employees to safely connect AI to every tool they need.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
This is Janelle. Janelle is a new marketing hire here at Merge. She already built her first AI agent to generate blog posts. We'll prompt Janelle's agent to create a blog post about our latest product releases. Right now, her agent is scanning every tool it's connected to.
In Slack, it's finding a private leadership thread with unreleased revenue numbers.
In Google Drive, it's finding a board deck with company strategy, growth targets, and all our employees' salaries. And in Salesforce, it's finding something even more sensitive, our customer records, which show names, payment details, and sometimes even government IDs. Now, let's rebuild Janelle's agent with Merge agent handle.
Merge automatically sets Janelle's access permissions.
We can also manually adjust them, like letting her agent read Slack messages, but blocking access to Salesforce contracts. Merge gives Janelle one secure access link that she can put into Cloud. Now Janelle, type the same prompt. Right now, her agent is pulling the event recap and approved quotes. It drafts the blog post perfectly. Behind the scenes, agent handler blocks seven unauthorized attempts in 30 seconds. It also logs every tool call and access request in real time, creating a complete audit trail of the agent's work. It gives Janelle's agent access to everything it needs without anything that could put our company at risk. Right now, every company has two choices. Block employees from using AI tools entirely and fall behind, or open the floodgates and risk giving employees access to everything.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:02)
Merge agent handler creates the third option. Give every employee the full power of AI while keeping sensitive data protected. That's why Merge is already trusted by over 750 teams, including OpenAI, Ramp, and Dropbox.
Keep your company safe with Merge.

**Turner Novak** (2:24)
Now, let's jump back in. Nuno, welcome to the show.

**Nuno Goncalves Pedro** (2:28)
Well, thank you for having me, Turner.

**Turner Novak** (2:30)
Yeah, this is going to be really interesting. We prepped a bunch of different interesting non-intuitive data that you kind of found in years of venture that could sort of go against the general narrative of, you know, here's X, here's Y, here's a rule everyone follows.
One of the ones I thought was really interesting that you found was being an employee at a successful startup actually led to higher probabilities of a strong venture startup outcome than previously being a serial founder.

**Nuno Goncalves Pedro** (3:04)
Yeah, I mean, as background, we're an early stage venture capital firm and obviously we're a little bit of a different animal in the sense that we've developed our own proprietary AI and quant. Quant from quantitative, just to be clear, like hedge funds, platform called Mantis. There's a lot of insights that we have that come really from our own data and our own analysis and our own algorithms. I think there's been this sort of believed doctrine by a lot of VC firms, in particular those that invest in B2B more than the consumer side, which is a serial entrepreneur with good to modest exits will typically help perform a first-time entrepreneur in the B2B space, either physical or software.
We do back testing with our platform all the time. One of the things that we were doing back testing on was on talent, which is one of the factors that we do analyze. The conclusion that the engine came up with after we applied machine learning to it and did the back testing was, well, not so fast. It depends on the first-time founder. To your point, basically, if the first-time founder was working for a highly successful company, and that person was an early employee there, not a founder, an early employee there, and that company is in an adjacent space, the company that they're doing right now, they would outperform a serial entrepreneur with good to modest exits in B2B. That was really counterintuitive even for us, as investors that have been doing this. I've been doing this for 16 years. It was very much counterintuitive. This was a significant difference.
Basically, the repeat founder with serial exits, good or modest, was 20 percent worse odds than that first-time entrepreneur that had worked for it, rocket ship, early employee in an adjacent space. That's significant. It's significant to tip the scale on looking at the company and looking at the talent at that point in time.