[#SV2TLV23] Venture's Rush, Crash and Re-Cash with Silicon Valley's Biggest Venture Capital Funds | Morris Levy hosting Sujay Jaswa, Yasmin Razavi, and Sarah Pinto

**Morris Levy** (0:00)
Hi, everybody, Morris Levy, one of the managing partners at Sarona. Thank you, guys. That was fantastic. Thank you, Jeffrey, for those pearls of wisdom.
I have three great guests with me today. The world's changing. We're back to some kind of normalcy, and then it changes again. And speaking to some of the startups in the room, raising money is not what it used to be, right? We had a feeding frenzy for a bunch of years, and now it's a new reality. And when things change, some changes stick around, and some are fleeting. So I want to talk about that from the startup's perspective, but what they could expect to stick around as it relates to fundraising.
So what's going to stick around, and what changes are going to be short-lived?

**Sarah Pinto** (0:54)
Okay, I'm starting.
Well first of all, thank you to Sarona and Dio for asking me to come to Israel, because I feel like this is the collision of a bunch of my worlds, including some of my family members who are here. So love being on stage here in Israel and in Tel Aviv to talk about what we do in Silicon Valley. Look, I would say in general in venture and in particular at Emerson Collective, we seek to invest in what we call consequential companies. So companies that will change their industry, that will make a difference, that will generate venture scale returns and also impact. And those companies tend to thrive despite cycles. And with cycles, again cycles, but they tend to be somewhat acyclical or somewhat maybe super cyclical. And so I think for the best companies, and I would definitely put D on this category, a time like this may be more challenging, but they're going to be fine and they're going to be able to raise. So there's definitely at least as far as we're concerned a flight to quality.
But I think fundamentally, we invest for the long term. We invest for five years at the growth stage, often 10, 15 years at the seed stage. And so while yesterday we're looking for great businesses with great unit metrics and profitability, and it's not growth at all costs, at the end of the day, we're looking for large markets, amazing, unique teams changing their industry. And when you have those things, you're going to be fine.

**Morris Levy** (2:38)
Yasmin?

**Yasmin Razavi** (2:42)
Yeah, maybe I'll touch on the other side of it.
So I'm a growth investor at Spark.
Earliest I would invest is probably around Series B, all the way to pre-IPO.
I would say the past, and I've been a spark for seven years, it feels like the first sort of chapter of my investing career was riddled with playbooks. So there was a lot of rules, double, double and triple, triple. This is your magic number. This is how much you should spend on sales and marketing to generate this much revenue, et cetera, et cetera. And it felt like a lot of nuance and custom thinking were leaving boardrooms, how first-time founders thought about building and scaling businesses. And I think this has really opened up an opportunity where really every company is truly in a unique situation. There's no two companies alike. Every company has its own challenges they're facing today. And some of these sort of boilerplate type, you know, tweet storms that people listened to or took to heart maybe over the past 10 years no longer really apply. So I think it's really going to be, you know, the next chapter is going to be much more about first principles thinking, every company is unique, don't rely too much on advice in general and sort of figure things out. And quite frankly, as an investor, that makes a job much more fun for me too, versus just kind of repeating or having to battle what founders have heard on Twitter, etc. And I think this is probably going to be one of the things that stays for a while.

**Morris Levy** (4:13)
I don't agree with you, but I'm going to hear from Sujay.

**Sujay Jaswa** (4:15)
Yeah, so I grew up in Silicon Valley and I started in venture in 2008, which was the financial crisis. So not terribly dissimilar to right now. You know, the world, I mean, it felt like the world was falling apart. And for founders, it was a really, really hard time. It was hard to raise venture funds, which meant it was really hard to raise startup funding.
And I think in those environments which were not there yet, but were kind of moving towards that kind of a window, it's pretty simple, right? There's three things that matter in early stage company building. Make something that people want, that customers can want. Figure out ways to get it in the hands of as many customers as possible, and raise the capital needed to keep doing those things.