Notes from Ibrahim’s presentation:
- Every VC firm has a slightly different flavor to how they see the different stages of company building and investment.
- 90% of DCM’s focus is in the Seed and Series A&B stages
- At the Seed stage, they want to see a “hair on fire” problem being solved. They look for founders with ambition, grit, a bias toward action, and coach ability. They ask, when things get hard, what keeps this founder going?
- At Series A, they look for $1M ARR. At Series B, $10M ARR. At these stages, DCM looks for 15% month over month growth, early product market fit, and a sightline to growth.
- DCM reserves 10% of their fund to Growth/Series C stage.
- They work globally. Every geography is a little bit ahead of every other geography in some way.
- DCM has a core belief that every company grows better with collaboration.
- They help their portfolio companies with people, product, finance, GTM, and more.
- They think about team culture from the very beginning.
- GenAI has the ability to extend existing apps and services, as well as enable novel new apps and services. The later has greater potential for returns.
- One unsexy vertical they’re interested in is service-software hybrids.
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