Engineer turned VC | Leo Polovets, cofounder and GP at Susa Ventures

Infinite Curiosity Pod with Prateek Joshi

Leo Polovets is a cofounder and General Partner at Susa Ventures, a seed stage firm that has invested in iconic companies such as Robinhood and Flexport. Prior to Susa, he was the second engineering hire at Linkedin where he helped build the first versions of products like LinkedIn Jobs and LinkedIn Groups. He then worked on payment fraud detection algorithms at Google, and was also an early engineer at Factual, where he built data cleaning, processing, and deduping software. And he has an engineering degree from Caltech.
In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- How to derisk a startup
- PMF risk, market risk, and funding risk
- How should enterprise SaaS founders think about the first 10 customers (choice of customers, how to find them, how to convince them)
- How should VCs think about providing feedback on pitches (why is it important and how to do it well)
- Pricing mechanics
- How should seed stage companies think about moat
- AI-infused software applications
- What gets him excited about an investment opportunity
- GTM motion of successful seed stage startups
Leo's favorite books:
- A Guide to the Good Life (Author: William Irvine)
- Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth (Authors: Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares)
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Where to find Prateek Joshi:
Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com
Website: https://prateekj.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi