Humba Ventures: Investing in Deep Tech Startups with Engineering Focus

Lab to Startup

Leo Polovets is the Co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures. Leo focuses on enterprise software and technical products at Susa. About two years ago, He also started Humba Ventures, a fund that invests in deep tech and critical national sectors like energy and defense at Humba.

Leo led Susa's investments in Mashgin, People Data Labs, Scalyr, and Treasury Prime. Having been a software engineer for 10+ years, Leo approaches challenges with an engineering mindset and supports portfolio companies in vetting and hiring technical talent. Prior to Susa, Leo was the second engineering hire at Linkedin, where he worked on the first versions of products like LinkedIn Jobs and LinkedIn Groups. Leo then worked on payment fraud detection algorithms at Google, and was also an early engineer at Factual, where he built data processing software. Leo received a bachelor's degree in Engineering and Applied Science (Computer Science) from Caltech.

We talk about lessons that translate from investing in traditional startups; explore lessons learned about market sizing, pricing, team dynamics, managing burn, scaling, valuation and many other topics in the deep tech space.

Shownotes:

• https://humbaventures.com/
• Leo’s presentation on “Exploring Startup Ideas” https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C-JFkqsY40tidqPD1OZbV3-OXPAyrsPIV5Q_00PkToQ/edit#slide=id.g221d008c440_0_35
• Thinking about making money for scientific founders
• Thinking about market attributes for a potential startup
• Intro to Humba ventures
• Investing in deep tech
• Founder-market fit; Time to make money
• Investment thesis
• Communication: between team members, to investors and beyond
• Working with startup teams: Commercialization
• Pricing in deep tech: Think of value being created
• How to ask for money for your product?
• Aloha robot- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaaZ8ss-HP4&t=5s
• Story telling
• Manage your burn!
• Scaling: Calibrating on talent; learning to delegate; firing Bs and B+s on the team
• Keeping up with new technologies
• Thoughts on valuation
• What Leo likes to hear while being pitched to