About a decade ago, when I was still early in my VC career, I held founder/VC office hours for a few years around the holidays. These meetings were fun and I still keep in touch with some of the people I met back then.
I’d like to bring this experiment back for 2025.
If you’re an early-stage or aspiring deep tech founder and think a 20-30 minute virtual chat would be useful to you, please apply. I’ll hold a total of about 25 sessions over the days before Christmas and New Year’s Eve. If I get a lot of applications, I’ll pick the ones where I’m best able to help.
About me: I was a software engineer for ten years (2nd engineering hire at LinkedIn, then a few years at Google). I then switched to venture capital, co-founded Susa Ventures (software fund) in 2013, and more recently started Susa’s sister fund Humba Ventures (deep tech fund) four years ago.
Criteria:
You’re US/Canada-based.
You’re the founder of a pre-Series A deep tech company, or you’re thinking of starting one. (This is the stage where my advice/feedback would be most appropriate.) The areas I’ve been spending time in over the past few years are robotics, energy, defense, manufacturing, space, techbio, etc.
You have a topic that we could cover well in a relatively short period of time.
Topics that work well: pitch practice/feedback, product feedback, fundraising advice, discussing founder issues, brainstorming product/business/GTM strategy, etc.
Things don’t work well: requests for intros (they don’t scale + it’s hard to give a strong intro after a single short chat), pitching Humba Ventures for an investment (if you want to pitch us, my email is on my LinkedIn page), questions that require deep expertise in a specific area that I don’t know well.
If you’re interested, please apply by 11:59 PM (PST) on December 18. [Sorry, applications are now closed.]
If your friends or online followers might be interested, please share this with them :)