Investing in Companies with Co-Founders vs. Solo Founders

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The chapter delves into the debate around investing in companies with co-founders versus solo founders, exploring Google Ventures' approach of assessing founders' capabilities to fill skill gaps. It discusses the perceived safety in investing in co-founder companies, the importance of recruiting and filling skill gaps, and the considerations around risk evaluation for investors. Additionally, it touches on macroeconomics' impact on venture capital, New York City's thriving tech ecosystem post-pandemic, and the significance of geography in entrepreneurship.

GV, or Google Ventures, is an independent venture capital firm backed by Alphabet.

Erik Nordlander is a General Partner at GV and invests across enterprise software and frontier technology, focusing on developer tools, cloud infrastructure and machine learning. He has backed companies like Cockroach, Warp and Neo4j. Prior to joining GV in 2010 and opening up the firm’s New York City office, Erik was at Google and led development of the company’s next-gen display and serving system, and built statistical and machine learning models for Google’s ad businesses.

Erik joins the podcast to talk about his work.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk.