Billion Dollar Moves™ with Sarah Chen-Spellings | Global Venture Capital The Rise of the Solo Capitalist: How One-Person Funds Are Winning Big w/ Itamar Novick, Recursive Ventures
With 25 years across engineering, operating, and venture capital, Itamar Novick knows what it takes to build billion-dollar companies—because he’s done it. From betting his life savings on Life360 (now $4.5B public) to helping 60+ startups raise Series A, Itamar shares the unfiltered playbook on solo capital, Pre-Seed power moves, and why he’s staying small in a mega-fund world.
Tune in for tactical insights on fundraising, AI investing, and VC truths founders should know!
TIMESTAMPS / KEY TAKEAWAYS
0:00 - Intro
02:10 - From Sandhill Road to solo GP: Itamar’s founder-focused philosophy
06:14 - Itamar’s bet on Life360: investing life savings and the $4.5B IPO journey
10:00 - Pivoting framework: ‘Time is money and money is time’
13:42 - The birth of Recursive Ventures
15:14 - Rise of solo GPs: How Tech, AI, & LPs making it more feasible
18:02 - AI’s role in venture — replacing VCs?
21:18 - Pre-Seed investing strategy: Staying small, focused, and lean.
24:44 - Trend of Mega Funds as financial services firms
27:35 - Returning capital before IPOs: Liquidity and Secondaries
33:54 - AI investing deep dive: Infra vs. application layer; importance of Moat
40:14 - Founders’ pitfalls: dilution, anti-patterns, and mispriced valuations
44:03 - Billion Dollar Questions
About Itamar Novick
Itamar is a solo capitalist and the founder of Recursive Ventures, a pre-seed fund focused on fintech, AI and emerging tech startups. Itamar has been on all sides of the startup table: as a founder and executive, an institutional VC, and an angel investor.
He has supported over 50 successful startups, including Deel, Honeybook, Placer, Credible (IPO), MileIQ (acquired by Microsoft), Automatic Labs (acquired by SiriusXM), Tile (acquired by Life360), SafeGraph, and Armory. He’s been recognized by Business Insider as a Top 100 global seed investor. As an operator, he helped take Life360 from Seed to IPO, scaling the business to over $250m in revenue.
Before that, Itamar was a founding team member and head of Product at Gigya (acquired by SAP). He holds an MBA from Berkeley Haas and an undergraduate degree in computer science from the Tel-Aviv Jaffa College.
FOLLOW ITAMAR:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamarnovick/
About Recursive Ventures
Recursive Ventures is a San Francisco based VC fund investing in US Pre-seed and Seed Tech Startups disrupting industries through use of Data and Artificial Intelligence. Recursive is managed by Itamar Novick with support from a seasoned group of Founders, Operators, and go-to-market experts.
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PODCAST INFO:
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