Roger Ehrenberg is the founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City. In this episode, Roger gives a master class on all aspects of starting and building a venture firm.

IA is managing $475M across four funds, and is currently investing out of its $160M fourth fund. Fund 1 was a $50MM fund raised during the global financial crisis, with a first close of $17MM.

Earlier in his career, Roger served as CEO of DB Advisors, was Global co-head of Deutsche Bank’s Strategic Equity Transactions Group, and was an investment banker at Citibank in derivatives, capital structuring and Mergers & Acquisitions.

Roger currently sits on the Boards of Ethyca, Gospel Technology, Mighty, Octane and TransferWise, and was an early lead investor in both The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD) and Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG). Formerly, he served on the boards of Buddy Media (sold to Salesforce for $800M), Recorded Future (sold to Insight for $780MM), and Simple Finance (sold to BBVA for $120M).

In this episode, Roger covers the following:

* His background from going from M&A banking and hedge to early stage investing.

* The opportunity and vision he saw for IA during the global financial crisis.

* The amount of diligence he went through for choosing a partner.

* How he made some unconventionally sized portfolio bets early in Fund 1 when the fund was still raising.

* IA’s philosophy on fund sizing.

* How he thinks about portfolio construction and recycling.

* How he thinks about staying disciplined on ownership and valuation targets and when to have some flexibility.

* The role of pattern matching and how IA tests and re-tests this.

Here are some resources to learn more about Roger:

* IA Ventures website

* Roger’s Information Arbitrage blog. The following posts should be required reading for emerging managers:

* Building a Seed Stage Venture Fund

* Working to Build a Better Mousetrap

* Thoughts on distribution strategy

* A presentation Data-Driven Business Models for The Research Board’s Global CIO Conference

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