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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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