Sunil Nagaraj of Ubiquity Ventures on the journey of a solo-GP, The Importance of Authenticity, and Navigating Hype Cycles

Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.

On this week’s show, I’m thrilled to be joined by Sunil Nagaraj, Founder of Ubiquity Ventures. Sunil started Ubiquity in 2017 to focus on backing technical founders at the pre-seed and seed stages around a thesis he calls “nerdy and early.” Before starting Ubiquity, Sunil spent just over 6 years at Bessemer Venture Partners, and began his career as a founder of a startup.

With so many solo-GP firms emerging, Sunil took us through us his lens of a solo-GP, and how he has built and grown ubiquity over the last 7 years.

This was a very insightful conversation and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

About Sunil Nagaraj:Sunil Nagaraj is the Founder and Managing Partner of Ubiquity Ventures, a seed-stage institutional venture capital firm with over $150 million under management and a focus on "software beyond the screen"® startups. This includes B2B technology companies that utilize smart hardware or machine learning to solve business problems outside the reach of computers and smartphones.

Prior to founding Ubiquity Ventures, Sunil spent the better part of a decade with Bessemer Venture Partners where his work included leading the seed rounds of Auth0 (acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion) and Zapier as well as investments in Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB), Spire (NASDAQ: SPIR), Velo3D (NYSE: VLD), Tile (acquired by Life360), and Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $1 billion). Before investing, Sunil was Founder and CEO of Triangulate, a VC-backed online dating startup using machine learning and behavioral data to improve matching accuracy. He has also worked at Bain & Company, Cisco, and Microsoft.

Sunil holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In this episode we discuss:(01:45) Sunil’s journey into tech and investing(04:33) The decision to become a solo GP after spending his career in partnerships and team(09:56) How the first raise for Ubiquity went(13:23) LP segments(19:28) The types of founders that Sunil likes to back(22:25) Biggest lessons learned during his time in VC(24:54) Lessons from his anti-portfolio(28:37) Sizing your fund to be both small and nimble and large enough to write meaningful checks(31:33) The potential for AI(36:25) Navigating the hype cycles in VC(38:43) When to make exceptions in terms of ownership or check size(41:20) What the current VC market is like and how it might evolve(44:28) The advice he would give himself at the start of his career

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Sunil. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.

Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee

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