Hello and welcome to the 10th episode of the 20 minute VC with Harry Stebbings.

On today's show, I'm hugely excited to welcome Nico Bonatzos.

Nico is Principal at General Catalyst Partners, where he has been involved with investments in the lights of Snapchat, Spoon Rocket and Tune In.

Now I've done enough talking, so it's time to dive into the episode.

Three, two, one, zero.

You have now arrived at your destination.

First, I'm really curious about how you got into the technology industry and into the venture capital industry specifically.

Could you tell us a little about that

and your background? Sure. So I grew up in Greece and my background is in electrical and computer

engineering. I basically spent the last decade studying and researching many different types of engineering, electrical,

computer, manufacturing, biomedical, in a bunch of different places and industries in the world.

So spend time working as a computer engineer in Tokyo,

spent time studying manufacturing, engineering in the UK,

did research in biomedical signal processing at Harvard.

And I was very fortunate to move to Silicon Valley five and a half years ago to go to Stanford, study a little bit of operations researcher and do research in cloud computing.

And also, SIRTI, the SOSSO Networking company that ended up being a massive failure due to huge platform risk that we took. I lucked out to

join a venture capital firm called General Catalyst right when we were starting the office

here in California in late 2010 and the last four plus years

have been a VC so in terms of how I became a venture capitalist happened to be the right person

at the right time for the right thing it wasn't planned I hadn't thought about becoming a VC at the time.

I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

But unfortunately, my company was clear that it would fail.

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