20VC Rising Star: Why Founders Should Expect More From Their VCs | How To Know Pre-Investment Whether a VC Will Be Valuable and How to Get the Most Value Out of Them | Is There a Misalignment Between Founders and VCs with Oana Olteanu, Partner @ SignalFir
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Oana Olteanu is a Partner @ SignalFire where she focuses on enterprise software at Seed, Series A and Series B. Prior to joining SignalFire, Oana was at Scale Venture Partners where she invested in applied ML and developer tooling. Oana sourced Scale’s investments in Observe.ai, Flatfile, and Proscia. She was part of the deal teams for Honeycomb and AllyO (acquired by HireVue). She also supported existing portfolio companies such as Dialpad, Matillion, and BigID. Prior to Scale, Oana was an AI seed investor at SAP.io, SAP’s $35M seed fund, where she sourced the investments in Plum.io, Oto.ai, and Akorda.
In Today's Episode with Oana Olteanu We Discuss:
1.) From Tank Driving in Romania to VC's Rising Star:
- How Oana made her way from driving tanks in Romania to becoming a VC?
- How did leaving Romania for Germany and then moving to the West Coast impact her mindset?
- What does Oana know now that she wishes she had known when she entered VC?
2.) How to Assess a VC: The Founders Guide:
- Pre-investment, how can founders know whether a VC can add value? What are the signs?
- What three core questions will reveal how much value a VC can add?
- Post-investment, what can founders do to extract the most value from their VCs?
- What should the founders ask their investors for help with? What should they do themselves?
3.) The VC Founder Relationship:
- Oana has the highest founder NPS of any VC I have ever had on 20VC, what does Oana believe makes her founders rate her contribution so highly? What works? What does not?
- How does Oana give sometimes very hard feedback to founders but retain that relationship of trust and safety at the same time? What mistakes do other VCs make in giving feedback?
- What does Oana believe are the single biggest misalignment between VCs and founders?
4.) VCs Behaving Badly: 101
- What are the single biggest ways Oana sees VCs behaving badly?
- How does Oana think founders expectations of the product of venture should change?
- Does Oana believe boards are valuable? What can be done to improve them?
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:
Oana's Favourite Book: The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living: Featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You don't have to be part of the golf club or the battery club or whatever club. |
| 0:06.2 | You can just be yourself and people will appreciate that. |
| 0:09.3 | Today we have an insanely special show, what I'm calling 20 VCs Rising Star Invention. |
| 0:14.4 | Now, three months ago I tweeted, I want to do a series on the Rising Stars of Venture Capital, |
| 0:19.4 | principals or partners who've led deals, |
| 0:22.0 | sat on boards and have insanely high founder NPS. Now following this, I got over a thousand |
| 0:27.1 | submissions and insane influx of recommendations, but there was one specific person who got far |
| 0:32.7 | more than anyone else from founders that they've backed, from founders that they haven't backed, |
| 0:37.2 | from past and present team members. |
| 0:39.3 | This person got triple the submissions as the second person, and since I've gotten to know her, and bluntly, I see why. |
| 0:46.3 | She really is one of the best and an incredibly special person. |
| 0:49.3 | And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Oana Altianoo, partner at Signal Fire, where she focuses |
| 0:54.7 | on enterprise software at Seed, Series A and B. |
| 0:58.1 | And prior to Signal Fire, Oana was at Scale venture partners, where she also invested in applied |
| 1:02.6 | ML and developer tooling, investing in the likes of Observe AI, Flatfile and ProChiar. |
| 1:08.1 | And prior to scale, Oana was an AI seed investor at SAP with their $35 million |
| 1:13.0 | seed fund where she sourced investments in plumb.io, Otto.a.i and Accorda. And I'd also |
| 1:18.5 | want to say a huge thank you to Jim Stoneham and Walter at Signal Fire and then also Jay Das for some |
| 1:23.8 | amazing question suggestions today. But before we move into the episode today, |
| 1:27.8 | holiday gifting for your friends and family can be hard. |
| 1:30.8 | And for your business, it can be even harder. |
| 1:32.8 | And Open helps companies of all sizes deliver better gifts, |
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