Award winner | Firm of the Year 2025 (Sub-€200M): Point Nine (represented by Ricardo Sequerra Amram)

0:00Over the years, I think that that ethos has remained. To be a small firm, we believe that we'd rather be the best than the biggest. Each of us does two to three commitments with founders per year. So it's a low volume, high conviction, all in on a few select companies per year so that we can dedicate a huge amount of our time to think about the companies. This gravitational pull is maybe the best way to describe these types of really special individuals that when we get to interface with we try to do everything we can to partner up with.

0:35Ricardo Sequerra Amram:We are live. We are live. In five. We are live. Four. We are live. Three. We are live. Two. We are live. One.

0:53For everyone that doesn't know Point9 that well, The firm was started roughly 16 years ago by two of my partners, Christoph Jans and Pavel Chudzinski, a German and a Pole that met in Berlin and started investing as angel investors, met each other in so many cap tables that over time they decided to institutionalize their angel activity and start point nine. and you know this was a time where there weren't that many seed specific focused funds in Europe there was a trend around the U.S. around micro VCs smaller funds that were less that were much more focused on early stage investing seed was pre-seed back then there was no such thing as pre-seed and the thesis that my two partners underwrote was that you know number one there was a need for a seed-focused fund that would lead rounds at seed, not just chip in, because there was a ton of people that would chip into rounds, but not really a ton of people that were ready to lead the round and take over 50 to 70 percent of the round.

1:57A contrarian thing was that, like, headquartered in Berlin, seed was very local, and we decided to be global from day one. First two checks that 0.9 ever did were in New Zealand and in Canada, and then the third one in Canada. Two of those companies are unicorns today. We thought that releasing the geographical constraint was an important factor because we had a very strong thesis. This is, again, close to 2008, and the winning models, or the models that we bet on, became the winning models of the Internet era, which is an era that we can probably conclude that is sort of like ending towards the intelligence era, and we can talk about that later when we discuss thesis, but B2B SaaS and marketplaces were the big two theses that we underwrote.

2:44And that led to, you know, 10 plus$100 million revenue businesses like Zendesk and Contentful and Algolia and Delivery Hero and Revolut and many, many others that my partners and the team back then was very, you know, fortunate to be able to partner with. and over the years I think that that ethos has remained to be a small firm we believe that like we'd rather be the best than the biggest we think that the size of the fund we've scaled to 180 million from a fund of seven then 20 then they'll kill me if I get the numbers wrong but like 50 70, 99, 180. The only reason we've scaled the fund size is so that we can continue doing what we want to do, which is to lead seed rounds.

3:36And so the inflation of the round size is what led us to scale the fund size. The way we work is that each partner at point nine, and we can talk about the equal partnership model in a sec, we're four equal partners. Two of them are the founders. Louis was sort of like went up the ranks inside the firm and I was brought on board seven years ago and you know like each of us does two to three commitments with founders per year. So it's a low volume, high conviction, all in on a few select companies per year so that we can dedicate a huge amount of our time to think about the companies, think about their problems, discuss with founders at length the different things that they have ahead of them.

4:23And ultimately, that really is what being a true partner to founders is, is the ability to not just have a sense of what's going on in the company, but intimately knowing what's going on inside the company. And that's sort of the commitment that we make to founders when we commit to invest in their businesses, is that we are going to allocate, you know, I joke about this, a part of our brain, you know, space will be allocated to them. you know there's I joke that there's like wife kids and then all of the other portfolio companies and there's a limited space in order to be able to provide the service level that we are proud of to the people we partner with yes I want to I want to just you know ask you to dive a bit on the on the flip side of it so what trade-offs are you accepting by staying within this operating model I don't want to say not scaling because I think that's that that sometimes has a negative connotation but like what are the trade-offs like what what what kind of do you wish that you could do but because of this well it impacts in a way that you'd rather see it differently i think that like the way we think about this you know the firm is built by design um to be uh sort of like anti-scaling to have anti-scaling mechanisms you could say that like we have less optionality to invest in other stages, but the reality is that we don't want to.

5:45We believe that the early stage pre-seed and seed investment is a craft, and by focusing exclusively on that, the identification of outlier potential at the earliest stages of company building, we're really able to be good at it. And if we start thinking about how does a 20 million or 30 million or 50 million check look like in company X, Y, or Z, we're diluting the work that we need to do to identify outlier talent at the earliest stages. What I think is maybe a trade-off is maybe team size. I would say that we're four GPs, we're equal partners, we don't have a program of analysts, associates, principals, partners, GPs.

6:32We currently have one analyst working with us doing mostly research, which means that every interaction that a founder has when speaking 2.9 is with someone that can write a check and can commit to partner up with founders. But that means that we have a smaller team. We are not going to scale a fund to 500 million, at least not in the foreseeable future. but that also means that like the amount of capital per partner at the moment feels super right with 200 with roughly 180 million per partner we do think that there's space around the table for a couple more people the firm you know obviously i think christoph and pavel have voracious curiosity to continue building but in the same way that they hired me and brought Louis on board to the partnership when we were in our mid-20s.

7:28I think we have appetite to bring the next folks that are in their mid-20s so that we can continue refreshing ideas inside the firm. But in order to have efficient conversations, in order for us to be able to learn from each other, in order for us to be able to go deep on specific topics, we can't have 12 people around the table. We can have five, we can have six, we probably can't have more than that. That's our belief. So when I started in venture, point nine was almost, in my mind at least, synonym would be to be SaaS. That's very different from today. You know, if we look at the recent investments, that's a completely different story.

8:07As I said, we're talking about maintaining conviction at seed stage, but the thesis evolution, like how was that managed internally and how did you get to where you are today and describe that as well? One of our long-lasting LPs has once said in an LPAC meeting, you need to be focused initially to earn your right to be a generalist. And I don't think we are generalists. I think that each of us is just voraciously curious about technology and about the entrepreneurial endeavor. So we are looking for the next big thing. we were able to explore enterprise software, B2B SaaS, even network effects driven businesses and marketplaces and be super successful.

9:00But the reason we were successful was that, and believe it or not, this is true, when Christoph and Pavel started investing in B2B SaaS, it was considered deep tech. Everyone was doing e-commerce and affiliate platforms and B2B SaaS was a weird thing. And so you need to constantly be looking for what's new in order to generate returns. And we definitely went to late stage SaaS and beautifully saw a new type of software emerge, which is AI. And we definitely were able to understand that AI is not just the layer that you slap on top of software, but it's just definitely a new type of technology that enables you to build very different types of businesses.

9:50So, like, we have done investments in AI before the chat GPT moment, but I would say that, like, we have gone very much all in on it. A bit like Stefan at Crandom was mentioning, we've been building so many tools. We have a command center with you know AI and AI analyst that helps us analyze opportunities and AI sourcer that looks for opportunities that fit each of our tastes and helps us screen more market than we could just the four of us we've built a ton and by building a ton you understand the technology more and more and you're able to ultimately you know relate at a much you know deeper level with the founders that you want to back.

10:36Besides AI, there's just been so many other things that like we started building breadcrumbs around investing in hardware businesses maybe 10 years ago, investing in flying cars, investing in a few like eVTOL and robotics businesses definitely ahead of their time. So, you know, seeing the shift towards hard tech slash deep tech was not a massive surprise, And the beauty of it is that a lot of hardware, hard tech, deep tech, and even I would call physical AI-type opportunities are essentially the software definition of the physical world. A lot of these opportunities have a center of gravity around software despite having multiple different layers of technology aggregated together.

11:26so I would say that like our bias to software is still a lens that we use to look at opportunities but we are looking for much more and so in order to be defending the new of today we need to keep updated and understand it very well and I think we have that constant curiosity to feel what the new is what what is not just a flavor of the week or a flavor of the month type of consensus investing but really something that is net new and that we haven't seen before, a none of one company. And historically, we've been much more excited about investing in what we call maybe like the raw diamonds, the unpolished gems, like the companies that don't look obvious at all.

12:14Believe it or not, not a lot of people wanted to invest in Revolut when we invested in that round. Those are typically the best opportunities. and so that quest continues irrespective of the technology paradigm and in the intelligence era we're more ready than ever to continue doing so You cued me perfectly for the question I wanted to ask so we spent part of the morning talking about the topic of recognizing greatness we had a couple of investors and founders here on stage and you actually wrote I want to say a year, year and a half ago maybe a bit more you wrote a really really cool essay around this concept of magnetism and I'm connecting this to this idea of identifying these rough diamonds right and so I'd love you to describe that concept of magnetism and what it means for you as an investor especially when you're meeting founders when you're hearing about new companies I mean that concept that I tried to put into words even if I'm not great at it, was just the idea that there are founders that we get to meet, that in that first instant, you feel a sort of magnetic pull towards them.

13:25This energy that just irrespective of what your calendar or schedule looks like, you're ready to throw it all out and just spend as many hours as you can getting to know this person. And that happens in the investment process, but that also happens with those founders, with their teams, with their ability to attract follow-on capital, with their ability to work with incredible people and recruit incredible people, with their ability to narrate a story that is ultimately able to bring customers, partners, anyone to relate with that story. this gravitational pull is maybe the best way to describe these types of really special individuals that when we get to interface with, we try to do everything we can to partner up with.

14:21But I don't think that's the only thing, right? That's just one concept that we try to identify. Going back to sort of like this concept of like non-consensus, raw diamonds, I mean, we're not looking per se it's not doesn't mean that we have a bias against it but like the x harvard x revolu x stripe let's go let's back this person because of the cv we're maybe looking much more for insights obsession and taste sometimes insight comes from research sometimes insight comes from working 10 years in an industry sometimes insight comes from a particular ux or behavior that they've identify it and try to productize.

15:04You need to go and look from where that insight comes from, but its absence is very telling. I think obsession comes from when you're in process and trying to get to know someone. It's this constant push to explain in the best way possible every single aspect of the business. You can't expect it to happen out of the gate, but you also need to have the ability to ask the right questions to let the gates open and enable these people to show their best expression of themselves. And then maybe the last bit is just this taste topic, which is very hard to grasp, but whether a founder has an obsession around providing the best user experience in their product or these days maybe like looks at algorithms in a beautiful way and thinks about the level of the weights in a model and talks about it in a way that expresses that they have tried many things, have seen what works, have seen what doesn't and have the intuition almost implicit, automatic, that something has to be done in a specific way and then trying to probe that to understand as much as possible where that comes from, how well that is expressed, how strong, what's the depth of thinking that extrapolates that level of taste is something that we think about a lot.

16:44So I think these, like, you know, like founders change. When I started in venture, I was backing 10-year-older people than me, and now I back 10 years younger people than me, which is daunting sometimes. Founders also change because, you know, now these days it's clear that we back much more technical people that need to have a much higher, how would I say, range of skills. If you're building AI systems and models, you probably need to know about the algorithmic capabilities of a team. But also if they're building it in healthcare, they also need to know healthcare. But if they're building it in a specific field of healthcare, maybe they also need to know how that workflow works.

17:29The depth of capabilities or of skill set is very high compared to maybe in the past. Very hard to back up, I don't want to be negative, but hard to back a rocket internet team building AI businesses today. So I think that the founder profile changes, but what we look for in founders at that early stage remains somewhat the same. And so the work that we do is to go on that quest to extract as much of that information from founders. And, you know, you can't do that actually in a one-week process where you meet a team and you need to, like, write a check five days later. And sometimes, like, we just shy away from those processes.

18:20Whereas, like, sometimes we don't because we feel that there's something there. But many times we do. but getting to know teams for a longer period of time allows you to get the complete picture of the puzzle.