E477 | Jeremy Uzan, Singular: Chasing Pure Performance, Generalist VCs & Why Europe is Ready for Science-Driven Founders

0:00What if the biggest advantage in European venture capital isn't having more capital, but having less overhead. There was an opportunity to build a pure European player active at Series A stage with a generalist approach. While billion-dollar funds struggle with their own weight, Jeremy Usand spotted something different. We've seen a lot of inefficiencies in VCs, and we think that those inefficiencies are often connected to the size of the team. The solution? Strip away everything that doesn't serve founders. And it's much easier to execute with a small team. Be sure that they have everything they need to execute.

0:32But can a six-person squad really compete with the Giants? The proof is in their approach. Diversification is key. Different industries, different business models, different geos. And the timing couldn't be better. A new breed of entrepreneur is emerging across Europe. People coming out of their PhDs with already like a business brain. And this is very new and this is very exciting. Jeremy knows exactly what he's looking for. Honestly, very excited. We just need to find the right funding team. And we want those companies where you see actually the equity story and the exit path. Discover how Singular is rewriting the Series A playbook, one smart bet at a time.

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1:48Tear down this wall. It's more than just an ally. This is a union of values. Let's start acting. This show is not investment advice, and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. All right, everyone. Welcome back to the European VC Podcast. Today, we are doing an episode that I have been very excited about. We're talking to Jeremy Usan from Sinkila. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast. I'm not just excited because we've had some good conversations ahead of this, but also because you're one of the funds that speak a little less about yourselves in the ecosystem. So I'm looking forward to really dive in to Sinkil and how you think about the market we're in today.

2:33I'll do my best. Thanks for having me. So, Jeremy, you're co-founder and GP. Your latest fund is$400 million. It's the second fund. You have$625 million under management. you are headquartered in basically all of Europe so to say and you're also investing pan-European with a target stage of C to series B but you're focusing more than anything on series A. You are a generalist firm you're doing anything from consumer to deep tech and anything in between and you've made some notable investments that many of us will know which is Basecamp Research which is in tech bio, Aikido, Cybersecurity, Typology which is Consumer, Homa, Gaming, oracle oncology in tech bio as well.

3:15So did I get some of that correct? Did I forget something? Do you think there's something to add? I guess you must have been correct because I realized that everything is so generalist. We can do from C to B. We're everywhere in Europe. We can do anything. Yeah, I guess it's pretty true. Which gets us to the perfect question to ask you then. Why should Syncula exist? Okay, that's a good one. So maybe to take a few steps back, just with two co-founders we created Singular four or five years ago now and we've been in this industry for the last 20 years so we're like I would say I hope young veterans of the industry on my end engineering background and I've been working in this ecosystem for the last 20 years and this is my this is my whole career actually three four years as a banker helping startup find money and then I switched to the investment side with Rafi so Rafi was my colleague for eight nine years before we started Singular I guess we kind of realized that there was an opportunity to build a pure European player active at series A stage with a generalist approach and I think this was possible because the last 10 years we saw a little contrast appearing in the market, seeing the most visible brands or the best brands becoming naturally global, and seeing a lot of other brands, a bit smaller, becoming pushed at early stage, usually the third stage, and very often with a specialist approach.

4:51So naturally, we thought that there was a spot. There was some space that we could fill, bringing something that we thought could be interesting to the market with a very simple approach, like trying to build this player, a bit like the best of both worlds, between like a small and agile team, the look and feel of an early stage seed fund with the characteristic of the bigger platforms, meaning large ticket size, generalist, could be multi-stage, offering a platform team, helping the portfolio, So like all the characteristics you can find attractive when you look at the biggest platforms, but in a smaller team setup.

5:36I'm still surprised, but actually it happened. So we raised the first fund in 2020, second fund in 2023. And for now, we are executing as planned. If I asked your LPs, because you won't say it yourself, you won't pick yourself up. What would they say? Why did they back Jeremy and Rafi? Honest answer, I think it's when you're creating something, whatever it is, including a fan, I think you're backing a team mainly. We were in an interesting, I guess, situation where we had a decent track record, as we say. Good track record, not a first-time team. We've been working together for eight, nine years at the time when we launched Singular.

6:23Now it's been 15 years. Pretty straightforward approach. nothing fancy, nothing complicated, plain vanilla approach actually, where you're actually chasing performance and that's it. We are not very thesis driven. We don't know exactly how will be the world in a couple of years. We are pretty convinced that the game here is to spot the best funding teams, assess if they're working on something that could really make sense and that could become pretty big and support them along the whole journey. And that's it. And we naturally met the type of LPs that could be a good fit. We had from the first, second, a very honest and transparent relationship.

7:09And they decided to back us the same way VCs are actually backing seed founders or pre-seed founders. You think that they have a good vision. They have on paper a good track record. So statistically, there's a good chance that they will do well. Could you tell me about, because you have a philosophy around having a small and tight-knit team. Could you tell me about that philosophy, why you think it's the right thing for you and why you think it's a good fit for the market that we have? Usually, BCs are pretty small animals, I would say. You don't really have those massive teams you can find in the industry.

7:49like any other industry. That said, we've seen a lot of inefficiencies in VCs. And we think that those inefficiencies are often connected to the size of the team. We wanted to find something that was agile, flexible, the right level of velocity. And to do that, we think you need to find great talents. You need to find the right culture. You need to be sure that everyone is running in the same direction. You need to find this kind of team vibe that will be very important. You need to be sure that everything is working well at a partnership level. So all those small characteristics like decision making, how you debrief, how you process deal flow, how you interact with founders, all those things are actually pretty important in the whole, I would say, success equation of a fund.

8:50And it's much easier to execute with a small team. It's like it's less variables, I would say. So we decided to go for this from day one with the idea that we will just like opportunistically find the right people, fight to be sure that they are joining, keeping an eye on them to be sure that they have everything they need to execute and do their thing. And it's kind of working. So we're, of course, naturally growing. Now it's around 15 people, singular, base between Paris and London. I think we will push a bit more. Maybe 20 is the right size, maybe a bit more. Again, we don't have this fantasy of having a 100, 200 people team.

9:31The fact that we're focusing on Europe, the fact that we're focusing on a certain stage, I think helps. You're mentioning many things here, Jeremy. Agility, flexibility, culture, talent, that you make sure everyone's running in the same direction and that there's partnership alignment. I'd love to dig deep on each of them. If we think about agility and flexibility, how do you make sure that you've built that into the fabric of Sinclair? That's a tricky question, I guess. You need to recruit people that will thrive in this type of environment. So you need to be sure that you find people that will be happy with flexibility and this type of agile approach.

10:16But also you need to be sure that culturally this is very clear that it's okay, that we are very open to find creativity within the team. We're very fine with having feedback from everyone from the team. When we do an IC, for example, when we do an investment committee, we're very happy if the analyst of the team is giving his his opinion on the team the project the trajectory the exit potential it's actually a paradigm that you're building you're building this like kind of safe place where everyone can really like say what they have to say and do what they can do how do you empower because i think with agility and flexibility and what you just described with the analyst being able to speak up and actually having a voice?

11:06How do you think about empowerment in the team? It's a difficult question because I think this is happening naturally. We don't have like a recipe for that. Again, like I think we're respecting everyone. We are verbal about that. Like, so we're very fine with saying that the best company we'll ever find could come from everywhere, including it could be like the best friend of an analyst, you know, and the fact that we're saying this and we're not creating this kind of fake hierarchy where the smart people are at the top and everyone else is just like running everywhere to make sure that those guys are happy.

11:45It's more a question of culture than a question of like system and workflows. And, you know, I guess it's very much because like this is what we truly think. It's value from people. This is how we think you actually achieve success or greatness. So the question is more about like finding the right people, being sure that you give them the right weapons so they can like do their thing and being also honest. If like, if it's not a good fit, you need to just be honest and say that it's not a good fit. But we're not trying to grow. So we're not like optimizing for size or we're not optimizing for those short term characteristics.

12:27We're optimizing for the long term. I guess there is no other way, actually. Like if you're really optimizing for the long term, you need to find people that will join the team that are in the same mindset and that will play the game with those rules. And then it's very homogenous. Everything is working by itself, I would say. Yeah. Can you tell me a bit about how you think about recruiting and unlocking? Because I think, at least personally, my dream is always to find self efficacious. Is that the word? People, employees that truly just run with the ball and bring an entrepreneurial mindset. But it can be difficult to find people where you have that at the same time as you also have high competence and that you also built the right culture for them and so on.

13:15I think recruitment is very hard. I don't know if we are average, if we're good or if we're bad at it. But what I can say is it's difficult. It's those processes where you need to make a kind of a quick decision on opportunities. and also opportunities are much more complex than what you're seeing during an interview. So I think we have pretty good recruitment processes in place to assess what type of brand you have. So are you more like a scientific? Are you more a business guy? Do you have a good ability to create relationships with potentially founders? Are you like more a fundamentalist or a dreamer in terms of nature of VC?

13:58do you understand the concept of building networks how you leverage this to generate deal flow do you have the ability to assess an opportunity quickly do you have this kind of investor mindset where you are not looking exactly at a photo you're looking at something in motion in a way and you can actually think about what it could become in the future this i think we kind of have a method to just detect this. The tricky thing is what you just said just after, which is finding people with this kind of grit. The fact that they're pushing 1 % more, the fact that they have this like small entrepreneurial gene, this is very tricky.

14:40Like, and this, on this, I don't have a magic recipe. I mean, very often it's connected to imposter syndrome in a way. So those people are pushing a bit more because they feel a bit unsecure. but honestly I think you cannot detect this in an interview so I guess it's part of the game to know that you're doing whatever you can to assess those things but you need to accept the idea that actually for the first three to six months you will actually discover this part of the personality of the people you're recruiting because you need to see them like in situations actually you need to see them being active and see if they have this one percent more to put on the table or if they don't.

15:24I'm not saying that if you don't, it's a massive problem, but I'm saying that if you have, it's a massive advantage. And I think it's absolutely needed to grow in venture. Like if you really want to become a great VC, I think you need to have that part to your personality. I think it's very hard if you don't. I think you connect on a different level with founders as well. Exactly. I'd love to ask you about your investment strategy could you just if you line it out for everyone so they can hear them there are a couple of parts that i'd love to dive a bit more into yeah honestly it's a it's a it's a pretty simple one we are focusing exclusively on europe europe for us is europe plus uk of course we are series a focus but we can opportunistically opportunistically invest at c or b and the third one the third pillar is we're lead investors targeting a pretty sizable ownership in companies so a true lead investor.

16:22Last thing I can say is we target a 25 portfolio company setup. Average ticket is around 10 million. One of the points that are quite key to you is diversification. Could you tell me about how you think about diversification and why you single that out as something that's more important to you than maybe it might be for the average? So I guess this is like some kind of religion. I don't know if we're right or not, but we think diversification is key in this very specific asset class where we cannot really predict a lot of things. Diversification is a mix of a number of companies in the same firm.

17:01It's a mix of different industries, different business models, different geos. So yes, diversification is key. If you look at our portfolio, you will see a lot of different stuff. And as you said, like going from pure consumer brands to tech bio is like, it's really like, it's massive. We're fine with looking at anything. The first element in the scorecard is trying to find amazing funding teams. And once you have that, you kind of follow a bit their lead. Those amazing founders, they kind of know what they're doing. so there's a high probability that if you find an amazing funding team they will like bring you to something interesting i mean all this the old investors know that like you never know if you're betting on the right project it's highly probable that there will be some changes some pivotal moments and stuff but the thing that is actually like never changing is the team you're you're betting on.

18:06And this is our approach. It's pretty simple. The only thing I could add is we like full diversification, but we're very happy to have at a partner level to have some like, let's say, swim lanes. Like it's fine to be a partner that is a bit more sensitive to B2B or a bit more sensitive to B2C or to cybersecurity or to, I don't know, I think by OR. But at a more general level, we're fine with like having a generalist. I guess it's not just fine. It's actually a good thing because oftentimes you need to lean into your strengths as a and your networks your networks exactly exactly exactly it is difficult to know if if it will have an impact on performance because you're a better picker or if it will have an impact on performance because you will be picked more often by founders that think you're actually an expert on their field this i don't know and honestly it's probably both right maybe at least my philosophy peter Thiel famously has said that diversification is what investors do when they don't know what they're doing.

19:09He probably talks also a lot heavily there about the very broad portfolios, which yours is obviously not. However, I would love to ask you, because diversification to me is a bit like, so you have a bit competing views, right? or competing balances because on the one hand, you have a set amount of deal flow and opportunities that you look at that are truly remarkable. And in one year, they might fall more in one vertical or one type of business model than another. So that could then tell you that I need to go where the opportunities are. And we're finding that we need to go, for that reason, a little too heavily into AI right now compared to where we actually maybe would like to be.

20:02But it is where the opportunities are right now. That might be one perspective. You also have another one, which is, well, most LPs would have you fit into their portfolio model as one of many. and for that reason they don't want you to diversify as much because their LP strategy gives them the diversification they want. They want you to just chase Elf as much as you can. How are you thinking about this? How are you verbalizing it when you're thinking around diversification? So I guess two things. The first one is to come back to what you said on diversification. It doesn't mean that we're doing everything at the same time.

20:45It means that actually, if you look at what we've been doing, we are temporary specialists. There is a moment where for six months, one year, where we just build knowledge and we build network on a specific category of companies. And this is the moment where we just filter out and spot the right founders and stuff and do a couple of investments. So usually this is how it's happening. But we really have the impression that this ecosystem is moving so fast that it's actually quite difficult to start operations in 2020 and say that you will be a fund dedicated to crypto. It actually doesn't make sense to us because it's very difficult to predict if crypto will be a massive thing in the coming two to three years, which are your investment period, or if it's actually right now a good moment, but in two to three years, some new stuff will appear.

21:40So we have, I guess, this type of approach where we are trying to chase a couple of interesting trends, not necessarily mainstream, but still like, for example, last year, we decided to invest time and energy in tech bio projects, and we found amazing stuff. doesn't mean at all that two years ago we thought tech bio will be a thing for us it's just that we met founders we realized that this was interesting object in terms of risk return ratio defensibility uh leveraging the right uh technological building blocks and stuff so we did it i don't know if we will do three or four more or if this is fine but like if i'm looking back at the last 12 months this is where we were like focusing a bit our energy and on your second part of the question, which is LPs.

22:29I'm sorry to say something that is very basic, but we are actually not optimizing for LPs. We are optimizing for performance. This is very basic, but actually this is very true in our case. Like we are honestly fighting for performance. It's not like a marketing thing or we are honestly fighting for performance. And this will actually connect us to a certain type of LPs. If you are a massive LP and you need allocation, stuff maybe this is not for us because we will not like tick all the boxes but if you're an lp that is looking for performance and you just like add blocks you add like cards to your like card deck thinking that each card can actually deliver performance on its own and maybe some some cards will be competitive and stuff and you don't care you just want to maximize the probability of performance then we could be a good a good option it's easy to say because of course every vc wants to say that they are performance driven, but this is honestly how we approach everything, including the relationship with LPs.

23:30I always find LP portfolio construction so interesting because it is exactly as you say, we have someone on one hand that will have, they are trying to build a portfolio that gives them exposure across all of Europe, as an example. And then for that reason, they will pick one or two managers in the Nordics, as an example. And then when a third one comes by, it really has to be something very particular for them to do that because they would say, otherwise, I have covered the Nordics. But then another LP would say, no, I'm going for the best managers. And I think that the third best manager happens to be in the same region as adjusted to other investments.

24:07I'll still do it. It's an interesting conundrum as an LP to navigate. And then you end up with exposure to the same assets and all these things. So a lot we can talk about that. But again, if three good managers have picked that asset well i guess it's a good one to have 3x exposure to i guess it's part of the game when you're an lp it's part of the game to know that actually you are giving checkbooks to people you trust and then you need to cross your fingers and hope that they will just do a good job with it and you will have the feedback loop in 10 years and so for 10 years you need to trust actually the the team you picked i'd love to ask you about these sprints deep dive sprints or whatever we might call them, meaning, ah, seems like something is happening in sovereign compute.

24:52Let's spend six months digging into this. We've met three very ambitious founders. We can see some tech inflections happening. We can see some adoption inflections happening. We can see regulation is lining up. We should probably give this an extra look. Could you tell me about what triggers that, how you allocate team focus to it, and typically also how quick are you then from seeing those first signs of something interesting to pop up and actually execute and do the first deal? Or do you do three or do you have a rule that we try and really stay in that exploration mode for a bit before we do the first commit unless the stars align?

25:37Actually, it's a good question and it's a tricky one again because we changed our approach on this a couple of times already since we started. There was a time, so very basically there was a time where we were like having a very, very structured approach on this. Like we were really trying to have like deep dives every three months with a dedicated team, you know, the right notion page with everything you need, all the studies and stuff with like formal conclusion, a list of companies that could fit everything. And then you attribute tasks to people in the team. And you try to be sure that you've seen everything.

26:17And then you have a conclusion. And it was not really working for us. I guess when you start to do this, you're losing what we talked about at the very beginning, which is this. Yes, I think so too. Exactly. So this agility and this ability to be reactive and stuff. So we did this. And we realized that it was not a good fit for us, that a lot of disinformation that you are building and storing somewhere, actually you will never use again. We could feel the inefficiency. And so now what we're doing is actually just going back to the basics. We try to meet amazing founders. That's it. And we are open-minded.

26:58So if we, for whatever reason, we meet an amazing team and they're working on space tech, we will not have this first reaction saying I'm not sure it's for us we don't know actually so it's a good opportunity for us to understand from the best this is an amazing team they decided to dedicate a lot of time, energy, a big part of their life to this specific thing why? and we try to understand and it's thanks to this one process we're actually building, we're going from zero to one on understanding the space in this case, the space, the space, tech space. And it's the same with tech bio. It's the same with anything that is at the cross paths between science and tech, all those complicated stuff.

27:48We just like, we start with one opportunity. We don't start with a market view. We start with one opportunity and the opportunity is like opening a bit our eyes on the market. And then by capillarity, if you have one amazing contact, this contact will push you new contacts. And those are like usually statistically good contacts. So I guess now we have a less formal approach. We have, of course, like offsite and stuff and like a SWAT team working on some stuff. We have some people in the team that are the specialists of this and this. But it's much more organic. It was maybe two years ago, very structured and it was a bit inefficient.

28:26So now we like the idea to be, to have this organic approach. We're very open-minded. We respect any opportunity. We don't have those, I don't know if this exists in English, but this a priori where you're just like, space is not for us, actually. Like we kind of know it's not for us. It's not for us until the day we find an amazing team and that they can just actually show that it can be an amazing business and that it can work with our system and time frame and stuff. So being open-minded, taking everything seriously and deep diving each time you have an opportunity is important using leveraging this moment to build like a knowledge within the team this is actually how it's working i'd love to ask you about how ai has changed your or affected your process of understanding a topic i ask because as an example it's a small one and random one but i have for started forcing myself to instead of opening up my news app constantly during a day i pick a topic early in the morning, which is the one I want to understand better, typically driven by the news.

29:33So tariffs, everyone's talking about. Instead of opening up the same news about tariffs, I would then prompt my deep research in the morning to tell me, give me a deep analysis of how tariffs work and so on. And then what I open during the day when I feel like checking the news, I go and read that report which was generated. And then I chew through a a well-founded report during that day. I can only think that, again, back to building these knowledge bases, which I could see mean a lot and be very efficient and powerful to have inside a firm before. I can see a lot of knowledge you could have built up over the years that now is completely redundant because you can have an AI troll through all the available information that's at least publicly out there.

30:23So not people databases, not connections within the industry, not all the hard things, but all this aggregate analyst data that you would pull together. It's all there right now. Could you tell me, how do you use AI in your process today? Has it changed anything? Or are you saying it's always been so people driven? It's not really changing much. We are in this situation that is always a bit difficult to explain, but we are very much connected to tech. And at the same time, it's a people business. So it's kind of frustrating in a way because you can feel that you could dramatically improve efficiency if you had tech everywhere and if actually a robot could replicate what we're doing.