E541 | Ties Boukema, Dawn Capital: Building Rolodex: Why Venture Needs Its Own Tech Stack

0:00My most formative experience is that I've had five brain surgeries in my life. I was born with a brain condition called hydrocephalus, which means you have too much water around your brain. T's Bukema turned surgical survival into venture dominance. But even the sharpest minds miss million-dollar deals. And we present the findings back. The founder goes to this amazing stuff, super useful, really blown away. But also I took money from Index three days ago, so maybe you guys. This isn't about replacing human relationships. It's about amplifying them beyond recognition. I held the opinion quite strongly that really you should be able to take the human kind of out of a lot of pieces in private markets.

0:37I think relationships and humans are key and will remain key. The big opportunity, I think, is augment the human with technology. The future belongs to those who embrace surgical level discipline. Even the world's elite know this truth. And even Harvard neurosurgeons, where it's hard to make the case that they're not motivated, they're not smart, and they're not skilled. they increasingly rely on checklists and process. Discover how surgical discipline meets AI advantage. The full story of Thais Bukema and Rolodex. Listen now.

1:27room you want to be in. No pitch decks, no posturing, no script, just honest conversations between GPs and LPs. The upcoming AMA on the 21st of August is held by Jonathan Sibelia, partner at Bullhound Capital and one of Europe's most experienced LPs. Before Bullhound, he led fund-to-funds and secondaries at Molten Ventures for 16 years, deploying into 80-plus VC funds and backing breakout names like UiPath, Revolut, and Ledger. Jonathan brings a rare dual lens of direct investments and secondaries across thousands of fund reviews and real DPI outcomes. This is your chance to ask one of Europe's sharpest LPs how they really assess managers, secondaries, exit strategies, and what most GPs still get wrong, or anything else you're dying to know.

2:17Access to these AMAs are limited to EUVC community members. Don't miss your chance to be in the room. Head to eu.vc forward slash subscribe to save your seat. This was their final job. Tear down this wall. It's more than just an alliance. 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. Hi, everyone. Welcome to EUVC, the podcast championing the true narrative of European venture showcasing the breadth, depth and ambition of our ecosystem. Today, we have Thys Bukema with us. Thys is the Head of Data, Tech and AI at Dawn Capital.

3:05Dawn Capital has a fund of roughly 700 million US dollars, so that's 620 or so euros. Their AUM is close to $2 billion in dollars, HQ'd in London, focusing in Series A and Series B. Their focus geography is Europe. So of course, very much aligned with the ethos of our little podcast here, very much focused on B2B software and fintech. Some of the notable investments, and in this case, all of these notable investments are unicorns, which we can say with all of our guests. So that's kind of cool. We have Dataiku, Contexa, Mimecast, MinuteMedia, iZettle, Tink, Neo4j. And of course, there's many other notable investments, but I'll leave it at that.

3:44Tis, do you want to add anything that I left out that you think is incredibly important to mention? I think the most important thing to mention is that I'm very excited to be here. It's quite surreal to be on the podcast. That's my favorite, you know, sort of commuting podcast, which is also pretty much the only type of podcast that isn't here. In terms of Don, I think you've done us justice. we are a B2B software investor that purely invests in European founders with global ambition. And I think like just to add some context to our listeners and viewers, right? This is an interesting podcast episode because we're going to talk about AI.

4:20Well, everyone's talking about AI, but we're going to talk from a slightly different perspective, more focused in our industry, right? So here we have someone, I don't know if you're the only one, but you're probably the only one I know, that is really focusing a lot of time and resources in building AI for a VC firm, right? And so that's really going to be the focus here. We're not necessarily going to talk about AI trends from an investment perspective, but really from a practitioner perspective. So that's kind of cool. If you're excited about that, stay tuned, subscribe, follow us. You know the drill.

4:54Thys, I like to start with kind of showcasing the person that we're featuring. I was very much surprised to hear about your life story. And I don't want to kind of ruin it for anyone. So I won't hint into anything. But could you give us a bit of background on you and how you came to where you are today? My most formative experience is that I've had five brain surgeries in my life. I was born with a brain condition called hydrocephalus, which means you have too much water around your brain. And my condition was very, very severe. So the best way how I can describe how I felt on a day-to-day basis is as if you had espresso martini, a shot of tequila and three glasses of white wine, you have to wake up slightly earlier than normal the next day.

5:42You just feel a little off all the time. But then three or four times a week, I would get migraine attacks. And because the root cause of them is slightly different, the intensity would be very different. So part of the migraine attacks would be temporary blindness. So my vision would just go sometimes with one eye, sometimes both. My arms or legs would stop working well. The pain would be bad enough to vomit. I hope no one's eating well as this. And sometimes all of the above. And it could really take hours or sometimes even a full day to sort of regain full motor skills or vision. So I was a very, very sick kid.

6:21kid. So also I think when I, when I tell this to people that don't have kids, they go, oh, you poor thing. How did you make it through? When I tell this to people that have parents, they're like, well, I hope you really spoil mom and dad on father's day and mother's day, which I, I try to do. I don't think I would be against this, but I do my best. You know, I grew up incredibly sick as a kid. Like it's, I can probably count on one or two hands, the number of weeks where I was able to attend a full school day, five days a week. and on top of that i always expected to die very young because you know the the pressure in your brain to be bad enough where your your body thinks you know i'm sure vomiting is going to make you feel better or where your vision goes is very very intense so i always found this scary growing up because the pain is horrible and it would it would come on quite quickly so some days i would wake up and i'd feel you know my version of fun which is basically really hung over and then it go from really hungover to really the most crushing pain i think i've ever experienced my pain tolerance is high i broke five bones in my right hand during a mountain bike race and i finished a mountain bike race i was 23 so i think generally i don't suffer from man flu but this this was i was just extremely sick kid and then at age 20 i'm doing this um in the chip in New York and I get brought to the hospital against my will.

7:43And there's this American doctor who basically says, you know, I've interpreted the scans and our condition, my interpretation of your condition is different. And you should have surgery. I have a long talk with my parents where I also explained to them that I was sick much more often than they realized. So I think typically, right, when you have a child or a loved one and they're sick a lot, it's useful to know that they're sick and the extent to which they're sick because that you can do something, right? Like if I come home and my fiance is like, you know, passed out on the floor, then obviously I want to call an ambulance.

8:15It's just that I'd spend my entire childhood in hospitals and ambulances. I've had more than 280 overnight stays in a hospital in my life. So I really, and that excludes the day trips, right? So I really spend my entire life in and around hospitals. And my poor parents obviously would get very upset when they would see me, right? Pass out on the floor. or they would hear that actually I came home 15 minutes after leaving for school and spent the whole day being sick. So I tried to hide it from my parents as much as I could. So like I would, if I'd be sick all over myself, I would get rid of the gym clothes that I was sick in.

8:53And then my parents would sometimes ground me. They're like, man, you're so irresponsible. I can't believe you lost another pair of shoes. Like you really need to become an adult at some point. So I tried to shield my parents as much and hide the extent to which I was sick as much as I could growing up. So once they understood that, they were also supportive of the surgery. And the surgery at age 20, New York, just completely fixed everything. So I weighed 67. I'm like 6 '5 or 196 meters tall. I was 67 kilos, like 165 pounds or something when I came out of that surgery, which is extremely, extremely thin.

9:30It's not a great look. I wake up at age 20. And even with 230 plus stitches in my head because I mean it's proper brain surgery right like you really could go open install a pump and it goes to your stomach like it's not a pleasant experience and even then I realized I felt so much better than I could remember feeling so I really had this Walt Disney second lease of life especially when you're obviously in the big apple you're like you can be anything you want and now I really felt unencumbered by my by my body because yeah I did well on standardized testing when I was young. In the Netherlands, we don't have SATs.

10:08We have something called the CETO. I scored a perfect CETO when I was 13, despite average school attendance of three, four days a week. I just always found it very frustrating. I'm like, I have a decent engine. It's just stuck in this shopping cart trolley with three wheels. And post-surgery, I was like, I have a car, right? The car engine is in the car and I can do anything. And of course, that's not true. There's a lot of things I suck at, but I really felt like, what do I do with my life now? And then a friend of mine said, well, you know, you're good with numbers. You have a very preppy haircut and you're just very relentlessly optimistic.

10:43And you're gritty, right? You can deal with crap with a smile on your face. And if someone's going to ask you to please redo the entire PowerPoint presentation 2 a.m. on Saturday, you will handle it with much less attitude than many people your age. So I'm like, great. So I now have a vision for where to go in life because I'm not going to die before 25 and I won't be in a wheelchair. I reached out to about 74 different bankers and people on LinkedIn, basically pitched my story. A couple of people were nice enough to have coffee with me. One of them worked at Deutsche Bank, ended up getting an opportunity to intern at Deutsche Bank.

11:17The two internships there. For the first time post-surgery, my health was getting slightly worse because working till 2 a.m. is quite tough and maybe I'm just lazy. I didn't handle it very well. Learned a lot. So I thought that was exciting. Very sharp people. They worked very hard. Ended up pivoting into tech. Started my career afterwards at Google. Went from sales to strategy and operations. I did a law degree and a stats degree. So that's why I have a weird profile all around. Went from sales to strategy and operations role, which includes a lot of data. Taught myself data science and data engineering to move into Google Health.

11:53basically work at teams that apply AI for medical imaging, similar to the brain condition that I had. The last job I had at Google was running a big revenue reporting team. So basically target setting, reporting pipelines, creating the slides for executives, creating the dashboarding, just to steer the business in ads for a couple of billion dollars of revenue. And then I was at a dinner with a bunch of people in London that work in Bench Capital. and I was like, these people are so smart and they work so hard. Why do they all have to leave early to fix quarterly reporting? Like how, what do you need in 20, this is 2023 at a time.

12:31I'm like, you know, my team and I ran a team of like three people. We can do 14 executive presentations plus all the BI decking, plus all the sales bonus payouts, just the whole thing on like 30 plus billion dollars of revenue. And it's pretty seamless. And the way that these people are describing how this core process runs, just sounds like a nightmare. So I got hugely excited about basically taking my skills and just sort of knowledge about how you can transform processes with software and AI and applying that in a completely different context. I interviewed with a couple of firms. Anyone that's met Norman, especially who's the founder and general partner at Dom, he's a very big personality.

13:10And when you meet him, you want to work for him. So I really liked Norman. I really liked the other people I met at Dom. And there's just a real curiosity about doing things differently. So he was one of the few GPs that I spoke with when I was interviewing that was totally happy to try and do core reporting in a completely different way than all the other funds do it. And more similar to how it's done at Google. And also was open-minded enough about things like Rolodex, which we'll talk about later. Well, I think I have to start off by saying thank you. You shared a lot there. A lot about some tough years in your life as well.

13:47which is a big chunk of it, right? I think the only, you know, I don't want to dive too much into it either, but I guess the only one question I have is really how has that changed your perspective today? And of course, personally is interesting, but also as, you know, as someone who's active in venture, do you think it gives you an edge in any way or not at all? It's just a matter of perspective and philosophy. when you've genuinely feared for your life for 20 years, and had another surgery a year and a half ago, it just gives a lot of perspective. And I see this with a lot of people that work at great funds, and they were top of their class in high school, and then they were top of their class of Cambridge, and they were top of their class at McKinsey, J.P.

14:33Morgan, and then they top of the class at the first fund, then top of the class at the second fund. And then they get told on a specific deal or thing, like, hey, this just wasn't up to the bar. And they just really struggle with this. And I think because I've just really been faced with near-death experiences for 20 plus years, by comparison, when you wake up and you're like, my legs don't work, it's okay if my technical product doesn't work. Like I have a high par and I want to achieve great things, but I think I handle some of the inevitable snags you get when you're trying to build technology and apply AI in a way that really elevates how we run everything at DOM.

15:11you know you're going to break some eggs if you're going to try to make an omelet like this there's also no one else's homework to copy where we really have some certain areas where we really do things differently than all the other funds and sometimes it doesn't work sometimes it's harder sometimes you get the feedback that isn't you know oh my god this is amazing but you get hey your v1 is you know i'm really a v1 that's a big piece and i think the second one is there's a healthy skepticism against experts in some way and like how things are done because for the first 20 years of my life, every single hostel I would go to.

15:45And I was, you know, I was, I really can't overstate how sick I was as a kid. And the doctors were like, well, we reviewed the guidelines. And according to the guidelines, which is how the other hostels do it and the other doctors do it, you're fine. And I sort of see similar bits in VC where I think on how people accept the technology that's available to leverage relationships or to prepare meetings or to do, you know, important things like get the quarterly reporting deck in order. Most funds have a pretty awful process compared to what's possible. They're pretty awful. You know, they just don't leverage technology and AI well at all compared to what's really possible.

16:22But everyone does it this way and everyone's sort of fine with it. I think I have pretty thick skin. If I really think you can do it differently, you should do it differently, then I'm happy to keep banging on the drum to do things differently. And then I think finally, there's been a lot of moments in my life where if things had gone differently, my outcome in life would be radically different. So, you know, I try to work hard and I try to be kind to people and I take my job seriously and I go to bed on time. I really try to play my cards right. But if any of my surgeries would not have happened or went poorly, or when I was five, my parents got very strong advice to send me to special needs school because I was so sick.

17:06so I wasn't doing particularly well at school at the age of five. And my parents, I think quite unreasonably, disagreed with the teacher, disagreed with the principal of the school. It escalated to like the regional school board where my mom and dad told all these people that have been working in academics, like, you know, education their whole life, right? And they're not bad people. And they disagreed with all of them and said, no, no, no, our kid doesn't need to go to special needs school and we're also not bad parents. You know, we're parents differently and you just wait and see in three months or, you know, these will be fine.

17:36But if I had slightly more reasonable parents, I would have been like, wow, 15 experts all disagree with us on this. Maybe this is where I get it from. Or for whatever reason, right? Like if my parents would have at your personal point not had the capacity or the bandwidth to push back really hard. I mean, if I would have gone to special needs school, realistically, I'm much closer to the janitor and the cleaner at dawn than being able to have the humongous privilege of being on this podcast. Thank you for raising the bar for our little podcast here. No, but it's a bit off topic, but I feel like talking about it.

18:11So let's talk about it. This thing around experts, right? And maybe let's connect it to AI right now with the rise of AI. I think it's never been easier to kind of question expert views. You mentioned doctors, you mentioned teachers, right? I think those are very two concrete examples that, you know, people talk about all the time. You know, I have some cousins in university and they were here last week literally bitching about, you know, their teachers and how they could learn things better by just like using ChatGPT or Google or Mix or whatever other AI tools. I had another conversation two days ago with a business partner of mine where he was talking about the fact that he was misdiagnosed for something on, you know, there was some nerve issue that he had and he went to a bunch of doctors, nothing really sorted out, put it in chat GPT.

19:04It suggested some exercises. He got better two days after it. And so it's never been easier to disagree, right? or the question, how do you think about this from not necessarily a technological perspective, but also from us as a society? Where is this going to lead us to? It's a very big question. And I'm not... I know, it's a very big question. And you might not have what you think is an answer. So maybe how do you think about it as well? How do you face life knowing that? I think that I find an interesting paradigm shift now, and I'm going with something relatively tactical, which is like, I don't know, I get asked to prepare research on something.

19:45You can now produce a plausible sounding, pretty big piece of research just so quickly, right? Like you throw it in Chetupiti, you spend five minutes on the prompts, you come back an hour later and you have 15 pages. You can produce stuff a hundred times faster than you could ever read stuff. You can read it much slower than you can make sense of a lot of stuff. So I think there's an interesting piece now where, and I find it striking with ChagicD, where there's many aspects that are where the use case is fantastic. You can get a lot of value out of it, especially if you don't just do an ad hoc prompt, but you actually spend some time building something with Langchain or you build a product just for this use case.

20:34Where the ratio between value to hallucination gets really, really exciting. I think what I find striking is a lot of people when they talk about where is AI, they talk about, well, I spent five minutes on a prompt in the front end on this very, very broad AI model. And the output wasn't perfect. Right. And I think sometimes you can only tell that the output isn't perfect on something that you know well, like on a topic that I know nothing almost about. I'm like, wow, that sounds really plausible. Right. It's not on something where I think I have a bit of knowledge, right. Like on how to code or something.

21:07This isn't how you do it. Sterile or things sort of the next frontier is that you'll get more specialized builds for some of these pieces. Because for example, one of the products we build is when we have a founder meeting, I want to have a good summary that is deep enough that it's, it's useful, but it's digestible enough that I can read it about what these people do. And even as a massive nerd, I meet founders now all the time. and I am like, man, I'm looking at the website and actually I would need an hour to figure out what do they actually do? What would be the customer for this? I mean, it also tells you how crappy the website is that ideally I should be able to figure this by skimming, but 90 % of the time you can't.

21:53Understand where the competitors are in the space and then also understand how is their angle or narrative or product parity different from the competitors. So this is something where out of the box, ChagpT works pretty crap, especially for finding competitors. It might get better over time. I think also the VC, like what we consider competitors is different than what the average use case will be. So this is, I think, one of those where I hear people saying, well, you know, ChagpT won't get there or AI won't get there because it doesn't work well in the front end. But by spending a month of engineering effort to build something that automatically skins calendars and prepares meeting notes, call it Rolex Intel, about what they do, about who sits on the cap table, about who are the competitors, how do they compare, and then draft some questions at the top.

22:42Out of the box, it seems nice until you actually try using a founder meeting. It's just not good enough yet because we don't do high volume. We don't have 5 ,000 PDRs running around and we churn and burn accounts. Realistically, it's very sort of white glove. But after a month, you can really see how good it can be for that specific use case. Well, let's build on that. So now you're talking about using, leveraging, and building tech within our industry. We typically ask this question to all our guests, three biggest learnings. And in your case, I'm going to anchor it to building tech for the venture industry.

23:22So what have been your three biggest learnings doing that? One learning that I've gotten from, I think, other people that do my job is that I'm definitely not the only one. That's sort of like the only, and Don isn't the only fund that's invested heavily on building their own tech function. It is one of the very few. I think it's one of the industries, one of the bits where actually PE is more progressive than VC. There's a whole bunch of people that now have a proper tech function, invest in it heavily, pay material salaries. The amount of VC funds that I know that are like, yeah, we invested in two ex-Google founders, pre-seed, pre-idea, pre-revenue, pre-everything.

24:01And we gave them 25 posts. And then they're celebrating this. Because they're like, well, that seems reasonable. But then I'm like, well, would you just spend half a million to a million a year to build a function, to build software and set up your software and find AI use cases and build things that would elevate every single person in your firm? They go, oh, that sounds really expensive, man. That sounds really expensive. And I'm like, what are those things? They both have to be true or they're both false, right? Either they're really valuable people and technology is exciting, it's exciting.

24:32And it's worth investing in. Or it's... Well, the other argument we hear, because to your point of PE versus VC, right? The other point that I have heard multiple times is like, oh, well, well, you know, in venture, especially early stage, right? We're investing into companies like there's no data, like there's nothing. PE is very different. You know, they have these depending of what type of PE, right? So that's another argument. I don't know if you want to refute it as well or comment it. I mean, almost all the great tech people at PE spend all their time with portfolio work. Because in PE, especially when you buy out, you'll have majority stake, if not full, 100 % stake.

25:08So that means that per dollar of thesis time or salary, if you improve the portfolio company, you own 100 % the value you create, which makes the economics much more attractive. Also, you would hope that if you buy some kind of, if you do some kind of car wash roll-up play or small IT vendors roll-up play in the Midlands, like I would hope that, you know, the caliber of IT and tech calendar is not first class so that there's stuff you can do, right? I would hope if you buy Asta that you can do stuff on the ERP that's not already in place. Whereas if we would, in fact, if we would be looking at a bunch of founders and I have a conversation with them for two hours and their mind is blown.

25:57They're like, oh my God, I never thought you could do this. We should really not be backing those people. The best technical founders we'd be backing should know should be able to tell me stuff or at least be on par. I think on a lot of the technical fronts. I think one big learning I had going into EC is I, you know, I coming from Google where people love software and they love tinkering with software and they love figuring out little scripts. And like, I remember showing someone at Google that you can automatically color code meetings based on some rules and some logics and some, you know, so that you don't have to manage.

26:31I, I pretty OCD, I like color coding my calendar and you can just set up some logic that this gets done automatically. but he's not enough to do it manually. I remember showing it to someone at Google who worked in sales. And within a week, I'd gone like four emails because then I went on holiday and I'd come back and there's all these people that have like played around with it, had questions, iterated on it, implemented it, rolled it out to other people. Like people really like software. I think even software investors don't have a software background. So I think if you build something, it needs to be great.