279. Meet The Technologist Who Has Made 50+ Angel Investments | Desigan Chinniah

0:00Amardeep Parmar:Startups Inside Out, you've got Deez here today. And on your LinkedIn, you've got Technologist. What does that mean? I like asking other people what that means often. The honest shit is it used to have lots of other descriptions through the years. I think one before that was something like advisor, board member, investor. it's one of these long-winded things that kept on going and that just meant more linkedin in-mails because everyone who thought something they had something of interest that met those titles would should reach out to me and eventually i was like i should really change this um and technologists it became i think when when you look at well i see myself as a technologist mostly because I've had two decades of experiences in this world.

0:56And when I look at the world today, when you peel away most layers, technology is underpinning it. I've lived in, I guess, the end of, let's call it, Web 1, the formative years of Web 2. So I've probably put my fingers in a lot of what you would regard as Web 2 infrastructure that we probably use today.

1:15Amardeep Parmar:And I've seen the emergence of, let's call it, Web 3. And where does most of your time go today? On a plane. often um i'm traveling a fair bit but my sort of time is aspirationally i think and you've heard me say this before like you know i aspire to make work fun and fun work um so sometimes it's not obvious if what i'm doing is fun or work and if that's the case i feel like i'm winning but loosely I wear three hats small number of advisory roles a few board positions and some early stage investments and that's originally where you get to be know each other right for the investment side and obviously you run a big angel community and like different people you're working with there what made you get into investing on that side in the first place what were you looking for that sort of just happened pretty naturally I think it's quite funny that we're sitting here in Clark and all today because I actually sent some pictures to Reshma and Carlos from Seed Camp because this used to be one of the original Seed Camp offices in this building and weirdly that office became the unofficial Mozilla and Firefox office and so I had a desk in Seed Camp offices with Carlos and Reshma and Philip Mooring and Kirsten.

2:37Amardeep Parmar:when about was this this was around nine 2010 11 so very early seed camp used to do things called seed camp week and so even though i was working in the tech industry i was always sort of in the alongside things happening in the london tech ecosystem um the so-called silicon roundabout and having a desk at seed camp i was seeing everything within seed camp they asked me to help it mentor seed camp week what i call zero the very first seed camp week and i continued doing that through the years and so even though i was never in investing i was always periphery to And then in technology, through the years, co-workers, former colleagues, people that I did partnerships with over time were slowly, both in Europe, but also in America and other parts of the world, were slowly getting into this investment world in different guises.

3:46an investor I'm a startup founder and so naturally I was surrounded by people that were sort of slowly edging their way into it and myself I was at some point saying hey I like helping these folks what does that mean it could mean like continuing to mentor and advise and that sort of helped my advisory kind of strand of work but another part of it was like I was constantly meeting early founders. And at some point, it was like, you know, put some skin in the game kind of thing. And the early years were not so easy, because I think if you rewind the clock, maybe 15 years ago, like you needed reasonably large sums of money to be doing early stage investments, even in London, you needed maybe 15, 20, 25K.

4:39But that dynamic has changed over the last few years tremendously, whereas you could put 5k, 3k, 2k into a startup founder and they're not necessarily taking your money for the money. They're taking your money for the strategic help experiences and the network you bring. And yes, I do have some money, but I don't have 25k a pop, but I could have five founders at 5k a pop.

5:05Amardeep Parmar:And it's like, oh, so you've messaged into quite a lot of companies of the age, right? Do you know how many we've had? Lots of people do. I don't. there is a spreadsheet that I could look up and tell you. And how is your way of thinking? So you said you're doing smaller tickets now than you were before. But has anything else changed about what you look for, your philosophy there? Actually, well, the very first sort of few, which is while I was still in industry, I'd say today looking back on it was more with my heart than with my head. There were people I knew in the ecosystem. They were friends.

5:41They're doing something cool. they were racing around I was like yeah I could help you maybe and I did then there was a period of doing nothing because life family travel work etc and then probably over the last few years sort of pre-pandemic started thinking about this again and one of the things I thought about was in general I'm a brown dude in technology and have been one I advise a lot of folks I sit on boards but I said on the investment front you know I was well aware of the stats that you know people of color or underestimated minority founders very rarely get the majority of the funding and I was like can I make a small difference in that and so I specifically said that I'd like to support underestimated minority founders which I repeat like a broken record is is a very broad statement.

6:41It does mean lots of things to lots of people. So far for me, over the last few years, it's meant women, people of color, and things on the African continent. By extension, immigrants, founders with varying sexual preferences, older founders, disabilities, sort of come into the mix. And then I flippantly say, I don't necessarily support or I don't support two white dudes in North America. And not because they're not lovely, amazing people solving interesting challenge spaces. I just don't believe my 5K makes a huge difference to them when they're literally picking up 500K in the blue bottle line.

7:16Amardeep Parmar:Yeah. You mentioned the African continent, Dan. One of the interesting things, like we've obviously known you for a few years now, and you didn't want to come on because you're like, well, I'm African. And you've got such an affinity towards the African continent, obviously, where you grew up as well, right? Can you talk about the opportunity there for some people who maybe they didn't even consider it or they haven't been looking at the African continent as a place that's worth investing in? what are you seeing there that maybe could have people's eyes up to yeah well you know i i am african my entire family's on the continent in south africa so i grew up there i went to school there i got to the uk in 99 that that's i used to say half my life but like it's now more than half my life uh but i mean i'm on the continent a few times a year i spend most of my time in east africa and west africa uh when i'm in south africa it's more about hanging out with the family and having a Briani and a Samusa.

8:08Little, limited time in the north of the continent,

8:11Amardeep Parmar:although that is slowly starting to change. I've been doing recently a bit more work in Tunisia and Morocco. So that's good, that's changing. Yeah, there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of challenges on the continent. The ecosystem from a technology perspective is growing, where as Africans, historically, we were probably just consumers of technology. And then we were slowly starting to see some inspiration coming from other parts of the world, started building, and often building for local-ish problems, problems that you were surrounded by. And that's still super important because some of those markets, Nigeria, South Africa, are rather large markets, Egypt.

9:02But now you're also finding founders on the continent that are building and solving global problems, yet they're sitting in Kigali or Dakar. And I think that's super interesting. But it's all just the day-to-day is very different there. The problems are similar, but not the same. And so having empathy for what's happening on the continent is important and for someone like me i try and build that empathy by spending a lot of time on the continent first thing in the year i'll be in lagos for a week so just spending time on the ground and understanding what what these entrepreneurs and founders are going through

9:44Amardeep Parmar:is super important you mentioned how you're on a plane a lot right and you're doing all that travel what is it that you're enjoying the most of all of this these things you're doing so you said you're going around the continent you're doing the advisory stuff like what is it that you're like, yes, I get to do this this week. Being on a plane a lot is probably not good for the planet. I appreciate that. But it's super important for what I do in the sense of I'm all about people. And being on the ground, absorbing cultures, food, hanging out with people in their own environments is necessary. And also as an Achilles heel, I enjoy it.

10:30So that helps.

10:33Amardeep Parmar:And through the years, I built up this network where, you know, I've had the opportunities through my work and other scenarios where I've got a pretty global network. There's almost everywhere in the city, everywhere in the world where I end up going to, there's someone or a group of people that I want to catch up with. And they're often all doing pretty interesting things. Not always in technology, which is also quite nice because then I'm not just surrounding my everyday with technologists. Yeah. And even on that side as well, so you said, okay, you've got the different places you're going to look at different companies and build up that expertise there too.

11:16Amardeep Parmar:Where is it? So within the UK, right? How much of your investments do you think are UK-based versus global? I'd say I've had the benefits of working abroad in many continents, but I've lived here for a long time and I've been part of this ecosystem for a long time. So I'd say easily 40 % to 50 % of my helping founders happen locally. and then because of that network i see deal flow from silicon valley to germany to nigeria and that's only because i know people it's not because you know i'm the world's best early stage investor that you know people are looking at signals from me it's just because i know people so bhq has been going for three years now right which in many ways we're just a baby compared to like your experience in the ecosystem what are you seeing the ecosystem today versus how it's been over time is it do you feel like we're at a good spot of the right things happening or is there still a lot of work to be done in the uk well you know there's always work to be done there's no work doesn't end uh the world's changing a lot there's a lot happening in the world that you know need smart people working on what i would like to think of as hard problems and we don't have any shortage of those sorts of people.

12:43It's just a different mindset in different parts of the world. You know, everyone wants to maybe mimic Silicon Valley and maybe British founders or European founders think about things and need to think about things slightly differently.

12:55Amardeep Parmar:You know, there's a subset of folks that are chasing the shiny new and that could be AI or LLMs or foundational models or stable coins. borderless transactions. I mean, UK has always been strong with fintech. But I'm hoping that, you know, there's a sort of, I see some trend of folks that are tackling now problems in healthcare and conflict and defence, education, climate change. And I think that's where things got getting exciting. Like, you know, smart people working on hard problems. like you said you meet so many smart people right and obviously getting so many smart founders in like pitching to you as well how are you able now is to differentiate because i guess one of the things when i first i'd invest in myself is that you're easy to impress right because you don't know as many people building cool companies now for someone like you who's seen so many things how can someone break through that that higher barrier you must have now the higher your higher bar in some ways like what smart founders are or what a good founder is because because you just had seen so many in the past.

14:07It's gone through waves. Is it perfect? No. You know, I have to note that I'm not a VC, right? I'm not someone who's got a large fund behind me. And I'd like to think that the VC math is very different than Dee's math. And I've gone through waves. You know, early on, it was a lot about shiny things. As a technologist, I'm always looking at shiny things. Then it was a little bit about like, yeah, you know, is this cool?

14:42Amardeep Parmar:Like, you know, do I see myself using it? What have you. Over time, and those tended to be in areas that I had backgrounds in, you know, marketplaces with eBay, payments with PayPal, developer infrastructure, dev tools, foundational building blocks for the internet with Mozilla and Firefox. So those are natural because they were things that I came from. Over time, I'd like to say that I've become comfortable being uncomfortable. And that's part of getting back to this whole technologist thing, right? Like, you know, what do I know about the cosmetics industry or wigs or hardcore climate hardware solutions?

15:27Very little. but when I peel away many of those layers there's technology underpinning almost all of them and I hope that I could be helpful in those journeys in some way and the rest of it is me learning so I think it's a actually doing some of these investments or I know doing some of these investments is an easy way for me learning I'd like to think it's like a mini MBA, just getting investor updates. When it comes back to myself, terrible due diligence and not a strategy anyone else should employ, but it comes down to, do I want to hang out with that person? Do I want to have a meal with them?

16:14Do I enjoy my time with them? And you can almost certainly figure that out sometimes in seconds. Of course, the slightly additive bits are, do they have the background and do they care deeply about this problem space? Is this problem space important? And I'd more recently call it age or call it a few other things. but one of my questions in my head is, will this, or the work that this founder or founders are doing, will it leave the world in a slightly better place? And so you see maybe this trend away from the shiny things into the world is a better place. And it comes back to hard problems, comes back to climate, healthcare, education, financial inclusion, maybe some defense kind of pieces.

17:15Amardeep Parmar:Hello, hello. I hope you're enjoying the show so far. I'm Amadeek Parma, co-founder of BayHQ and the host of this show. For those of you who don't know, BayHQ is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. Over 7 ,500 people have attended our events. 200 people have been for our impact programs. And obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the program and then come to the events, go to www.behhq.com forward slash join. We also just released our first ever book called Startups for Outsiders, which you can get on Amazon now and the link is in the bio.

17:57Amardeep Parmar:Hope to see you soon at our event. Hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. I think I'm quite similar. My check sizes are, I think, I want to say between 1 and 5k I've done so far. And part of it is that even if those coming to do amazingly well i'm not going to make that bigger return like unless 100x then materially that my bottom line doesn't necessarily change but it's a bit you said about the mba part i think that's really helped me because i took across foundles all the time people all the time when's my actual money on the line you pay more attention you understand a bit more you get deeper into it and i think from my own understanding that's been really helpful and i did the thing as well like doing the limited partnerships with the vc funds because i look at that's where I can get on the inside and really understand.

18:40Amardeep Parmar:And obviously that's a privilege in terms of the financial background I've had and where I've made money in the past. But I think that part of it to me has been like a really interesting journey. And then now I'm kind of broke, so I can't keep doing it. We're paying ourselves again now. But there's a fear of like, okay, I can't keep investing. We need to make our own money first. And that difficult part of it there. But with these small checks you're writing, there's so many founders and even investors that will tell you like, oh, you shouldn't take small checks or it's too complicated. but you obviously bring in the strategic value.

19:10Amardeep Parmar:How do these discussions go with different founders when maybe you're the smallest check in the round? Look, so one, I do this by design. Like I said, it's not that I couldn't afford maybe larger sums of money, but by design, I'm doing smaller sums of money because I would like to help more founders. Admittedly, I can't help every founder, but I would like to help more. founders go through different cycles you know some founders are just looking for money and that's okay probably not for me because as a sort of investor skin in the game person I want to be helpful when I can be not just because I think I could be but like when I can be so I'm one of those people that's looking at an investor update and interestingly most founders put it right at the bottom of a long email I encourage them to put it right at the top as in the that's the first thing I'm reading because I want to be helpful if I can be and I like the little sometimes argument with the founder would be like that's not really worth my time and effort in paperwork to take your 5k days and i'm like look well one you're not taking my 5k because it's going to make a difference to your round um you know at best it's going to pay your head of engineering for a month so like at that point why are you taking the money you really hopefully or probably only taking the money because of my experiences which i have two decades of and my network because once you have me on board then those are available to you on tap if it makes sense and then i say to founders like you decide you got to do what's right for you as a founder uh you know for just absolutely no forcing function from me but i also encourage founders like i'm not going to tell you how amazing or how great i am but you probably know two three four or five other founders that I've supported, go ask them.

21:26Like, you should do as much due diligence on me as supposedly I'm doing on you, which I just said is very limited. But like, go ask other founders, you know, does this person actually add any value? And then you can make a call whether that's worth the extra paperwork. Of course, there are things in the ecosystem today that make it somewhat easier, right? the sort of growing emergence of things like SPVs or special purpose vehicles, tools or communities like Odin or AngelList, et cetera, just make it easier to take smaller combined aggregated checks and have a single line item on your cap table.

22:02But yeah, that's what I do. I do it by design. And actually, in retrospect, I wish that every single early stage check that I cut was the same amount.

22:15Amardeep Parmar:What's interesting there too, I think, say I get it a lot where if someone's somebody's, I'm public about who I invested in, right? The fact that my reputation then at the moment is quite good, it then helps, right? So you must get a lot where somebody's, people are doing due diligence on those founders. They're then going to see, oh, okay, you've invested in them. And I'm assuming you get quite a lot of people, investors reaching out to you being like, oh, I saw you invested in these guys. Why? Like, what did you think? And a lot of people really underestimate the power of that. And it's that soft thing where if you put me in your deck and I would be like, yeah, that's fine We've had it for example of what we're doing next year with the the venture side of things Some of the people who said oh, yeah, use my name the power of those people it opens up doors and Even if the money like you said isn't a huge amount the fact that you're willing to put your name to them I think people can underestimate a lot too.

23:08Yeah, look at To your point that I say to founders if you think it'll be helpful to you like feel free and yes someone sees name on some material I definitely get a lot of inbound from those folks in the same way that I do outbound to folks that are familiar to me in terms of names or faces on a pitch deck because I want to know more I don't necessarily need to know the really deep down into why they made an investment. I'm more like, tell me more about this person, this team. That's more my asking. And that tells you a lot. And sometimes those people have been a very early investor. and the reality is like sometimes the things that you hear and see and feel from a founder you know in retrospect many years later may be very different than the reality because founders can be in founder mode roofs about to fall down

24:33and sometimes I say to founder like people that reach out to me it's like yeah you look like this is what I think but the reality is like today it's a slightly different answer than what it may have been if you'd asked me the same question two years ago or three years ago now that I've been along for this journey a little bit I've seen some some updates of course it's in my benefit and selfishly I'm still going to be biased as being as pro this opportunity as I can be but I also am going to be honest and transparent with what I've seen and experienced

25:07Amardeep Parmar:Where do you think as well that founders don't use their investors enough for where, because I think one of the big things I see a lot is that they just don't think about the customer side of things. Is that everybody's about, okay, how do we get more investors? Like, well, if you get customers, that's revenue and that can keep you going for longer. And I feel like a lot of founders don't think about how can this investor bring me customers? They're always concerned about how can this investor bring me other investors? And one of the things that you see like that where maybe founders could really make better use of strategic investors?

25:38One, founders are busy. There's a lot to do. There's lots of fires. And often, different founders have different makeups. Some just want to be like, thank you very much. I'm going to go on and build my business now. Thanks for supporting me. I'll send you updates every little while. Leave me alone. Other founders, almost on the other extreme, like constantly sending you an email or an instant message or something like that. So what's the balancing act there? I don't know. But I say to founders that I'm available if you think I could be helpful. And well, one, I think founders need to, if they are going to try and use their founder network or their investor network, then they need to make some effort into better forming a relationship with the investor.

26:35And that could be a tea, a coffee every now and again, a lunch, where it's not necessarily about the business, because hopefully I'm getting that through my investor updates, but it's about life, family, people, because then you learn more about that person. And, you know, someone like myself will probably suddenly realize, you'll realize that, hold on, these has connections in X part of the world or in X industry. I didn't know that before because it never came up in my conversation. My conversation was only trying to extract some capital from them, right? The other part that often happens is founders do ask for help, but it's very top level.

27:24like and it's especially with with folks that are busy it's easy to just pass it by so I always say to founders definitely ask for help like you don't get if you don't ask first of all right but I always say help me to help you and what I mean by that is like put a little bit more effort and time and energy in the desk research when making an ask. So rather than introduce me to my next round of funders or investors or VCs, like maybe share spreadsheets and say, these are the funds that I've researched and I believe are relevant for me. These are the ones already spoken to. These are the ones that I'm still requiring someone to help me to get to a partner or a general partner.

28:22And these are the reasons why. They've made these moves historically. The more you can do of that, the easier it is for me to go, actually, I know these three people. Yes. Now I don't have to think about the 33 people that you need to talk to, because I just don't have the time to think, do your thinking for you. So I think it's, yeah, the ones that are better prepared and not just have like very wishy-washy asks.

28:58Amardeep Parmar:I always say in the who, what, why, right? Who do you want to speak to? What exactly do you want from them? And then why do they want to speak to you? Because a lot of times like, oh, say for example, this podcast, right? we have massive people coming on here all the time if you just said oh can I speak to that series b or series c founders like they've got a lot to do I can't just say oh do you want to speak to this person who's being didn't message me you've got to give me a reason why you're going to benefit them and get that mutual introduction and I think a lot of people just don't think about that enough of like just because I know somebody doesn't mean I should make the introduction because I've also got to respect the other person's time and just like you said taking the time to make it a compelling argument that you're going to make the ask for them it helps so much yeah it may come across that like it needs to be almost essayish and like super well articulated like people like myself often if i'm going to on your benefit on your behalf going to someone else like i likely have a good a reasonably good relationship with that person and if i didn't I'll probably flag it all.

30:07So I don't need a lot, but I need enough to go like, well, the receiving end is going like, this is asking, okay, that already has me looking. It's this, it's in my ballpark. I actually care about this. Like, yes. And sometimes people go, no, and that's okay too, right? There's a double opt-in kind of process. So, you know, and you've figure out who in your network sometimes, you know, you may have an investor list and investor A may actually be a better way in to the same person than investor B, even investor B knows that person. And you have to understand how this dynamic works, right?

30:53Amardeep Parmar:It's the whole social intelligence speech, right? It's that you've got to understand that you can you can even see you sit with me at events right it's like who do i who comes in and gives me a big hug and who's like more of a standoffish person if you can see somebody's coming in to give me a hug then you're at the event okay can i chat to that person but you've all taken up to frame it right you can tell that they're done it was between people and if somebody's worked together with somebody for five years ten years then yeah they're gonna be a really good person to do introduction because you could do it more casually and there's some people i can just whatsapp and be like hey this person wants to chat to you this is their background what do you think whereas if i need to be formal to that person be more like i need to work out how i'm gonna frame it to them that's gonna be a harder ask yeah it's uh like even myself i i have this it's not written down or anything but i almost have this mental awareness of you know who do i need to i message who do i need to email who do i need to slap message because different people react differently to different forms of communication.