2136 - How AI is Redefining Risk Assessment in Venture Capital Investments with SKL.vc's Alisa Lynn

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1:05With us right now, it's Elisa Lin. Elisa, you are the managing partner with SKLVC. And, well, you've had three successful exits. And now, again, you do amazing work as a VC, basically. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about your superpowers. Your website, by the way, is skl.vc. And by the way, to our friend who's listening right now, Now, if you want to get insanely jealous, Elisa is chatting to us from the Canary Islands. Go do a quick Google image search so you can see exactly what a gorgeous, gorgeous environment you live in. Elisa, it's great to have you. Hi. Thank you very much for having me.

1:53Well, tell us a bit about your work. Oh, well, I have a fantastic job. I'm an entrepreneur for more than 20 years. And my background is gaming. When I was a young girl, my mom brought me 8-bit Nintendo from USA. And since that time, I became a gamer. And that's how I got into the gaming industry. And, well, I have a couple of successful leads and a lot of unsuccessful companies that I started. most of them was in gaming and my couple of last companies was in AI and now I'm on the other side I'm on VC side I manage a scale VC which is a venture studio and we build startups in-house and we also invest on seed and pre-seed early stages well tell me a bit about because you know So in the gaming, tell me a little bit about, for those of us who maybe are a little bit on the outside looking in, tell me about the gaming industry from an investment standpoint.

3:03Oh, my God. Well, the gaming industry is pretty much like any other industry is very specific because this is a content business. And, well, you need to produce a lot of different contents because people love to play different games. It's pretty much like a movie industry or kind of any other entertainment industry. So this is a specific. And well, it's very, it's old. And it's very, it's on the later consolidation stages. It's when a bigger company is by other bigger companies. and it has a very high level of barriers to enter. So you need a lot of capital actually to enter the industry. So, well, this industry is pretty hard to work in.

4:02You need to love games. I would imagine so. So when you say, and I would imagine now that you get to meet with potential founders here. What are some of those personality traits that you're looking for? In terms of the people that are involved in the game, what do you like to see? And also, what have you seen that maybe might be considered a red flag for you? Oh, well, if we're speaking about the startups, we're investing or we actually invest in people. Yeah. So, well, we look, first of all, we look into very open-minded persons because what we do, we're building a fabric of hypotheses. So we test a lot of different ideas, looking for people's demand, trying to find the best ideas and the best unit economics for the startups.

5:11And well, in this case, we're looking for very flexible and very open-minded persons who can easily test the different hypotheses with us. And I think this is kind of the way how talented entrepreneurs actually act when they're trying to fall in love with some projects. So, well, open-mindedness, flexibility to search and to play with the different startups before you found that one you fall in love with. Yeah. And when you, so would you mind maybe sharing a little bit about in your portfolio, who have you been working with so far? Who are you currently working with that you can share? Actually, we have a couple of pretty successful startups in e-commerce space.

6:19Well, in C2C e-commerce, which is a re-commerce startup, it's now launching in March. We also have a very interesting startup that creating a research co-pilot, a co-pilot for researchers and scientists. It's AI co-pilot, which helps you work with academic writing. So if you do a scientific paper or work on some scientific projects, it's co-pilot with AI, which help you to work with your documents. Well, we also have one startup in India, which is e-commerce also based on the collective buying. Now, we actually had more than 27 MVPs this year. So it's going to be... Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So it's going to be a long list too.

7:20Yeah. What is the... Can you tell me a little bit about what the process is like? So how is it that startups are finding out about you? How do they engage with you? And what would you recommend for the best path? Because I think a lot of, or at least my suspicion, is that, you know, a startup founder is going to do everything they can to try to get your attention, right? Because they want to be considered. And so they might be trying tricky things like trying to DM you on LinkedIn and all the kind of extra stuff. And God bless them for trying. But what advice would you give for someone that's just trying to be seen by VCs?

8:08Because you've been on both sides of this now. Oh, yes. Yes, I've had a lot of venture deals through my life. I think more than 20, probably. being on the side of entrepreneur. And now I'm on the other side. Well, I think the best advice is when you're looking for a capital, you're actually looking for a partner, first of all. So you need to understand who are you going to pitch and what they're looking for. And know your potential investor. And if you know your potential investor and what they're looking for, your pitch probably will be brilliant uh so prepare not just you know in and everywhere and pitch like to everyone no and it can bring you into a very strange situation when you are in the boat with a not right partner um well so the best advice um to get to sklvc to get my attention is actually to go on the website skl.vc and just write down on the website because we read it every day and just just do this even if you have only idea we are not only invest like vc we also build startups in-house so we're looking with the people with the good ideas as well as we invest in startups which already have some operations.

9:42We are very data-driven and we do a lot of, we have a very strong analytic team and we do a lot of analytics, tons of analytics every day. And we usually have kind of our own wish list of startups to appear on the market. So the more people with the good ideas will come, then we look at our wish list and then we see the same startups, the same ideas then we put it in our fabric of hypothesis as i call it um it's kind of the first step we do is to try to understand the people's uh the customers demand if any any any um any way uh it could be a mobile application it could be landing page it could be even you know some calls but just try to sell this to your people the simplest simplest mvp simplest prototype it's this just check that there is a demand this is the first then the second step is if there is a demand then we actually uh see what kind of what kind of product what kind of person what kind of entrepreneur we have if he or she is able to push the project if if he's uh um um experienced enough if he has he or she has a team uh for example mini team and then so how good is the team if there is a team if there is there are people who are actually wants to do it with us Then we put some money and we put some back office and marketing and experience and analytics and grow them to a MVP stage.

11:29And then we see is it works or not. So we kind of have this funeral of testing a lot, a lot of deep hypothesis and then moving them into MVPs. and then the most promising startups we actually finance by ourselves or go and raise some BC money as well. Yeah. What are you excited about as it relates to AI? Because I know AI is something you've also been involved in for a while. I mean, let's pull out our crystal balls, shall we? What? I mean, it's so exciting. It was kind of interesting. One thing I think a lot of us can identify with is that it seemed like a couple of years ago, there were big AI headlines about once a month.

12:15And then last year, there were headlines, like big AI headlines about once a week. Now, Alisa, there is like big AI headlines daily. It is so exciting of how fast this is ramping up and what a huge opportunity for founders and entrepreneurs to be a part of this. We're in the middle of the storm, like I'm in the middle of Atlantic Ocean. We are in the middle of the storm, which would probably disrupt all industries. and this is a huge opportunity to jump in right now even if there are an industries with dinosaurs and the big companies and but anyway now is the time actually to jump in you know i'm 20 years in in in it business and i've been my one of my companies been a pioneer of mobile development so development you know yeah iPhone uh iPhone appeared when is it's like 2009 probably yeah the first iPhone we saw in 2009 and I used to have a gaming company that made the games on the web and I was one of the first people who decided to make it on iPhone and Android and I remember this huge wave that we felt it's coming because of the, you know, opportunities which smartphones brought to us.

13:44And now it's like 100 times stronger with AI. That's how it feels. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, again, I think that's, again, mobile is just, do you find that, like for developers or a startup founder, do you find that, you know, is it PC gaming or console, console gaming, forget console gaming, probably not console gaming, or maybe, maybe you could correct me if I'm wrong, but, or mobile gaming, like in terms of accessibility or opportunity, what's your opinion? You know, SKLVC works not only with gaming, it works on the different industries in the different verticals as well for gaming i would say no um maybe in roblox um four students can do this but for serious professional industry and of course for consoles or pc gaming uh it's probably not because there is a hollywood model so you put a lot of tens and uh hundreds of millions and then come out with a big franchise franchise uh and like 10 years of development so that's how it works in the console um but for other industries i think ai uh opens opens a lot of opportunities and um um the possibility to use the power of modern llms and the rugs and everything that we have right now from the big guys um to implement them to find the right business model to um to automate a lot of stuff a lot of professions right now i think on even only one guy which you know we're a good programmer or good ml engineer can can enter the markets that's how it works right now and that's the probably the strongest strongest point of this opportunity that the level of entrance is pretty low right now and it's gonna be here then So if you decided to jump into the AI market, now it's the time.

15:57It's still the time. Elisa, right now, are you interested in attracting more startups to apply with you? Or are you interested in other investors to join in with you? Or in terms of your roadmap? app? We're looking for small teams with great ideas, prototypes, and MVPs on the early stage of development to invest and to bring them into our studio so we can build something together. That's what we're looking for. Yeah. Love it. Love it. Love it. Okay. So your website, skl.vc. Share maybe next steps for a friend that's listening. How do they connect with you? What should they be following in terms of like maybe your thought leadership?

16:53And how do they engage? Well, we are pretty active on LinkedIn. And so in social networks, usually me or someone from studio usually answers every day. So it's very easy to connect. I think in the modern life, it's so easy to connect to anyone you want. We have Facebook, LinkedIn, and some messengers. Yeah. Listen, listener, I already gave you the website. You shouldn't have any questions here. You could figure this out. I asked the question anyway, just in case you had any secrets up your sleeve or something like that. Alisa Lin, again, three very successful exits. chatting to us from the beautiful Canary Islands, managing partner with skl.vc, found on the web at skl.vc.

17:45Alisa, thank you so much for the conversation. It's very good to be here with you. Thank you.

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