Sameer Dholakia
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The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 20VC: You Need $1BN To Do Seed Today: The Untold Truths of Venture…
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How Fast Could AI Change Drug Discovery?
Sameer Dholakia says the next decade of biology, therapeutics, and drug development can show what would have taken half a century. After robotics, the use of AI that he is most excited about is finding cures, which he calls the greatest impact he expects from the technology, including work people describe as drugging the undruggable.
Wet labs, he says, are going to become automatable. An AI system that can see and reason over huge sets of data can work in ways one person cannot. He says the pace is already visible, and he really believes the next decade will show what would have taken half a century.
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Can Waymo Become a Trillion-dollar Business?
Sameer Dholakia thinks Waymo can become a trillion-dollar business, and ride hailing is not the only market that gets it there. Bessemer invested nearly $200 million into Waymo. Ride hailing is the near-term focus. Waymo is rolling out across cities, and he expects a very large business there, including trips that did not exist before.
The same autonomy, applied to personal car ownership, then to trucking, then to logistics, is what makes him call the outcome extraordinary. He bought a car for his 16-year-old son. A Waymo driver as a monthly subscription on a family car would be a default purchase for him, in the way Tesla sells full self-driving on Tesla cars. He thinks Waymo can offer tha
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Do You Need a Billion Dollars to Do Seed?
Sameer Dholakia does not see how a small seed fund succeeds at the prices coming in for early-stage deals. Harry Stebbings asked whether a firm needs a billion dollars to do seed today, pointing at Bessemer's $1.75 billion seed and early fund and at a $900 million fund USV had just announced. Sameer Dholakia comes back to shots on goal. A fund needs enough swings to find a winner, and he does not know how a small seed fund gets there.
A seed check in his earlier years was $3 million to $5 million on a $20 million to $40 million valuation. He does not have the exact figures for today. He knows the checks are factors higher, and a firm has to hope it is a great picker. A lot of AI businesses
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Do Near-term Gross Margins Matter in AI?
Sameer Dholakia is not worried about gross margins over the next 12 months on a growth-stage check. His hold is five to seven years, so he asks what gross profit can become over that stretch, and why.
A spreadsheet that jumps to 60 or 70 percent in five years has to be defended. He wants the reason, not a hope. Economies of scale matter, and so do share and position. In a lot of the AI businesses he has backed, gross margins at the investment were meaningfully lower than the margins at scale, with a factor of improvement inside 12 to 24 months. He will own up to Legora. He led the round at $1.8 billion, and he is a fan. Harry Stebbings had asked about margins, and the lens Sameer Dholakia u
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Was the Anthropic Round Bessemer's Lowest-voted Deal?
Sameer Dholakia says the Anthropic round was the lowest-voted deal in Bessemer's history for as long as Byron Deeter had been at the firm. Harry Stebbings asked whether the deal was controversial. Sameer Dholakia said Harry had no idea how controversial it was.
Anthropic was one of half a dozen or more labs trying to build intelligence, so the bet was not obvious. Sameer Dholakia thinks the AWS internal model, Nova, was not particularly distinctive, and AWS had just put a very sizable amount of money into Anthropic. The AWS relationship mattered because it would supply compute for training and early distribution. Empowerment is a Bessemer value, and the partners with conviction were told to
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Why Is AI a Bigger Market Than Oil?
Sameer Dholakia says intelligence will be a bigger market than oil. Oil powers machines. Intelligence, as he puts it, powers people across consumers, smaller firms, the mid-market, enterprises, and government, and each of them needs more of it.
He has been in software for 31 years, and a trillion-dollar supercycle followed every time the technology felt like magic. He graduated in 1995 in Silicon Valley, when people could publish to the whole planet and buy without walking into a store. Later, VMware split hardware from the operating system. The software could put 10 virtual machines on one box and move a running workload from one machine to another without stopping the work. He did not see
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What Company Does Bessemer Regret Missing?
Sameer Dholakia says the company Bessemer rues missing is Stripe. Bessemer was the developer API venture capital firm, and the firm was not in Stripe. Missing Stripe hurts.
There are many misses, and he picks Stripe. Bessemer led the series B in SendGrid. David Cowan led Auth0. He thinks the firm also led the seed in Twilio. He comes back to the same point: Bessemer was the developer API company. Stripe sat in that same world, and Bessemer was not in it. He would keep Stripe as the example of the deal the firm wishes it had made.
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Does Bessemer Still Want Concentrated Growth Bets?
Sameer Dholakia says the numbers in a $4 billion Bessemer growth portfolio are large, and the firm still wants concentrated bets. A concentrated bet means Bessemer may write $200 million to $400 million into one company, into one opportunity, when conviction is high enough.
The capital would probably go in over a couple of different rounds, or a few rounds, and the fund is still looking for relative concentration. For the late growth funds, he thinks the average check size will be 5% to 10% of the fund, and 5% to 10% feels fine. Early growth is a little different. In the last growth fund, Century 2, he thinks 20% went into Anthropic.
Late growth stays a concentrated construction inside the
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Why Do Venture Firms Need to Be Giants or Specialists?
Sameer Dholakia says a venture firm has to be a giant global platform or an extreme specialist, because the middle is a hard place to make money.
A seed check in his day was $3 to $5 million on a $20 to $40 million valuation, and seed checks today are factors higher, so a firm has to hope it is a great picker. When he evaluated venture capital as a second career, it looked nothing like the mid to late 90s, when everything was hardware and software in Silicon Valley and principally early stage. The asset class is now global, spans every sector, and runs from a pre-seed check through an IPO, with investors putting in hundreds of millions of dollars. Location, stage, and sector are dramaticall
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Is Capital a Moat in AI Markets?
Sameer Dholakia believes capital is a moat in AI markets and a signal to the market. The biggest war chest, the most capital, is a necessary condition for winning the market, and in math terms the war chest is necessary but not sufficient.
Competitive breadth has not changed. The capital intensity behind the competition has, and the amounts raised create a competitive intensity unlike the SendGrid era. Legora and Harvey have both raised war chests that drive the difference. Markets pick winners, and the pick becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. SendGrid and Twilio were the building blocks developers plugged into an application to send communications. Once developers decided, the race was ove
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Does Entry Price Still Matter in Venture?
Sameer Dholakia says entry price always matters, and about 150 times current revenue was still a price he would pay for Anthropic because the company could grow at scale, compound for a very long time, and still make a venture return. Four and a half years into a second career, he treats the work as a craft and looks out the windshield.
The investments he is most proud of sat at current ARR multiples that would make most venture capitalists throw up, and they sparked hard talks in the investment committee. Anthropic, in a 15 billion dollar round, was at about 100 million dollars, like 150 times current ARR. Legora was at 20 million dollars of ARR when he invested and led a 1.8 billion dolla