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Vertex Ventures US Partner Dom Perri on the Firm’s New Fund Focused on DevOps and Infrastructure
Vertex Ventures U.S. has a new $200 million fund devoted to early-stage business-to-business startups, with a focus on digital infrastructure. L.A.-based partner Dom Perri joined this episode of LA Venture to talk about the new fund, and offer insights from his career in corporate and business development.
Vertex is a multibillion-dollar family of funds spanning Singapore, Israel and China, among other countries. Bay Area-based Vertex US writes checks from anywhere from $500,000 to $10 million, and is focused on seed and Series A funding rounds, Perri said. The Bay Area-based firm is looking to help startups working on cloud developer systems, DevOps and cybersecurity.
"At the end of the day, Vertex US is an independent VC firm," said Perri.
He added that two-thirds of his time is spent on infrastructure broadly, while the rest is spent exploring new verticals like fintech, supply chain robotics and automation.
Speaking of cybersecurity for early companies Perri said, “The majority of attacks are still largely a result of human error. All the more reason to prioritize compliance and governance and not just when you hit a certain scale as a company.”
Perri cut his teeth working in business development, including mergers and acquisitions, where he worked at Dropbox, Juniper and Tesla. When the electric automaker acquired a company in Germany, Perri flew to the country to help with the acquisition. He had to convince the employees who were already skeptical of Tesla.
"Merging companies is always going to be nasty and really impact the culture," said Perri. He added that communication is key to getting to understand the rationale behind a merger.
In his negotiation workshops at Stanford, Perri talked about avoiding a situation where you approach someone as an adversary. He said if you're restricting information or hiding information, those are all things that will complicate the conversation.
Despite tough negotiations, the reason Perri said he gets out of bed to be a venture capitalist is because he loves working with founders.
"It's a real privilege for us to be working with them,” he said. “And just also being able to help them and drive some of the outcomes and hearing them in board meetings or quarterly reviews talk about how we've been able to help them."
dot.LA Engagement Fellow Joshua Letona contributed to this post.
Hear the full episode by clicking on the playhead above, and listen to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
After five and a half years at Crosslink, Joe Guzel is launching his own venture fund Haven Ventures, a new fintech fund focused on seed and pre-seed startups, cutting checks of up to $1 million.
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Guzel talks about his journey into the venture world and becoming a leading investor in fintech.
Guzel got his start at Intuit in San Francisco, where he fell in love with the city’s culture – and adopted the city’s feeling that “there isn't that much going on from a tech perspective” in L.A. But shortly after moving to Santa Monica to join the L.A. firm Crosscut Ventures, Guzel caught "the L.A. bug."
"After literally day one, cruising down the ocean to Crosscut's office in Venice Beach, I was like, 'Oh, this is really, really nice. Like, ‘what the hell are all these people up north talking about that L.A. sucks’?,'" he said.
Guzel moved back to the Bay to work for Crosslink Ventures, where he focused on the firm’s fintech investments, including startups such as Chime, Personal Capital and Step.
There, Guzel saw the landscape in financial technology radically shifting, both in terms of the technology and consumer interest.
“There has never been a better time to get into fintech," he said. “And that's because you have this $15 trillion industry that has taken decades and decades to get to the point where both tech infrastructure on the B2B side is ready for an upgrade.”
He saw a chance to start his own venture firm focused on financial technology and the transformation that is happening with decentralized finance and web3. With his partner McLain Southworth, he built Haven.
In the rest of the episode, Guzel talks about his family’s journey from the Middle East to the U.S. and what it was like growing up in an immigrant family in the Central Valley.
“We went from kind-of having it all in Kuwait, to having nothing,” he said. “There were eight of us living in a four-bedroom house that we still own in Bakersfield. I was sleeping on a bunk bed with my mom till I was 12.”
dot.LA Engagement Intern Joshua Letona contributed to this post.
Hear the full episode by clicking on the playhead above, and listen to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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UP Partners’ Ben Marcus has been fascinated by flight since he was young. After stints as a founder of aerospace startups, he’s now working on funding some of the most ambitious companies in the space.
Marcus joined this episode of LA Venture to talk about his fascination with flying, founding UP Partners and the future of transportation.
Marcus and his longtime best friend Cyrus Sigari met at the Santa Monica airport as kids. The two shared a love for everything involving planes. They ended up going to college together, became pilots – and eventually started their first company together, jetAVIVA, the world's largest broker of business jets.
As a young pilot, Marcus said he would fly over the traffic on the freeway asking himself, "Why is it that I'm one of the lucky ones that gets to be up here in the sky and everybody else is stuck in traffic? How do I get all these people up here in the sky with me?"
Marcus went on to found Airmap, a company that became a leading provider of an unmanned aircraft traffic management software. Now at UP Partners, a a $230M Fund I investing in entrepreneurs who are making transportation better, Marcus still has his hands in the aviation world – in particular, in laying the groundwork for a new infrastructure for a new breed of aerial vehicles.
He’s also deeply interested in how to move goods in more efficient and safer ways. Zipline, one of their portfolio companies, is focused on delivering humanitarian aid, including blood and medicine, to the places that need it most.
"For a long time, we've been hearing about Amazon, maybe someday delivering your toilet paper or your toothbrush by drone. But today, Zipline is delivering thousands of packages a day using drones in Africa," said Marcus.
UP Partners is looking to support companies that are innovating in automation and electrification, Marcus said. Autonomy and automation in flight advanced beyond other sectors some time ago. Passenger and commercial 747s have been capable of auto landing for decades. The difficulty, Marcus said, has been in convincing FAA regulators to embrace innovation.
"So how do you take this really fantastic technology and make it acceptable to the public and fit within a regulatory construct?," said Marcus. He envisions a slow roll out of the type of technology that can change the industry, most likely in cargo planes testing automation in rural environments where there are fewer people in harm's way. Eventually, as it proves itself, he said, automation will find broader acceptance in passenger vehicles.
Electrification is another game-changing technology Marcus sees on the horizon. Because electric batteries don't last as long as a typical fuel, Marcus thinks the technology will first roll out to aircrafts flying below 3,000 feet, on shorter-distance flights. Still, he thinks there could be far more of those flights, for instance, turning a 45-minute drive from Santa Monica to Pasadena into a 5 minute ride.
"These aircrafts will be quiet. They won't emit any carbon when they fly. They will be fast, smooth, comfortable — and I think we'll develop a very compelling service," said Marcus.
dot.LA Engagement Intern Joshua Letona contributed to this post.
Hear the full episode by clicking on the playhead above, and listen to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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