Cem Sertoglu: Lessons from the Greatest Venture Investment in European History | E1228

... the best single venture investments. We have 16 and a half million investments that has brought us back 2.1 billion dollars in proceeds. So Fund 1 is 20-time multiple on invested capital. 2.7 of that is non-UiPath, so about 85% of the proceeds of Fund 1 have been UiPath. I believe UiPath went from a million to 100 million ARR in 21 months. At the time, that was, I think, the fastest ever.

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Cem, I'm excited for this. So we first did a walk around the park and I was like, "God, I wish this was recorded." So first, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Harry. It's great to be here.

Now, I would love to start, how did you make your way into the world of venture first and come to where you are today? Let's just start there.

I'm a founder-turned-investor. Uh, I started my first company in 1999 in New York. Horribly timed, arguably the worst time in history to start a tech company. Um, it was a company called SelectMinds. Uh, we were building in social networking software, uh, one of the earliest, uh, participants in that space, but hit the crash pretty hard. We survived, ultimately did okay, uh, had a nice exit, and, uh, decided to move to Istanbul, which is where I grew up on Turkish, born and raised in Istanbul, and, uh, initially thinking that was going to be for two years. Uh, when I moved back, I started meeting young Turkish tech companies, mostly consumer internet businesses, and got excited because I, at the time, I think I saw two things that not a lot of people agreed with me on. Um, one is the fact that people behave similarly everywhere, uh, especially in their interaction with technology, with consumer technology. So, uh, at that time, for example, people were telling me, "Oh, you know, uh, people in France will never buy shoes online." And I'm thinking, I look at the US, I look at the UK, and I'm like, "Uh, that's not right. People are people, they're gonna buy shoes online." So, uh, I saw the playing out of consumer internet, uh, in the West and looked for opportunities to, uh, partner with companies that were trying to do the same thing in the rest of the world, uh-

And so you're an angel in these early companies?

I was an angel in these early companies. I got very lucky. I, uh, a few of my early investments turned out to be the biggest exits, uh, at the time in, in the Turkish market. A e-commerce company got sold to eBay, a food delivery company, the leader in Turkey, got sold to Delivery Hero. These were big outcomes, largest exits. So it started to build a ... if it were a commodity, it would be the same thing to raise from a Sequoia, or from us, or from 20VC, or, uh, or from your, uh, you know, dentist who's angel investing. And we all know that that's not the same thing for a founder to be ... It's, you know, it's not cash is green and all equal. So I don't think it is getting commoditized because it's limited. It's, uh, you cannot scale it by just pouring money on it. I think that's what commoditation- commodization implies.