Connect Ventures

Fireside chats hit different when the fire is real and the view is Tuscany.🔥 During our off-site, we were joined by Sitar Teli from Connect Ventures, one of our lead investors. Connect is a London-based VC that backs founders at pre-seed and seed, when the idea is still more conviction than proof. Sitar walked the whole team through how VCs think and what they look for in a company. We wrapped the chat with her favorite sci-fi films. 📽️ Thank you, Sitar, for making the trip and for such an open conversation. And thank you for helping ai-coustics build the future of audio intelligence.

Last week I joined the “Algorithm vs Instinct” panel at Wave by Vento in Turin, alongside Tom (QuantumLight) and Dinika (Cherry Ventures). It is a fascinating matter, a multi-dimensional one, where art meets science meets … gut. What is instinct in investing? Instinct is what you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. Let me unpack. Two things matter at inception, and instinct is always there for both:  → The founder: what’s their superpower. That “did they just blow my mind?” reaction.  → The upside: if all the stars align, how big this could get, which takes imagination. But unexamined instinct turns into bias, and you end up backing founders who look and sound like past winners. So we treat instinct as a hypothesis and use diligence to test it. Like luck, instinct gets better with work. Track your decisions and revisit the ones you got wrong. At pre-seed, the founder is the dataset. Our data is the conversations we have with founders. Our algorithm is our thesis on them. We’ve codified the founder attributes we look for. There’s no secret sauce: they’re on our website, and we keep iterating on them. Will AI pick deals? For traders and passive capital, yes. But VCs like me aim to be a true partner to the founders in the company journey. And that requires trust. Trust that you earn with empathy, radical candour, and being right in your advice, which - guess what - most of the time is about being right with your instinct. An instinct fed by staying connected to the founders, their team, their product, their customers. From the first meeting to the end. That part has always been human and stays human. And it is the fun and most rewarding part. Thanks to Andrea Gennarini for hosting and to the Vento team for putting together a great conversation.

I had an amazing time last week at the panel “Algorithm vs Instinct” with Tom (QuantumLight), Dinika (Cherry Ventures), and Pietro (Connect Ventures), at Wave by Vento! 💡A few takeaways from our discussion: 📊 Data-driven investing is here to stay, and its role will only grow. Especially at later stages, where there's much more data to work with. And its not just about growth rates: even less obvious factors like a founders age (younger can sometimes be better!) or startup valuations (higher doesn't necessarily mean worse!) can tell us something about the likelihood of success. 🎯 What can instinct capture that data cannot? At the earliest stages, theres often very little data to rely on, so judging the founder becomes even more important. Ambition, obsession, and above all, courage are some of the hardest things to measure. Taking on huge incumbents or fast-growing competitors takes guts, and recognizing that in a founder is where instinct really matters. 🤖 Human in the loop, after all? There's no single right approach. Whether you rely on algorithms or instinct, we're all trying to back the best founders. Most likely, the answer lies somewhere in between. And hopefully, VC will remain a business where meeting founders in person, building relationships, and trusting your gut still count. Maybe one of the last jobs where human judgment really matters! Already looking forward to next years! Big thanks to all the organizers, especially Diyala and the entire Vento team (Isabella, Tommaso, Elena, Marco, Virginia Martina) for bringing together such a great community!

A big thank you to everyone who joined us yesterday for The Founders’ Table 🫶 Wave by Vento brought an incredible concentration of talent to the city: founders, investors and operators, all pushing ambitious ideas forward. We wanted to keep that energy going beyond the conference floor, so we co-hosted a side event with Connect Ventures and White Star Capital: a few words of welcome, then a room buzzing with introductions, ideas and new conversations. A few snapshots from the afternoon below. Already looking forward to the next one! ✨ With Massimiliano Magrini Paolo Gesess Matteo Moscarelli Pietro Bezza Eric Martineau-Fortin Elisa Steccaglia Claire Walker Rebecca Rossini and the UV Team!

On Tuesday, we were in Amsterdam for our latest Built By Few event. 🇳🇱 Loved hearing from three brilliant founders building out of the city:  Paul Veugen, Desert Ant Labs Salar al Khafaji, Monumental Bob van Luijt, Weaviate Three very different stories, building very different things, but so many common threads and valuable takeaways for everyone in the room. 🙌 A huge thank you to our speakers for being so generous with their time and insights, and to everyone who joined us and made it such a special evening! Next up, London! 🇬🇧 We'll be back in our hometown next month for our biggest Built By Few event of the year, and we can't wait. Full details will be announced very shortly, so keep an eye out. 👀 In the meantime, if you're interested in joining us, you can express your interest here: https://luma.com/phtg8nap