In this episode we are asking Bogumil Balkanski, Partner @ Sequoia, what is he looking for in startups, and how he supports portfolio companies after investment

Inovo Venture Partners backs early-stage, post-traction startups that can grow 100x. We partner up with ambitious founders like Stefan from Booksy, Maja from Zowie, or Marcin from Spacelift. We invest between €0.5–2m in startups from Poland and the region.



TRANSCRIPT
Hi, This is Tomasz Swieboda. I'm a partner at Inovo a VC Fund focused in Poland and Central Europe. This is the very first episode of Inovo Podcast in which we are aiming the founders from the region to build a global tech company.

Today we are hosting Bogomil Balkansky - a partner at Sequoia, one of the best VC funds globally. If you're interested in what Sequoia needs to invest or how Bogumil will support your company after the investment, it's definitely a podcast for you. Let's start!


Hi Bogomil!

Hi Tomasz!

Pleasure to have you here! Bogumil if we could start with your story and you could share a couple of words about yourself.

Of course! As you mentioned I'm a partner at Sequoia Capital, we're one of the leading venture firms in Silicon Valley and the US. I think it's fair to say that we are the firm that invented Venture Capital as such. We have been in existence for 49 years, we will be celebrating our 50 year anniversary like next year. And all years we have partnered with many companies that all your listeners would have heard of. You know, Apple, Cisco, and more recently companies like Airbnb, Doordash and many others.

My personal story is I actually grew up in Bulgaria and came to the US 29 years ago, in 1991. I belong to that lucky generation of Eastern Europeans in the sense that I finished high school a year after the Berlin Wall fell and I jumped on the very first chance to come to the US and get an education.

So I came here for college and ended up sticking around and making life for myself in the US. I have lived in the Bay Area for the last 22 years. What brought me to the Bay Area originally was going to Stanford for my MBA and that was in 1998 through 2000 which if you remember was the very peak of the dot-com wave and so I found myself smacking the middle of all these exciting things happening around the Internet. And I ended up taking a job in the technology start-up when I finished my MBA and I have been working in technology ever since so 20-year career as an operational executive in software companies. Always in b2b enterprise and my entire career, I led product management and product marketing teams for various enterprise solutions kind of up and down the technology stack from deep data center infrastructure to SAS apps and anything in between.

I spent quite a few years at VMware focusing on data center infrastructure. Before VMware, I worked at Siebel Systems which was the leading CRM software at the time. After VMware, I went with a startup. I got acquired at Google so I spent a couple of years at Google. I ended up joining Sequoia earlier this year.

Okay, so it's your first time as an investor or did you invest before as well?

I'm a recent professional investor, but before that, I had been an angel investor for probably a decade.

Okay.

I also have been a board member at various technology companies for almost a decade.

That's an amazing story! Thank you for sharing this.

So what kind of companies do you focus on right now when you invest?

I personally focus on enterprise technology, very broadly defined and by the way, if you just look at our portfolio by the numbers, majority of the companies that we partnered with are enterprise companies.

I don't specialise anymore narrowly than that. Sequoia's approaches for all of us, to be generalists. The...