Kiyan Zandiyeh
CEO & CIO, Sturgeon Capital · 1 appearance on the record.
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investorexecutive@k_zandiyeh ↗LinkedIn ↗sturgeoncapital.com ↗
Kiyan Zandiyeh is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer at Sturgeon Capital. He oversees investments in early-stage technology companies across emerging and frontier markets.
23statements → 12claims → 7claims resolved → 14%fully supported → 3.96/5average certainty → 1.65/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 5 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 4 not checkable as stated how the 12 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 11 assertions · 1 opinion · 3 insights · 7 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 12 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Kiyan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Zandiyeh: Kaspi completed a $15B London IPO out of Kazakhstan
“Two, you had just had the IPO of a company called Caspi, which is a fifteen billion dollar business listed in London, a technology business out of Kazakhstan of all places, which had validated that you could build a sizable business there.”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Kiyan Zandiyeh on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Kiyan Zandiyeh said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Zandiyeh: Tech startups face lower expropriation risk than frontier industrial assets
“The difference is that you have a tangible asset that it relatively is operationally simple to run. There's a positive correlation between the success of it and the willingness of the government to ultimately want to take it off you at some point in time, beca…”
Zandiyeh: VC fixation on product-market fit ignores underlying business economics
“For many years now, what I think has been a disservice to the venture industry is this concept of product market fit. What it effectively has entailed from an investment strategy perspective is that when a company reaches or sees some level of demand, Irrespec…”
Zandiyeh: Major fashion brands quadruple volume with Bangladeshi portfolio startup within year one
“Now, in this case, and specifically, the company has already the relationships of the likes of the Inditex, the H&Ms, the large brands of the world, where what we see is basically in the first year, as soon as these brands start working with them, they almost …”
Zandiyeh: Average upper-quartile venture capital DPI is only 1.76
“I think it explains why the average upper quartile DPI is 1.76. The fund sizes cannot even cope with generating that much enterprise value.”
Zandiyeh: Bangladesh has 170M people, 8th largest smartphone base, only 2 VCs
“So you take a country like Bangladesh, hundred and seventy million people, eighth largest smartphone user base in the world. As I said, GDP per capita higher than India. You only have two VCs in the whole country.”
Zandiyeh: Uzbek banks ignore SMEs despite driving 60% of GDP
“If you look at the banking sector, effectively, 80% of that banking sector only does corporate and government lending. There's no real retail banking. There's no real banking to small to mid-sized businesses. Small to mid-sized businesses are about 60% of the …”
Zandiyeh: Raised approximately $3M from three investors as a teenager
“It was around three million actually, which actually came from basically free investors, which were largely Individuals that had known me since I was a little kid”
Zandiyeh held 60% portfolio concentration in a single stock
“So at some points I would have one company that was 60% of the fund, which means extreme volatility, but actually the performance was pretty good.”
Zandiyeh: Sturgeon's Iranian tech startups reached $110M in profitable revenue
“For a period of years, we built those businesses up. They do around a hundred and ten million dollars in revenue. They're profitable businesses. They're the leader in their own sector and have a very long runway to grow ahead of them.”
Zandiyeh: Bangladesh and Pakistan have a higher GDP per capita than India
“There is basically two countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan. We're combining about four hundred million people. GDP capital actually higher than India. But still, sub-one percent e-commerce penetration, low levels of digital payments, and low levels of BTP softw…”
Zandiyeh: Tech will capture 20% to 30% of Pakistan-Bangladesh GDP
“And that combined, you have roughly about a trillion dollars in GDP, that probably over the next 1020 years, 20 to 30% of that is up for grabs by technology companies that can service that revenue base.”
Zandiyeh: Sturgeon Capital avoids pre-revenue businesses, targeting $500k to $10M revenue
“So we never invest in pre-revenue stage businesses. Typically, there are companies that are, at the time of investments, their revenues on the lower end are around half a million dollars, and at the upper end, around ten million dollars.”
Zandiyeh: Customer acquisition costs in frontier markets range from $5 to $10
“And typically in these countries, customer acquisition costs ranges from around five to 10 dollars each, which is very low.”
Zandiyeh: Frontier market startups must reach profitability faster than Western peers
“The dynamic that I think is different also in these markets relative to, let's say, the US or Europe is generally because these countries have not had a deep pool of funding available to them. The entrepreneurs from the get-go understand that basically they ha…”
Zandiyeh: Frontier governments champion tech FDI to eliminate economic inefficiencies
“So what you typically see is actually the governments are the largest champions of FDI, specifically in the technology sector. Because they understand it as a reset economically for their country, where they can reshape a lot of the inefficiencies that exist t…”
Zandiyeh: Launched a teenage investment fund with 0% management and 25% carry
“So I had a structure which was zero percent management fees and 25% performance fee above six percent.”
Zandiyeh: Kaspi completed a $15B London IPO out of Kazakhstan
“Two, you had just had the IPO of a company called Caspi, which is a fifteen billion dollar business listed in London, a technology business out of Kazakhstan of all places, which had validated that you could build a sizable business there.”
Zandiyeh: ZoodPay founder previously built an $800M business and sold one for $100M
“And one of our large investments is that, I mean, it's a company called Zootpay. The founder started his first business when he was in his twenties. He sold it for about a hundred million. Second business built an eight hundred million dollar business. And thi…”
Zandiyeh: Sturgeon-incubated Uzbek SME lender turned profitable in six months
“And so we incubated that company in a way where we found the investor. We found the management team. We own around 25% of it. I'm on the board of it myself and almost got started from scratch. And that's doing tremendously well. And it's only in a six month op…”
Zandiyeh: Kaspi generates $2B annual net income in Kazakhstan
“For context, to introduce a comparable business model to start, I mentioned briefly this company called Caspi listed in London. Now that business is fascinating because Kazakhstan is a population of nineteen million, and these guys have managed to build a busi…”
Zandiyeh: ZoodPay reaches 2M MAUs and 50,000 merchants across Central Asia
“Zootpay, the company in question, that business model, but operating in four or five different countries. Where on the initial side, we purely started with e-commerce, build the infrastructure to enable e-commerce to happen in these countries, and build up a d…”
Zandiyeh: Pakistan venture funding surged to $300M in 2022
“If you look at a country like Pakistan, they went, on average, for three years, raising twenty million dollars in total for the venture ecosystem, where in twenty-twenty-one, it got to two hundred fifty million dollars. In twenty-twenty-two, it was three hundr…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Kiyan Zandiyeh – Empty Rooms: Venture Capital on the Emerging Frontier at Sturgeon Capital | May 25, 2023 | 42m |