David Evans, Managing Partner at Sentiero Ventures, discusses how the firm evaluates traction in seed-stage startups.
0:00 / 0:36exact quote · 36.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So we don't use a lot of metrics. You don't have a clearly defined customer acquisition cost or lifetime value yet just because of the age of the company. But we do look for is exactly one of the things that you described is we want to see customers voting with their wallets. Now I don't care specifically for a floor on a revenue number. But I want to see the, that team can take their products, bring it to market, Acquire a lead and bring that lead all the way through the sales funnel and convert them to the convert them to a customer.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from David Evans
Opinion
Evans: The term 'agentic' AI is currently more hype than reality
“I think, unfortunately, I think the phrase agentic has become overused, and it really is more hype than reality, but I do think there, the core of the shift to agentic is, is really enterprises are looking for demonstrable ROI.”
David EvansJun 2, 2025▶ 4:46Harnessing AI through Seed-Stage Investments: Insights from David Evans of Sentiero Ventures
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Evans: AI automation in compliance and HR will not eliminate jobs
“It's not going to take anyone's job away. It's actually a place where companies will realize the benefit of being better in their HR processes, being better in their compliance processes being better in their recruitment processes. You'll realize the benefit o…”
David EvansJun 2, 2025▶ 7:19Harnessing AI through Seed-Stage Investments: Insights from David Evans of Sentiero Ventures
Opinion
Evans: Investor helpfulness is the most oversold cliché in venture capital
“I think it's one of the oversold cliches and ventures that were helpful.”
David EvansJun 2, 2025▶ 17:27Harnessing AI through Seed-Stage Investments: Insights from David Evans of Sentiero Ventures
Insight
Evans: Sell existing products to matching buyers before building new features
“You built the thing. People are buying the thing, find more people that will buy that thing. Because the insight there is that a lot of times what we tend to do is we tend to look past the people that are already paying us. Right. And you go and you look and y…”
David EvansJun 2, 2025▶ 23:17Harnessing AI through Seed-Stage Investments: Insights from David Evans of Sentiero Ventures
Insight
Evans: Building deep vertical AI is difficult due to public training data
“Building deep vertical solutions is still really difficult because if you think about the data that's been used to train chat GPT, it's largely data that's available on the internet.”
David EvansJun 2, 2025▶ 1:57Harnessing AI through Seed-Stage Investments: Insights from David Evans of Sentiero Ventures
Insight
Evans: Vertical AI requires marrying proprietary data with public models
“The interesting opportunity for most of our companies is to be able to marry that sort of private data that's behind the scenes or that proprietary data. With these public models.”
David EvansJun 2, 2025▶ 2:28Harnessing AI through Seed-Stage Investments: Insights from David Evans of Sentiero Ventures
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 100 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.