America Wins: VC Meets DC

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Matt Caspari:

  Hey, my name’s Matt Caspari. I’m the managing partner of Potomac Ventures, which is Alumni Ventures’ Georgetown-centric fund. We are in Georgetown, so we’re hosting an event this evening at Faraday, which is a clothing store. They’ve kindly invited us to come in, so we’re taking over the second floor of the store. We’ve got entrepreneurs coming out, venture capitalists, investors in our fund—so it should be a great gathering of the community.

  Christon Hill:

  So Matt is a managing partner at Potomac Ventures, and he’s part of the Alumni Ventures family of funds. He’s a seasoned—some may say salty—venture capitalist with passion for deep tech and has a background that includes being a startup CEO, investor, and innovative executive. And he’s here tonight to share his perspective on innovation, venture capital, and the policies that are made right here in our backyard in DC and creating new opportunities for startups, inventors, and investors—especially in the sectors of AI, defense, and strategy. So please give Matt a warm welcome. Thank you for being here, Matt.
  Yeah, thanks. And thank you for inviting me to pepper you with questions. So I’m going to do something a little different than what’s normally done. Instead of closing with the lightning round, I’m going to open with it. Just get us warmed up on our toes. So just as quickly as you can:

  Matt Caspari:

  Okay. Quickly.

  Christon Hill:

  The answers that pop into your head. First one doesn’t have to be right—just fast.

  Matt Caspari:

  Okay.

  Christon Hill:

  Alright. What’s one emerging tech you’d invest in today if you could choose only one?
  Don’t say AI.

  Matt Caspari:

  I’ll say physical AI, which in a lot of people’s minds is robotics.

  Christon Hill:

  Excellent. What’s a founder trait that’s become more important than ever in 2025?

  Matt Caspari:

  A unique insight. I’m keeping these very short. We can go deeper.

  Christon Hill:

  I appreciate that. Yeah, no, we will. I’m going to come back to that one—unique insight. What’s the biggest misconception about venture capital?

  Matt Caspari:

  So I’ll say this—having been an entrepreneur who’s dealt with the joy of raising money—we see a lot of opportunities. There’s a million things that come across our desk. You really need to stand out. I think entrepreneurs have this misconception that it’s all about their company.

  Christon Hill:

  That’s fair. In 10 years, the next unicorn will come from which sector?

  Matt Caspari:

  I think at this point we’re thinking about companies that can be worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, which is kind of wild. We used to think about a billion-dollar company as what we call a unicorn. If people aren’t super familiar with venture jargon, really what we’ve seen is these companies can even get into the trillions of dollars of value. NVIDIA is a venture-backed company. Apple is a venture-backed company. So we’re seeing massive, massive value creation. What sector? I think we’re going to see multi-billion-dollar outcomes across many different sectors. So I’d say a few that we’re interested in right now are space—you mentioned energy. There’s a lot going on there. A lot of that is driven by AI, and I think we’re going to see it driven increasingly by AI. So I’d say it’s probably hard to find an area that VCs are investing in that I don’t think has potential to create very large outcomes.

  Christon Hill:

  And if you weren’t a VC, what would you be doing right now?

  Matt Caspari:

  An entrepreneur.

  Christon Hill:

  That’s fair. I feel like it’s a little bit of a cop-out since you did that already, but I’ll allow it.

  Matt Caspari:

  They’re related, but very, very different jobs and roles.

  Christon Hill:

  Okay. Well, that was the lightning round that everyone popped buttons for. Well actually—check that. So I know you’re in DC for Georgetown Reunion this weekend. So maybe you can give us just a quick rundown or overview of your journey from Georgetown to becoming a venture capitalist.

  Matt Caspari:

  Yeah, so I studied biochemistry at Georgetown. I also took a lot of business classes, decided to go down—call it more of a business path than medical school or something like that. But I’d say my career has had a lot of intersection of science, technology, and business. So I spent a few years as a management consultant. Our clients were large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. I was living in New York at the time and was doing a lot of work with Genentech in the Bay Area. Started to become really interested in innovation and venture capital. Decided to go to business school at UC Berkeley—I’ve got a Berkeley guy in the audience. We’ll have to get to a story with Zach. We were both in the basement of an incubator at Berkeley, 2005–2006 timeframe. So I started a company out of there, won the business plan competition the year I graduated.

  We went on to raise a lot of venture capital—raised over $100 million for that business. Ended up selling it about a decade after we started it to a big conglomerate out of India. So I’d say I started learning about venture capital as the CEO of a venture-backed company. So I’ve been around kind of the ecosystem for about 20 years at this point. Most of it as an operator, not as an investor. Had another kind of life and career as a leader of the innovation team at Nike. So we did a lot of projects in partnership with external companies—both large and small. We had about 600 people on our internal team. So that was an interesting role where we did things like new material development, new methods of manufacturing, 3D printing—things like that. And then some of them we were able to take to global scale.

  Actually getting to scale is a whole other set of challenges that unfortunately most venture-backed startups never get into. So that was an interesting vantage point. Along the way, I tried to help a lot of other entrepreneurs—started with advising, mentoring, led to angel investing. And angel investing was my hobby for a while. That’s how I’d spend my weekends and nights—look at companies, talk to entrepreneurs, invest in some of them. And I really enjoyed that. It was fun. And that led me to decide to make a leap into doing venture full time. So I’ve been in the role with Alumni Ventures for a little over four years now. We can talk more about it, but that’s kind of the quick path—over 20-plus years from Georgetown.

  Christon Hill:

  So as you transitioned into venture capital, you came to Alumni Ventures. So can you tell us a little bit about Alumni Ventures, its connection to Potomac Ventures, the thesis, that sort of thing?

  Matt Caspari:

  Yeah, so Alumni Ventures is a pretty unique venture firm. It’s sometimes worth sharing a little bit of the founding story of Alumni Ventures. So our founder had worked in traditional venture capital, was kind of towards the back end of his career. He had returned to New Hampshire—he had gone to Dartmouth undergrad—and he was approached by some friends, some classmates saying, “Hey, can you help us invest in startups?” These are people who invested in stocks, bonds, real estate, but just did not have access to venture capital. And that led to this idea of creating a fund around the Dartmouth alumni community—hence the name Alumni Ventures.

  And they started to invest in some venture-backed startups. That quickly led to two much larger ideas. So we talk about our mission as democratizing access to venture capital. Our founder figured there are probably lots of people like his friends who don’t have access to venture.

  The other thing that he saw was post-investment, you could actually tap into this investor base as a really interesting network that could support the portfolio companies. And that’s very different from traditional venture capital. The LPs in traditional venture funds are usually pension funds, endowments—they don’t help startups. In this case, if you’ve got alumni that are investing in these companies, they can really be interesting people to support.

  So we talk about being a network-powered venture fund. We see our investor base as an interesting network and we’ve expanded it way beyond that. He quickly launched a Harvard fund—he had gone to Harvard Business School. We started doing other funds around other alumni communities. So we now have funds in over 30 communities across the U.S.

  We also have some thematic funds. I wear kind of three main hats:

  • Potomac Ventures is our Georgetown-centric fund—it’s based around the Georgetown community. That’s why we’re here today. For me, it’s great. I obviously studied at Georgetown undergrad.

  • I also run our UC Berkeley-centric fund. I’ve had long-term ties to innovation and entrepreneurship there.

  • And I also run our Deep Tech Fund, which is more of a thematic pool of capital.

  So that’s, at a high level, kind of what we’re up to.

  Christon Hill:

  You touched on it a bit, but I’d like to unpack it if you’re willing. So with such a tight-knit investment thesis, what are sort of the advantages and disadvantages inherent to that?

  Matt Caspari:

  Yeah, so at Alumni Ventures, we’re extreme generalist investors—meaning we invest across different sectors, we invest across different stages. For the investors who invest in one of our funds, we want to create a diversified portfolio. So we want to get them access to startups that are at different stages, different sectors, even different geographies. So we’re investing really widely.

  That has pros and cons versus a strategy where you’re investing in many fewer companies. I’d say the other thing about our model is—we’re very active. Actually, PitchBook, that kind of tracks venture activity, said we were the most active venture firm in the U.S. the last two years. So we’ve invested in over a thousand companies across Alumni Ventures. That’s a core part of our network and what we’re up to.

  But given how active we are, we don’t take board seats, we don’t lead rounds. We co-invest alongside other venture firms. So that has pros and cons. There are different models, different strategies. Our strategy is to be a co-investor. We care a lot about the track record, experience, quality of the lead investors we’re investing alongside.

  And our value proposition to entrepreneurs and to the lead investors is bringing this massive network to the table. And we’ve got lots of ways that we’re able to tap into that. So I’d say, yeah, we spend a lot more time building community, building connections—less time deep on specific startups, sitting on boards, really trying to add a ton of value to a specific company.

  So it’s different strategies that different venture funds go after.

   

  Christon Hill:
  Sure. You mentioned that you don’t lead those rounds, you look for the strength of the investor. Are there any other standout criteria or specific criteria that you look for in a pitch or at that early-stage company when you do want to invest?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, so our firm Alumni Ventures, given how active we are, we’ve got a very formal methodology that we use to assess companies. It’s actually a scorecard. It has kind of a rubric. We’re looking at all these criteria, and when we write our due diligence memos, we’re providing evidence to support our scores. So it’s things that are probably obvious. We’re going to assess the CEO, we’re going to assess the management team. We’re going to assess the revenue, the margins, the competitive moats—all those things.

  But in addition, we’ll assess the lead investor. We’ll assess the specific partner who’s leading the round, taking a board seat. We’ll assess: is this an outside-led round by a new venture firm? Is it only insiders? What are the other people on the cap table doing in this specific round? So these are all things that we look at and evaluate as we’re looking to make an investment.

  Personally, especially at the early stage, I probably put the most weight on the CEO. I think that’s critical. I mentioned earlier a unique insight. Are they going after something that’s differentiated? I like things that I haven’t heard of before that aren’t obvious, that don’t have a ton of competition—something special, unique. And is there a good combination of this CEO going after this problem? And do I think they’re going to be a magnet for really world-class resources?

  And I’m really talking about people—do I think they’re going to be able to bring together great people to work with them? Do I think they’ll attract world-class VCs to the company? And if they’re able to do that and it works—which it often doesn’t—but if it does work, will it become just a massively large company? That’s the game we’re playing here. So those are at a very high level some of the things we think about.

  Christon Hill:
  Sure. So when it comes to those founders and CEOs, what are the top qualities or strategic decisions that you look for—and just to bring it into the DMV ecosystem. Let’s say they’re playing in sectors like defense or climate tech or…

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, there’s a lot of little things that we can look for to try and give us a sense of could this person become a great entrepreneur or are they a great entrepreneur? If they’ve taken companies public in the past and they’ve gone through the journey, it’s pretty obvious they understand the game they’re playing. But when you think about people that—think of a Mark Zuckerberg or someone at 19 that creates an iconic company—how would you have spotted that? That’s a lot trickier.

  So we look a lot at what distance has this person traveled in their life? Where did they start? Where are they at now? Have they done anything exceptional? So if you think of someone who’s 19 at Georgetown or Harvard, to pick your favorite place, where did they come from? Where did they start? Have they done some exceptional things? Have they built something that’s gone viral? Those can be signs that there’s something there.

  If there’s evidence of just perseverance—how did they get in touch with you? Have they sold something? Do they have customers? Entrepreneurship is hard. I like to ask the question of, “Why are you working on this versus anything else?”

  So I gravitate a lot less toward people who are working on an AI thing that I know they came up with in the last few weeks than someone who’s been thinking about a problem for a decade and they haven’t found a solution, so now they’re building it. Do I think they’re going to go through the pain to stick through this for a decade or more? Because what we’re looking for is entrepreneurs to sign up to really go on this long, long journey that’s going to be hard.

  There are other little things that seem to correlate well with great entrepreneurs. They tend to respond very quickly. There’s little things like this that Y Combinator put out a little data on. The best founders, they tend to respond within hours. The average founders tend to respond within days. So there’s just this pace. There’s a speed. There’s usually—not always—but usually pretty good clarity of vision.

  And when you talk to hundreds, thousands of entrepreneurs—which is kind of what we’ve probably done at this point—you start to find people that stand out as more exceptional. We’re looking to back exceptional people. So those are a few of the things we look for.

  Christon Hill:
  Those are good. So notes—those things are conviction, grit, clarity, and responsiveness.

  Matt Caspari:
  That’s well said.

  Christon Hill:
  And then obviously unique vision. With those folks, with those founders, those CEOs—particularly at those early stages—what do you see as sort of the common mistakes that are made for those startups, particularly when they’re engaging with government or regulated markets?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, in regulated markets like that, you tend to see things taking a lot longer than people expect. So I think a pretty common mistake is to have a revenue ramp that just doesn’t look realistic, to not have a clear plan on how they’re going to penetrate those markets.

  Again, being realistic. I’d rather you tell me it’s going to take a year to hire the right lobbyist and hire someone who’s sold into this specific group, and I need someone who’s worked with that person in that group because they’re going to make the decision. Just be very thoughtful—it’s going to take time to build the team and build the relationships, and it’s going to be two or three years or whatever it is to try and go after this contract—than someone who says, “We’re going to do $3 million in the first year,” and there’s not a clear answer.

  So I think it’s just—we’ve seen a lot. Be transparent, understand what it’s going to take to truly sell in. And there’s upsides too. Once you break through, it can be very sticky. So just understand the business you’re in and what these relationships can turn into in terms of revenue in the future if you are able to win these awards.

  There are a lot of mistakes that entrepreneurs make, but related to those sectors, that’s a couple.

  Christon Hill:
  So with the understanding of the market and of those regulations being such an important piece—or such an important component of success—how is it that you recommend, or how would you recommend that early-stage founders really build that muscle and that muscle memory and stay aware of the trends in their respective sectors?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, I think even without any money—when I started my first company, we didn’t have any money—you can get advisors or other people around you. Again, I talked about being a magnet for resources. Show me that you can be a magnet for amazing advisors, amazing mentors.

  Set your dream list of people you want to go after and start to bring those people. So if you know you’re doing a medical device, you’re going to deal with the FDA, put some great people around you who’ve done that. That’s really not that hard. You don’t need any money. You need to sell your vision. You need to convince some people to help you. But show that you’re able to do that and tap into the right people.

  A 30-minute meeting and conversation with the right person can get you most of the way there. So show that you’re able to do that.

  Christon Hill:
  Well, I was waiting for you to do DC stuff, but you mentioned two three-letter agencies, so go ahead and dive into DC policy. I’m going to try and put this in a way that doesn’t make it such a hot-button question, but—so in your opinion, in your assessment, how do government policies impact startups? And more—can you share some examples of where policy has helped or hurt venture-backed companies?

  Matt Caspari:
  I’d say if you read about Silicon Valley and where it started, it’s been heavily influenced by the US government, especially around defense. So I think there’s a very long history of Stanford, Berkeley, places like that working with the government to develop a lot of the technologies that created Silicon Valley.

  I think a lot of that disappeared or wasn’t as obvious for a long time around the internet and even mobile and other areas. In climate tech, we saw some interesting support of companies. Tesla very famously won a large grant from the Department of Energy—which, as far as I know, if they didn’t win that, we probably wouldn’t have Tesla today. And they paid that grant back very quickly. So we’ve seen when government can help a new industry or accelerate some things, it can make a massive difference to getting some of these companies off the ground.

  So I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. What’s hard for entrepreneurs—and I don’t like to invest in companies that are totally reliant on that—is it’s kind of nice to have a baseline plan where regulations can change and you’ll still survive. And maybe you can get some really strong tailwinds and you think that things may be moving in your favor, and maybe over the next five years, it could be a catalyst for accelerated growth—but it’s not going to kill you.

  Same thing the other way: you don’t want to be in an area where if regulations change, it’s just going to create massive headwinds for you. So it’s hard. I’d say it’s part of the reason why we build portfolios and invest in a bunch of companies. You can have these changes in DC that can really accelerate some companies in the portfolio, and tariffs or other things could come up that could cause real problems for others.

  For entrepreneurs, it can make or break their companies. So I’d say we do need to pay a decent amount of attention to what’s happening in DC because I do think it impacts venture-backed companies.

  Christon Hill:
  To the wave of government funding and policy moves that are around AI, defense, energy—you mentioned the tailwinds, so let’s keep it in a positive light. What kind of opportunities are these changes creating, if any, for venture-backed companies?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, I’d say deregulation is probably generally a good trend for technology companies. And the opposite of that—interestingly, the crypto space has been asking for clarity around regulation for a long time. Maybe they’ll get more clarity on it, which could actually help them in a lot of ways. I think there are a lot of people kind of sitting on the sidelines—big institutional pools of capital—that are hesitant to come in until that really is in place.

  But I’d say there hasn’t been a lot of M&A in technology, often because of regulatory issues. So I think people feel that if it becomes easier for acquisitions to happen, that can be a big accelerant to venture-backed companies. I’d say that’s probably the biggest challenge we’ve had in the venture industry: lack of liquidity. And by that, we mean startups aren’t getting sold or aren’t going public.

  Those are the two ways that money comes back into the ecosystem. So you’ve had not a lot of IPOs—which you could tie pretty strongly to the regulatory burden of going public. There are other issues, but that’s a big one. And we’re not having as much large M&A because the large tech companies are just having a lot of regulatory scrutiny. So I think if those two things go away and you start to see a lot more exits, then you get a lot more dollars coming back into the venture firms that end up funding the next wave of innovation.

  So I’d say that’s kind of the big macro thing we’re hopeful for—to see this liquidity cycle really pick up. It’s been closed for a while.

  Christon Hill:
  So taking it from that macro view to more of a local view—with all these headwinds, tailwinds, changes that are coming about—what role do you think DC is playing or maybe even should be playing as a tech and innovation hub, particularly compared to those more traditional ecosystems like Silicon Valley, Bay Area, and Boston?

  Matt Caspari:
  I think DC and what’s happening here has always been important, but I think most venture capitalists probably didn’t realize how important it was to what they’re working on. And I think we’re seeing a lot more VCs spend time out here. There are policy things that are really impacting their investments and their portfolios.

  So I do think some people thought Silicon Valley being in California—which is where I’m based—and so far from DC was why it’s been successful. I don’t know that that’s true. And I think as we go forward in the future, there’s going to be a lot more collaboration between technology hubs and DC.

  Obviously there’s technology coming out of here, but I think it’s more the policy. I think it’s working with government. I think it’s selling into government. We’re seeing a lot of stuff happening in space technology. There are a lot of regulatory issues there. There’s a lot of government entities that you can sell into. A lot of defense-related contracts and things like that.

  We’re seeing pure defense startups created. So I think we’re seeing a lot more entrepreneurs want to spend time in DC, sell into the US government and all these different agencies. So yeah, I think the next, call it 10 years, will be really good for this ecosystem.

  Christon Hill:
  So staying in that sort of AI and defense vein—with it moving as fast as it is and has been—how would you say that this compares to past tech revolutions? And how should founders and investors balance that opportunity with—and you don’t have to go too deep into this part of it—but with those ethical concerns about AI and defense tech and that overlap?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, that’s such a big question. There’s a lot there. I think of how to break that down.

  Yeah, I mean AI—I think everyone’s very aware of it. I’d say I’m very excited about it being applied to areas that maybe aren’t as obvious. Things like material science, drug discovery. We’re just seeing innovation cycles sped up dramatically by AI.

  If you’re developing a new material, scientists used to mix a few things together, test it, they don’t get the result they want, mix a few more, and they do this for literally decades to try and get the result they’re looking for. Now with AI, you can come up with 10 things that the AI is recommending that you try, and you get hits on two or three of them. I mean, that’s amazing. It’s rapidly accelerating innovation cycles. I think that’s very exciting.

  I think compared to past technology waves, this one seems to be moving much faster. We’re on exponential growth curves. We don’t really have a good time grasping these. A lot of these models are getting much better in months.

  So if you didn’t like the result you had from ChatGPT and you stopped using it, maybe go try it again. You might be pretty shocked at what the result is today. We’re not seeing the spending slow down in any way. So this is all going very, very fast. And I think it’s a catalyst for basically every company we invest in.

  All these companies are more efficient than they were in the past. I think every large company needs to think, “How would they start from scratch—AI native?” I think it’s going to be very hard for a lot of large incumbents, and startups that can move quickly and pivot and hire the 22, 23-year-olds that are AI native are going to disrupt a lot of industries.

  So I think there’s a huge amount of value creation and destruction that’s going to happen. I think we’re in the zone of hopefully capturing a lot of new value creation, but I think a lot of things are going to be disrupted. A lot of people’s jobs are going to be disrupted.

  So you could say ethical or other considerations—but there’s no way to put this back in the bottle. It’s coming, it’s here, it’s going to go. I think trying to regulate it—I don’t think that’s going to work. You can put these models on your computer—they’re out there, they’re open source, a lot of them, and they’re good.

  So I’d say it’s an exciting time. But yeah, it can be challenging. And on the defense side, we’re seeing massive changes to the way things are done, especially with drones—to warfare. So I don’t think the traditional, what a Lockheed or someone would go through—these big massive long-cycle programs—I think what’s evaluating on the battlefield is happening very fast. I think you need to be able to iterate very quickly. I think you need to solve for problems quickly. That’s kind of the realm of what startups are pretty good at.

  So I think we’re going to see startups win against some of these old defense primes and incumbents that just have very different ways of working that aren’t probably optimized for what we need today.

  Christon Hill:
  Unless they buy them.

  Matt Caspari:
  If they’re willing to sell. So we’re seeing venture-backed companies—Palantir, Anduril—creating tens of billions of dollars of value. And a lot of the best entrepreneurs have passed on selling. Again, going back to Zuckerberg—they had a billion-dollar offer for Facebook, and I think most people at the time thought he should take that because it seemed like a very rich valuation. And he passed. He had the vision of where it could go. So they may sell, but they might not be willing to. So yeah, we’ll see.

  Christon Hill:
  And with that’s going to come—there’s a procurement process for those big agencies and for the armed services. So it’s an interesting time for sure. You mentioned some of the areas where you’re sort of optimistic about AI integration and AI and its impact on those specific sectors. Are there any where you’re experiencing more trepidation or hesitation or anything that you’re just outright avoiding?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, there are a lot of areas of AI that are extremely crowded. So if you’re not familiar, there’s this incubator accelerator called Y Combinator that’s had a lot of great companies come out of it. You can go look on their website, see what startups are coming out—they have several batches per year. So it’s kind of interesting to see what the entrepreneurs in a specific batch are working on. And if you do that and you flip through them, you’ll start to see, “Huh, that sounds familiar to another company in this batch… and two other companies in the batch before.” And you start to see a lot of areas look pretty crowded—AI applied to certain verticals.

  So you’re taking someone’s model—ChatGPT or someone else’s—and you’re trying to help a law firm or some specific use case solve that problem. You can probably generate some revenue, get a bit of traction, but it’s a lot less clear how you create really long-term defensible moats.

  I think there’s a lot of nice—what we in Silicon Valley call—lifestyle businesses, which I think, with my entrepreneur hat on, can be great businesses. There are a lot of 10-person companies I know that are doing very, very well, very profitable, using AI tools. But they’re not the multi-billion dollar venture outcomes that we’re looking for. And it’s not clear that those companies will be around in three or five years. I think there are real concerns around defensibility, moats, and these areas, again, just get really crowded.

  If you’re a law firm and the first entrepreneur shows up who’s going to solve your problem, it’s like, “Wow, come on in.” But when you have three entrepreneurs per day start knocking on your door, it’s different. The leverage changes. So those are areas that I’d say I’m a little less excited about.

  Christon Hill:
  Well then let’s talk about areas where you are excited. So beyond AI, what emerging technologies or business models do you think are flying under the radar right now but will be huge in, say, five to ten years?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, I mentioned in the beginning around physical AI—we’re kind of developing a bit of a thesis around this. So right now, I think a lot of people, when they think of AI, think of ChatGPT—you type something in, it gives you information back, generative-type AI. But you’re going to see a lot more AI in the physical world. So AI that’s using sensors. Think about enabling things like robotics.

  I’d say from the venture side, I’m particularly interested in areas where I think a startup can have a real competitive advantage. Think about Tesla working on humanoid robots—there are a lot of large companies with very big projects working in some of these general areas. So I’m interested in things that are a little more specific. For example, we invested in a company called Andromeda Surgical. A serial medtech entrepreneur had taken things through the FDA previously—actually, it was the first-ever Y Combinator medtech entrepreneur back in 2015—was doing a new surgical robotics company. So a real moat around knowledge: What procedures do you go after? How do you get through the regulatory process? But it fits into this thesis of: it’s all enabled now because of AI, leveraging more or less off-the-shelf robotics. So something like that I think is interesting. If I think out five to ten years, I think we’re going to see a lot more happening around robotics and a lot of very specific use cases.

  Christon Hill:
  Interesting. So for folks in the room who are either interested in investing in Potomac Ventures or raising capital, what’s the best way for them to engage with that entity?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, we’ve got a few investors in our funds here, so thank you for coming out—we appreciate it. So yeah, at Alumni Ventures, we have over 10,000 investors across our different funds. We’re the largest venture fund for individuals across the U.S. So if anyone’s interested in learning more—Alex, where’s Alex? He’s hiding in the back—Alex is on our investor relations team, he probably signed some of you in. So yeah, he’d be happy to tell you more about it.

  Again, our whole mission is around democratizing access to venture capital. The minimums on our funds now have just come down to $10,000. I’d say typical investments are probably in the $50,000 to $100,000 range. So it’s really accessible. You need to be accredited, and you need to be patient—this is a long-term, illiquid asset class. A lot of people invest through retirement funds. It can take ten years or even more, but we think it’s a very interesting part of your long-term, patient capital portfolio—and you get to back entrepreneurs and innovation.

  For entrepreneurs who are raising—obviously, we’re in the job of investing in great entrepreneurs—so happy to learn about your specific companies. We are a co-investor, so we really spin up our diligence and start spending time when you have a term sheet. If the lead’s in place, we know what the terms of the deal are, you can send us the data room and we can really, within probably a day or two, let you know if it’s something we’re going to spend more time on. Our whole process typically takes about two weeks for us to make a decision. We move really quickly.

  Christon Hill:
  And we’re winding down here with the questions to get back to some general conversation. But I don’t know if there are any students here, but for any early-stage entrepreneurs that might be in the audience—what’s one piece of advice that you wish you had had when you were starting your journey, both on the entrepreneurial side and also for any aspiring VCs or investors?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, it took me a while to realize this, but at the early stage, for better or worse, they’re investing in you. So tell your story. It’s the time to not be super humble and just realize most of the pitch is around you. And that’s fine—that’s easy. Tell your story, tell why you’re great, tell why you’re working on it. But a lot of entrepreneurs at the early stage don’t spend enough time on that.

  Christon Hill:
  And then every interview I do—and God do I do a lot of them at this point…

  Matt Caspari:
  You’re good at it. That’s why.

  Christon Hill:
  Well, thank you. Maybe too kind. But my final question is always: What are you watching, reading, or listening to right now that you think other folks should be aware of?

  Matt Caspari:
  Yeah, good question. Well, since it’s kind of venture capital and entrepreneurship, I’ll stick with things mostly in those areas. There’s a good podcast that’s been around for a long time now called 20VC. It’s a guy named Harry Stebbings out of the U.K.—I think he started it when he was 18 years old, has been doing it for maybe a decade or something now. He’s interviewed a ton of legendary VCs, but also a lot of CEOs and other people. So I think that’s a good one.

  There’s a podcast called Acquired, which is kind of at the other end of the spectrum—really long-form podcasts where the two hosts go very deep on really established companies that you’ve heard of. But they often get into the founding stories, the entrepreneurs behind it. That’s another good one.

  There’s one called BG Squared—two really good venture capitalists run this podcast. So if you kind of want pretty inside, Silicon Valley “baseball-type” stuff—it’s good there.

  On books: the two that I recommend to entrepreneurs and VCs—Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. I think he’s just got very clear questions that, if you think long and hard about them, are actually pretty hard to answer. And I do think you need good answers to those questions, so that’s worth spending some time on.

  And Jason Calacanis, who has another podcast, The All-In Podcast, wrote a book called Angel that I think has really good questions—especially as an investor talking to entrepreneurs. He was a journalist. I think he’s got some good framing of questions: What do you ask people when you’re thinking about investing in them? So I think there are some good things there. And also, if you’re a potential angel investor, he’s got some good tips on investing in startups.

  Christon Hill:
  Well, Matt, those are all the… okay, awesome. So I’m going to release you from this icy craft. I do appreciate it. Again, thank you.