Disclaimer: The views in this podcast do not represent the guests’ organizations, and the mentioned projects are not investment advice. Sip some boba, enjoy afternoon tea, and let’s chat Web3! 🍵🌐💼 DYOR!

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Welcome to another edition of OPL Boba Time, where we engage in insightful conversations with Web3 experts. This month, we're honored to have Calvin Du, Head of Platforms @ Inception Capital, as our special guest. Today's focus is the “Wisdom of Fundraising”.  Grab your virtual boba and join us as we dive into Calvin's experiences and thoughts on navigating the fundraising journey.

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NONO: Do you drink boba? What’s your go-to order?

Calvin: Yeah, I do. I like it and my girlfriend loves it. So I do drink quite a lot of Boba Tea.

What kind? The most basic, regular Boba Tea with less sugar and less ice.

NONO: Tell us a little bit about yourself, what role do you play at Inception Capital?

Calvin: I am part of the founding team at Inception Capital. In addition to covering the deal side of our investments, I also lead our platform capabilities. As head of platform, I build a lot of our resources in house, mostly related to go-to-market for our portfolios, as well as other resources like service providers and KOLs at our disposal to help our portfolio companies. On a regular basis, I speak and work quite actively with all of our founders.

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NONO: As the Head of Platforms, what are the main objectives of Inception’s current fund as well as the Fund of Funds? What is your investment focus & thesis?

Calvin: On the venture side, we participate or lead deals mostly in the pre-seed and seed stage in all different tracks and sectors. Lately we’ve been very focused on leading high-quality consumer infrastructure deals.  Consumer is a vertical we’ve been interested in since our founding, and the vertical seems to be gaining healthy traction this cycle. We take a very hands-on approach, including helping projects with their pitch decks, project ideations, GTM strategies, and other resources as well. All in all, we facilitate these conversations and want to be seen as a trusted advisor and partner that they can work with, in addition to just putting money in their project.

For our Fund of Funds, just the nature of being a fund manager. A lot of our work is mostly scouting out, finding early stage and emerging managers. So we tend to think about vertical expertise, geographical expertise when it comes to the Fund of Funds.

NONO: What are the criterias you usually look for in founders? What appealed to you about your portfolios such as Avalanche, Celestia, and Scroll?

Calvin: I think that for me, in terms of a “final vibe check”, it is mostly about insight. How much insight the founder can provide to me in that 30 minute, 45 minute conversation. I love those conversations where there's a lot of “meat” that's involved. We're asking very specific questions that require very specific answers that go to show how in-depth a founder has thought about a particular topic. This includes not just the product itself, but also marketing, hiring, operations, and etc. The culmination of all these answers give our funding team a lot of confidence in founders that have the capacity to seriously consider all the roadblocks and challenges ahead.

The other thing I like in terms of the insight is how much they know about their target clients. Usually in pre-seed to seed stage companies, these are pre-product or products that still need a product-market-fit. The more due-diligence the founder can do upfront, the more de-risked our investment is going to be. Therefore, once again, by providing a lot of insight, the founder can demonstrate their knowledge in knowing their customers’ priorities, which gives the funding team comfort.

What we're investing in is the next generation solutions and next generation founders, we want them to have strong conviction on what they're building. An analogy I use for finding the niche fit or pain point is like getting poked by a sharp needle vs blunt knife. Which hurts more? The answer is obviously the needle, which demonstrates that the more specific a founder can get with a particular pain-point their product is trying to solve, the more I can feel their conviction and passion. This combined with their technical capability and their grand vision, as well as their proven ability to execute, are some boxes we are trying to check when looking for a robust founding team, an example being Scroll, and Particle Network.

One other example portfolio is Fyde treasury that has a very comprehensive background. They have a TradFi background which is needed to build a treasury, Web3 native capabilities, people on the business side, as well as a very strong technical co-founder. These kinds of balanced Web2/Web3 cross-functional and cross-sectional team structure is what we like a lot.

Lastly, in talking about the ability to execute, I’d like to mention Yodayo, a team that is trying to build AI-generated content. Frankly speaking, we were not very impressed with our initial conversation. However, upon a further longer conversation, we started to get dragged into the founder’s realm of in-depth thinking about the different perspectives of his project. Along with showing us all his progressions in the past, the founder demonstrated that he really has tried all of the fancy ideas people have thought about in the generative AI realm, as well as considered all different kinds of factors in building a Gen-AI product.

NONO: How does the above compare to what you look for in an emerging manager for the Inception Fund of Funds?

Calvin: I think it's still about insight. We want the managers that we invest in to be able to increase OUR insight into what's the investable universe of all the projects within Web3.

NONO: Once a deal has been confirmed, in what ways does Inception nurture and assist its portfolios? What are some strategies to help portfolios with their GTM plans?

Calvin: We'll start by introducing different VCs within our network to expand essentially the conversation with the founders. And then as we formally close, they'll get introduced to our platform team and be looped into our platform resources. The third piece is our internal expert network. Our founders can book one on one sessions, kind of like a consulting or brainstorming advising sessions with these experts. And then just periodically, we put our founders in a gated Telegram chats so they can share more intimately about some of the latest trends and establish partnership that way.

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NONO: Any last words or wisdom for our community of builders who are actively fundraising?

Calvin: It is the first few VCs that really find value and believe in you, they are the most important. They will help you in crafting a more robust narrative fundraising plan in your initial rounds. This also means to not get too hung-up on the investors that rejected you, but rather to find the investors that agree and support you. It’s a bit of a numbers game to speak with a lot of VCs and find the ones that really demonstrate interest and work very closely with them. These are the people that will give you the highest ROI at the very beginning. And you should feel it's a two way street, you should feel comfortable discussing challenges and concerns with a VC. If you can hit it off with a VC that really wants to discuss in depth with you, brainstorm into the questions with you, those are the VCs that will, later on, stand by you and help you as you progress in your venture.

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