Vivek Ladsariya, new managing director at Pioneer Square Labs, doesn’t buy the Seattle freeze stereotype.
Ladsariya moved from the Bay Area to Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood to take his new job with the Seattle-based startup studio and lead investments with PSL’s venture capital arm, PSL Ventures. According to Ladsariya, the experience here has been great so far.
“People have been incredibly warm and welcoming,” Ladsariya said. “I haven’t lived through a Seattle winter, so ask me again in a year and maybe I’ll say something different. But going into the spring and the summer, and with the energy around the city at large and the tech community as well, has been very inspiring.”
Before taking his new role with PSL, Ladsariya spent more than six years at SineWave Ventures, where he led investments in the analytics platform Databricks and the security screening company Evolv. He is now focusing on pre-seed and seed investments with PSL Ventures, which invests in early-stage startups in the Pacific Northwest. He will also help with the startup studio, which has launched more than 35 startups.
The Business Journal talked with Ladsariya about his job change, the Seattle tech landscape and his favorite restaurants so far in the city.
What made you decide to join PSL when you were already entrenched with a major venture firm?
I have known my partners here for a while. They are incredible people doing this for the love of the game. A lot of them certainly don’t need to be working for money or legacy. They’re doing it out of pure passion and joy. … I also have been a founder in my prior life, and the idea of both investing at the earliest stages, including potentially the formation stage of a business, plus spending some time on the studio building and spinning out companies in-house was very attractive to me as well.
What excites you about the Seattle-area tech landscape?
It is smaller than San Francisco as far as the tech and VC market goes, but it’s certainly not small by any means. It’s pretty sizable if you compare it to other major markets in the country. But in terms of the depth of VC investing and institutional capital flowing here, there’s a big gap. And that gap is, to me, a massive opportunity. There’s a highly untapped VC market here. There’s a great amount of technical talent and a great amount of founders building cutting-edge technology that there aren’t enough VCs here financing.
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How do you like Seattle so far?
I’m loving it. Seattle is beautiful. I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of seeing the mountains on my commute.
What kinds of companies excite you as an investor?
The infrastructure layer that enables the development of applications and use cases in any new technology. This 25-year-old technology of artificial intelligence … is starting to really hit mainstream now given our ability to take really large models and our ability to have the compute resources to develop on that. What that’s doing is creating a need gap for a whole new kind of infrastructure layer that hasn’t been built.
It’s a tough venture market right now. What do you wish more founders knew before pitching you?
I think a lot of founders come at their business starting and led by the technology. We’ve got this great technology or we can build this great technology. Technology is extremely important, but to build a successful business, I think the most important thing is having a really good understanding of the customer’s problem, or whose problem and what you’re trying to solve.
Anything else?
In an easy fundraising climate, and we recently went through one of the most easy times to raise venture capital in history with the zero-interest-rate period, founders had a lot of optionality and could raise from a lot of different VCs. But as their options get limited, there is a tendency to just take the first investor that wants to invest in you or chase the best valuation. I wish more, especially first-time founders, knew just how important it is to ensure you partner up with the right person.
What is the best restaurant you’ve found in Seattle so far?
An Ethiopian restaurant called Cafe Selam. I love Ethiopian food. … Seattle Fish Guys. That was really good as well.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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