Tell us about your startup. What inspired you to start Nativ?

It was always a dream of mine to start a tech company! I joined my last full-time job mainly to convince my manager (who was also an excellent friend from Revolut) to leave and start a company. We started exploring ideas for fun in the gaming space, then after talking to a few users we stumbled upon this idea of culturalization. We learned how businesses spend millions of dollars adapting their content to other markets. It instantly hit me that this is something that AI will be able to solve at scale.

How did you validate your idea before approaching investors?

We initially started working on using AI to automate game testing, but we ended up pivoting after talking to users and realizing that there was a bigger opportunity on culturalization. Early on, it was based on intuition. We validated it after speaking to more than 70 companies and noticing a pattern in the process. It’s expensive, inefficient and fragmented. The thing I want to double down on is the power of gut feeling and intuition. Many people will say that speaking to users should be the ONLY way to validate but I disagree. Your intuition is equally important! A mix of both is the ideal.

How did you capture the attention of top VC firms?

Top VC firms get a huge number of inbound, so the best way to approach them is via warm intros. Luckily, a friend of mine raised from a16z a year ago and put me in touch with the partners. We ended up convincing them to invest after 2 calls and reference checks. We received tens of messages and emails from other investors. I asked a few how they heard about us, and there were 2 things: seeing “ex-Revolut” in our LinkedIn headers, and hearing from their network that we were starting a company.

In your view, what are the key skills someone needs to start their own founder’s journey?

There’s a huge list I can say here, but I’ll try to give 2 key skills that people don’t share much:

1. Making high quality decisions with little information: This is probably the single most important thing as a founder. Whether it’s about hiring based on a just couple of interviews, making business deals with limited information on the other party, you will almost always make decisions with limited data. Intuition plays a big role here, and you need to trust yourself (and your co-founder) a lot.
   

   

   Ahmed & Ashish, his co-founder

   2. Being comfortable with uncertainty: You need to be okay with things not going your way because it will almost always happen. For me, working with my incredible co-founder makes up for everything. I love the process so much that I learned to embrace uncertainty and even started to see it as a fun challenge.

What are the biggest challenges you faced?

One of the most challenging things people don’t realize when you’re a founder is the emotional side of it, and this is something that is common among all founders I met. There’s something about building something completely new and trying to convince others (and sometimes yourself) that this can become big and that it will work when all the odds are against you. At the beginning, I faced a lot this challenge where I would ask myself whether this is gonna work and whether it’s worth all this energy I’m putting. I learned to love the process, and starting to get customers/generating revenue creates that validation.

Tell us more about the programme you’re in, how is SF treating you?

I am part of a16z Speedrun, a startup accelerator from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Twice a year, they pick 40 companies out of 6,000 applications to invest $750K in and invite to SF. The program last 2.5 months and you get to work from the a16z office, meet other incredible founders. The partners at a16z help us with meeting customers, fundraising, sales and host incredible speakers every week. So far, we had the chance to meet Dylan Field (Figma CEO), Ilkka Paananen (Supercell CEO), Adam D’Angelo (Quora CEO, former Facebook CTO) and so on. It’s an amazing environment to build extremely fast. The name a16z opens lots of doors for us: customers trust you more when speaking to you because they take you more seriously, and the warm intros we get are very helpful (especially since we are selling to businesses).

What are things you’re learning today you wish you knew before starting this journey?

The main thing I’m getting out of being in SF working with such talented and accomplished people is that I should be thinking bigger. Before starting my journey I had the mindset of starting a business that solves a real problem for customers and that I’m passionate about. Today, I truly want to change the world with what I do. The funny thing is that this simple mindset shift pushed me to move faster and motivated me like never before.

What are your top 3 tips for founders looking to raise funds from top VCs?

There are 2 tips that I found to be very helpful when selling to top VCs:

• Sell a huge vision: If you go back to how VC math works, they basically need to return a large multiplier of their fund size to their Limited Partners (LPs are those who fund VC firms). For top VCs, that is hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. When VCs invest, they expect that a big majority of their portfolio will either shut down or simply sell for a low price, and only a few of them will return that number. As a result, they will only consider you if you can achieve that, which can only happen if you’re going after a big market and selling a big vision.

• Make sure to double down on the “Why Us & Why Now”: Why Us & Why Now are basically the 2 main questions VCs will ask about you at the early stage (on top of the market size). Why Us is about why your team is the best positioned to start this company. Typically, the founders have either worked on this before or have some insight/advantage that others don’t have. This can also be it’s because it’s an incredibly strong team who can achieve pretty much anything. “Why Now” is basically “why is now a good time to start this company”. In the current landscape, the answer is almost always AI. If you nail those two, you have a good shot.

If you could summarize your founder’s journey in one sentence, what would it be?

It’s the most incredible and transformative experience of my entire life! I started sharing my journey on being a tech founder on social media, feel free to check it out! You can also learn more about Nativ here.

Helpful Resources

• Listen to Ahmed’s episode here

• Watch full tl;dl episodes on YouTube 

• Check out tl’dl’s latest episodes on Instagram 

As always, feel free to hit reply if you have any questions or would like to discuss particular topics.