Recursive Ventures

On this episode of the show, I have with me Itamar Novik.

He is the founder and general partner at Recursive Ventures.

We're going to be talking about being an early AI investor and how does he kind of tell what traction looks like when there is no traction.

We'll talk a little bit about what those AI modes look like.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Recursive Ventures.

Tell us what kind of VC you guys are.

I'd love to hear for you to introduce yourself.

So I'm the founder and general partner of Recursive Ventures, a pre-seed focused fund investing in companies disrupting industries through AI.

I've been in startups for my entire career, 25 years now.

I'm a serial entrepreneur and I've invested in over 200 companies.

Eventually, through iterations in the product that actually led many of these, when we started using features like geofences, places, and so on and so forth, we were able to make the app so much more sticky to the point that all the numbers started really adding up, right?

Amazing.

And there you are, you know, you push through to the IPO, and then you transition to, you know, doing and investing, right, at Recursive Ventures.

I mean, you've already been doing that in parallel or consecutively with Life360.

Simon writes a social media post, grades itself every week and asks permissions to change its own rules.

Itamar runs Recursive Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing AI startups.

He opens both agents on the screen and is blunt about the one time in 10 that they fail.

By the end, you will exactly know how running these agents properly costs.

I have a head of ops, but that's pretty much it.

So, I was thinking that AI capabilities are perfect, a perfect way to scale a firm like mine, basically enabling us to do so much more.

And that's why around a year ago, I went on the journey, before it was really cool and everybody was doing it, I should say, to try to see how much of my firm, Recursive Ventures, can effectively automate with AI and meet the quality standards and the SLA standards that we need in order to operate a successful business.

So, okay, you decided that you will scale the VC firm using AI agents.