Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
00:11:48 · Yaron Valler
[00:11:48] S1: I think there are two aspects to it. One aspect is that we have a responsibility as human beings, being human, and to proliferate our success and our prosperity in the rest of the world. And that's a responsibility that we have. And being one of the main geographies in the Western world, I think Europe has a responsibility as well. However, that ideology can be mixed with a financial and economic agenda, and a responsible country has to take care of both. So yes, you should have programs that bring in a certain number of refugees, but having uncontrolled illegal immigration, which is uncontrolled mainly because of laziness, not because of anything else, because of lack of resources or lack of assignment of resources or laziness or political pressures, That's irresponsible. Milton Friedman is saying something really interesting about immigration into The US. Until 1917, anyone that came to The US became a citizen. It was free, open borders, and open immigration. 1917, as World War I was drawing to a close, they started integrating a social safety net. You cannot have a social safety net and open borders. It doesn't work. So a responsible government can't just shrug its shoulders. One aspect is yes, EU Maine have a certain number of refugees that come into the country. Two, anyone that comes into the country has to go through an integration program in order for them to be productive citizens for them and for the society that they're integrating with. Not all of these integration programs will be successful, but it will be better than than it is today or some sort of discipline in borders. Just not doing it out of laziness is eventually going to bring exactly the result that the people that support immigration don't want to happen.
00:13:31 · James Pringle
[00:13:31] S0: Absolutely fascinating. And thank you so much for sharing this insight because I think it's a really important topic that is difficult to talk about, but is really fascinating. If I bring it slightly back to venture capital, how should the industry view investing in immigrants and how do they maximize this opportunity of sort of, you know, these refreshing perspectives and doing things 10 x better rather than 10% better because you're taking a completely novel first principle approach to a problem. How does the industry try to adapt and make the most of that fresh perspective?
00:14:10 · Yaron Valler
[00:14:10] S1: Traditional venture capital was a very clicky thing. Right? It was about who you knew and where you came from, and that was detrimental to immigrants that were trying to raise money. But this hasn't been the case for the last twenty years or more. We see an understanding with all venture capital funds. Opportunities are not local. We see a cultural understanding. So I think that venture capital funds are doing it. Where there is a bigger problem is later when a company is trying to raise institutional capital, sovereign capital, or in some cases, private equity. These are more local plays and sometimes immigrant entrepreneurs don't have as much access to it. Usually by the point that they need the access, they would have already made the networks and connections and this would have been solved. But generally, I think the venture capital industry has been leading the charge when you look at immigration. I think me and my colleagues have been really thinking about this right and not favouring local entrepreneurs.
00:15:05 · James Pringle
[00:15:05] S0: Well, that's great to hear and hopefully other funds are taking a similar approach. I mean, I think that there is a really diverse background of entrepreneurs certainly that we've had on this podcast. I mean, yes, you do get the sort of imperial engineers who then did finance and then launched the company. You're always gonna have that kind of like pathway for very talented people, but equally, we've had people who have come from absolutely nothing and built unicorns. So I hope through just reflecting on our own guests that we've kind of seen that in action. So Yaron, how does this reflect itself in your investments? Presumably, some of this thinking not only is from research, but it's also from experiencing this through your own portfolio. So can you touch on some of your best investments and any of them which are founded by immigrants who took a very different view of an industry? Can you share some of those sort of real tangible experiences from your investments?
00:16:04 · Yaron Valler, James Pringle
[00:16:04] S1: I'll give you two examples from our portfolio. Not necessarily my investment in at least in one case, but something that I was very close to. Take a look at a company called DocPlanner. DocPlanner was a company that I invested in in 2025. It was a Polish company, but their aspirations were global. They very quickly teamed up with a Spanish company that they ended up acquiring and then basically moved the merged company from Poland or the majority of it into... So there were a few things that I was looking for. One was this product understanding that is transcending borders for a Polish entrepreneur to identify an opportunity in Spanish speaking countries, find the right company to merge with, find the right product mix to pitch there, and eventually move the company is exactly the type of flexibility and the type of opportunity and risk taking that we are looking for. That's one great example. The other example is the living... [00:16:58] S0: That's quite... Yaron, can I just touch on that? Yeah. It's true. Course. That was really fascinating because I think you're right. If you were born in England, had your whole career in England, start a company in England or The UK, you probably aren't thinking of moving your company to Spain just because you've seen a bit of an opportunity. Whereas that immigration mindset is we go where the opportunity is, so we're willing to uproots and take that risk. That's quite a fascinating decision. Had they already made that decision by the time you invested or did that happen whilst you were already...
00:16:58 · James Pringle, Yaron Valler
[00:16:58] S0: That's quite... Yaron, can I just touch on that? Yeah. It's true. Course. That was really fascinating because I think you're right. If you were born in England, had your whole career in England, start a company in England or The UK, you probably aren't thinking of moving your company to Spain just because you've seen a bit of an opportunity. Whereas that immigration mindset is we go where the opportunity is, so we're willing to uproots and take that risk. That's quite a fascinating decision. Had they already made that decision by the time you invested or did that happen whilst you were already... [00:17:30] S1: It was it was happening as we were investing, and that was the basis on which we invested. [00:17:36] S0: Amazing. And they've raised like 140,000,000 now, so are they a unicorn? [00:17:41] S1: Oh, yeah, for sure. So we've exited most of our position there, and it was essentially more than $1,000,000,000 valuation. I can't say exactly how much, but it was very good exit for us. [00:17:52] S0: Amazing. And then you were about to mention the second one.