Feb 27, 2024
Leo Polovets is the Co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures. Leo focuses on enterprise software and technical products at Susa. About two years ago, He also started Humba Ventures, a fund that invests in deep tech and critical national sectors like energy and defense at Humba.
Leo led Susa's investments in Mashgin, People Data Labs, Scalyr,
and Treasury Prime. Having been a software engineer for 10+ years,
Leo approaches challenges with an engineering mindset and supports
portfolio companies in vetting and hiring technical talent. Prior
to Susa, Leo was the second engineering hire at Linkedin, where he
worked on the first versions of products like LinkedIn Jobs and
LinkedIn Groups. Leo then worked on payment fraud detection
algorithms at Google, and was also an early engineer at Factual,
where he built data processing software. Leo received a bachelor's
degree in Engineering and Applied Science (Computer Science) from
Caltech.
We talk about lessons that translate from investing in traditional
startups; explore lessons learned about market sizing, pricing,
team dynamics, managing burn, scaling, valuation and many other
topics in the deep tech space.