If you are not raising $1B, it’s because you simply can’t, right? We think not. A larger fund size would keep us from our best and our passion: investing in seed, with tickets from $500K to $5M in the earliest stages of a business. This is before the dust settles on newly emerging industries, ambiguity prevailing and no ‘data’ or much track record to identify talent: so hard yet so gratifying when things work out. Entrepreneurs often have a special bond with their first VC and this is where we would like to continue to play. This is why we kept the size of our new Seed Fund HV4 at $60M. We want to be there the earliest.

We didn’t stop there: we have fared really well doubling down on our portfolio companies with our first opportunity fund in 2014. And the new $140M Opportunity Fund does just that: extra ammunition to invest in our winners and new special opportunities with up to $20M in aggregated commitments per company. But without the pressure of having to invest and us lowering the bar: no fees charged unless we find good use of the extra capital. Optionality to lean in with global winners without any of the burden.

2/ The luxury of fast

After kicking off our fundraise, we were oversubscribed in 10 days. What helped was scoring top 1% VC returns globally consistently over the course of several funds. Our selectiveness, in contrast with the traditional early stage investing mantras, yielded one of the highest early-stage-to-winner ratios in the world, with 3 out of 19 seed investments in our first 3 funds between 2010 and 2014, generating $100M+ net profits!

Driven by overwhelming support from our existing private investor base, we onboarded over 200 shareholders in a first and final closing, taking less than a month from start to finish. What an incredible job by our extended team in an environment increasingly stifled by compliance. Imagine shareholders jumping through hoops just so that we could stay focused on our calls with entrepreneurs even during the fundraise. We easily forget how we, like most funds once, took a year from first to final closing. One year of poor productivity impacts 3-odd years of investment periods. No such distraction this time; what a luxury to focus on the thing we love most: working with entrepreneurs.

3/ We want to be the best global seed stage investor

We are collectors of contrarian truths. We believe ‘Alpha’ can be found in uncharted territory only: overlooked markets, emerging geographies & bold, new technologies and business models… often poorly understood, too underground, banal, against broad consensus, led by extraordinary entrepreneurs, off the beaten track.

When we started our careers, one golden rule of thumb for an investor was to focus on a local hub. To go sourcing over drinks and local networking, and perhaps in a private equity spirit to send out the cavalry if a company ran into trouble.

What did not help the startup ecosystem in particular was fund of funds with strict mandates, pushing the funds to a strict set of industries and geographies. Our first interactions way back with such fund of funds would have stopped us from backing Peak, Gram and in fact most of the great companies we invested in that don’t fit into a mandate, e.g. blockchain, frontier emerging markets. Bypassing these counterproductive limitations was hard in the early stages of our fund, but it set us free to go global.

Instead of trying to win in a local hub, we have proven to pick out great entrepreneurs far away from the traditional startup epicenter. To execute a global sourcing strategy is far from a walk in the park, but just like entrepreneurs we work with, we hustle every day, work with high intensity and speed to connect with the most exceptional companies early. Bypassing local investor sultans, we found the best entrepreneurs in emerging markets to be particularly intense. We have experienced the energy of zero to unicorn several times over, but the sheer intensity of for example Indian founders we work with, is just incredible.

Increasingly, entrepreneurs in emerging markets want to go global and benefit from the experience of their best peers in other parts of the world. A different sound. Inspiration outside a local bubble. Instead of us yapping away at board meetings, we believe Hummingbird’s global approach benefits founders, as they connect amongst one another to share notes in the earliest stages of building a startup.

4/ We’ll increasingly look out for a new kind of healthcare and biotech startup

Old biotech templates no longer work for a new breed of ambitious founders. This generation is harnessing the power and efficiency of traditional tech start-ups and using this to engineer the frontiers of health and biology; combining academic and theoretical research with the execution of exceptional tech companies. Based on our experience working with BilliontoOne (US), Pristyn Care (India) and Higia Technologies (Mexico), a paradigm shift is on the way as these companies are using novel advances to tackle problems experienced on a global scale, from more affordable healthcare for the masses to innovative diagnostics solutions. In the realm of biology, we have witnessed the potential of synthetic and computational biology with our most recent investment in Basecamp Research (UK), which is unlocking our planet’s biodiversity to find solutions to some of humanity’s greatest challenges, with the potential to deliver sustainable food supplies, environmentally-friendly manufacturing capabilities, and a new generation of medicines.

We are really excited to see 2 new colleagues joining us to help take a deeper dive in healthcare, biotech and beyond: Pablo Lubroth and Tess van Stekelenburg.

5/ The first 2 investments : Pristyn Care and Kernal Biologics.

We already invested in Pristyn Care in 2019 and we are tripping over ourselves in excitement over what is next: Harsh and the team building the largest asset-light surgery hospitals in the world. A high conviction investment from the new Opportunity fund.

Kernal Biologics is our first investment from HV4 and a great example of what we look for: brilliant founders, personified grit, and a project to shake the world, for good. Move aside Moderna and Curevac, as Kernal is a first mRNA 2.0 company. Kernal develops treatments whose potency can be dialed up without harming healthy tissues. Kernal’s technology, onco selective mRNA, exploits a flaw in the armor of cancer cells, provided by their ribosomes, as they seem to speak a different ‘language’ than other cells. Overly simplified, a future Kernal mRNA treatment will tell specific cancer cells to self-destruct and leave other cells unharmed.

We look forward to welcome new entrepreneurs across the globe, building a new generation of category defining startups that take on some of the world’s biggest challenges. Finally, we are looking to expand our investment team further so please reach out if you like what you have read so far.

1/ Contrarian

We invested against VC consensus back in the days on the poor dynamics of casual gaming; too hit driven, low retention & short-lived marketing arbitrage, unsustainable and you name it…

Peak took a proven genre of puzzle games, which people assumed were at the end of an innovation lifecycle. They proved that it was only the beginning. They relentlessly used A/B testing on level design, monetization and performance marketing to broaden and deepen this category. Through infinite iterations, they were able to design games where you continue playing for a longer time than just about any other mobile game in the world. Peak’s extraordinary D90 retention is unheard of globally, in an industry where keeping any of your players still engaged after 90 days would have been deemed outstanding performance. From a local publisher to a local games developer, to a global leader: coming out of nowhere, Peak outflanked Candy Crush in terms of in-game metrics, one of the first and largest in the puzzle category. Today, Toon Blast, the largest game of Peak, has one of the top 3 retention in the world. Kudos to a team with the kind of long term 10-year view and the type of grit which we hardly ever encounter.

2/ Capital Efficient

We were the only pre-seed fund to invest in Peak in 2010 with €500K at €2M pre-money. The company raised <$25M in total in the last 10 years, resulting in amazing economics for the founder, and 200x+ return on Hummingbird’s first ticket.

As the company didn’t try to tap into the usual C/D/E funding rounds trying to get brand names on board, they went largely unnoticed. This got us thinking: collectively we put much importance on the signaling of funding rounds. If a company did not raise for 2 years, they must be doing poorly, because alternatively, doing great, why wouldn’t they raise a star-led round? There must be a lot of amazing companies out there, far away from the spotlight, redefining whole industries while not raising round after round. Peak definitely benefitted from being resourceful, but equally so from not having to go up against multiple well-funded competition: they had the time to build great business fundamentals, and both the founders and a handful of investors ended up with large stakes and outcomes.

3/ More with less

The team generates one of the highest, probably the highest, annual revenue per employee globally, multiple times bigger than some of the best tech companies such as Google, Apple and more

With little resources relative to its peers, Peak had to make some though choices — they had to make sure that fundamentals were well in place before they moved with lightning speed. It meant the management team had to make a few strategic choices with no fallback scenarios as the wrong choices would destroy the company much faster than anywhere else. One such choice was that they kept the hiring standards extremely high, only going for the A+ players, who were ready to take ownership and work relentlessly, instead of increasing the team size in a rushed manner. And it also meant the founder went on a salary for close to 10 years that a junior developer in the Valley would not accept.

4/ Geography

Turkey was off-limits for investors. Nowadays, exceptional startups can come from anywhere. Far away from the epicenter of most tech innovation, away from FOMO, one can truly question golden rules of thumb and take the time to build a radically different culture.

Silicon Valley is where it all started. And now some of the best learnings, approaches and principles flew out all over the world. For so many startups, the Valley is the best breeding ground. But you don’t have to be in the Valley anymore. The war for talent, lack of loyalty and patience, being in the spotlight, trying to shield from the buzz and pressure, with often too much money too soon for you or your competition, makes it harder. There’s a reason a lot of early stage companies are hiding out in stealth mode, hiding for overeager VCs and street gossip. Building stuff instead of having to manage their ecosystem. Turkey was surely cheaper to operate in for Peak, but more importantly, it could not take Valley rules and dynamics for granted, which allowed for a first-principles based building of a true core culture.

5/ Global

Early-stage VC is often a provincial game, leaning on local networks & insider culture. But also great founders at the whim of local Serial Sultans. Let founders benefit from global early stage insights & best practices. We crossed 10 countries to get to Turkey.

It is hard to compete with the strengths of being local. On the ground, one benefits from friendships and intelligence-dense networks. A myriad ways of checking whispers and reputation. Time to build rapport and bond with entrepreneurs long before any fundraising efforts. That’s great, and startups benefit from these qualities, but not always. Too many emerging ecosystems now see the rule of a Serial Sultan. Some great entrepreneur who was a trailblazer, and perhaps because he or she had to fight so hard, they start investing with a sense of entitlement in their local ecosystem. This might translate in depressing valuations, but often in meddling and interfering as king makers. The charisma of local heroes gets them to a point that some rules do not seem to apply anymore. To solve for this, one needs more local funds, but entrepreneurs increasingly benefit from seed investors with a global view too.

6/ Grit

The company went from a local game publisher to local game developer, to global game developer in the first 5 years. They worked with incredible grit in between these pivots with many years of flat revenues.

Agile, sure. Grabbing momentum with little resources and street smarts. Getting things done in 1 month that normal companies tackle in years, if at all. But great companies solve one or more really hairy challenges. It is hard to combine that in one startup: usually it is one of both: you are too profound only in attacking hard problems: end of road for most. Or so opportunistic that you show amazing growth until retention or the whole company implodes after the arbitrage is over. In the case of Peak, for years they were bumping into a glass ceiling. Not accepting this, but always grounded and super realistic. I do not recall the founder selling us grand visions or making us feel good about how next year would be any better. In that period of stalling growth, people got really honest with themselves and us. Perhaps this created the peace of mind needed to keep slugging through the desert. Success was not an epiphany in this case, but millions of small improvements and progress.

7/ Near-death support

Founders seeking VC network & platform support marketing blabla, or a 50step formulaic guide to build a unicorn, or celebrity VC status. Try this instead: “With all other investors gone, do you have proof you will support me in near-death situations?”

When the Peak founder could not raise any external funding, we doubled down and wrote our largest check of $3M back then. Sure, networks are important, but any great entrepreneur we know is not successful because of the network of its investor base. Super useful, but not crucial. The platform support services are brilliant. Marketing for VCs that is. I am sure we will be proven wrong soon, but platform services are not crucial. Recently, we see more formulaic investors arriving at the table, claiming that based on their best 10 companies, if the founders follow this roadmap with these and these timelines in mind, and they’ll get there. The best companies in the world will by definition violate one of those formulas. So useful, but dangerous. Not crucial. We tell our entrepreneurs that one of the most relevant questions they can ask future investors is what happens when a company went through one of its mandatory 2–3 near-death moments. The point is not that they were the one and sole supporter at any point, but to prove at least a few moments that they held strong in difficult times. And the great ones will undoubtedly lack the clarity and courage to do the right thing even with such great references, but it talks about the longevity, strategic view, empathy and understanding of the best out there.

8/ Selectiveness and contrarian truths work well in seed

We invested our first $100M in seed since 2010 in only 25 companies, not following traditional spray and pray rule. And 3 have already become what we call internally zebras, i.e. wildly profitable unicorns (think $100m+ebitda in aggregate for startups who did not exist prior to 2010). We spent countless hours focusing on refining our founder pattern recognition to get here. We’re far from done.

We cannot argue with power law dynamics. Nor with luck. We believe some teams work smarter and harder and will not see such outsized success. With only a handful of unicorns in the world getting to such spectacular EBITDA in their first 10 years of existence, you need to surf an incredibly strong underlying wave. With an amazing vessel in terms of unit economics. But fund returns in seed are not a function of simply adding as much lottery tickets as possible. In our case, compensating for being gullible in an earlier part of our career, we went to saying no 10 times more: that is a bit masochistic as we meet so many great entrepreneurs. We find it amazing that other seed investors have the bandwidth and energy to invest in so many more companies, very successfully so. For us we’re still training to get to that level, but we believe velocity is not the only model which works.

9/ Investing in talent

Instead of hiring ‘experienced’ people, Peak has invested in young talent, mostly fresh out of college, creating their own unique culture and accelerating their learning curve with more responsibilities than they could have hoped for.

Unlike more developed tech ecosystems, Peak couldn’t rely on a large pool of extraordinary senior talent with experience building phenomenal companies from scratch in Turkey so Peak had to hire based on raw potential of young, inexperienced talent and train them intensively in their first years. This required huge courage and time investment: we remember being somewhat confused by this approach in the beginning, waiting for an accident to happen when we first heard about this strategy but have been amazed by how much Peak team was able to grow up in such a short time, delivering exceptional products.

10/ Founder genius

All of the above does not exist without a special founder. We fall every time for an extraordinary entrepreneur, not fitting in and wanting to prove the impossible wrong.. Our investment memo’s with risks and opportunities and market analysis are meaningless in comparison to the importance of extraordinary founders. Thank you Sidar, we learned a million things from you.

Originally published at https://medium.com on June 1, 2020.

We are excited to announce today that Zynga has agreed to purchase Gram Games for $250 million in cash, with a substantial upside if certain earn out targets are met. Having only raised $1.6M in funding to date, this is an exceptional outcome for all of Gram’s shareholders.

We co-founded Gram Games at a steakhouse (#saltbae), sitting around a dining table in Istanbul, in late 2012. There was no pitch deck nor any concrete plan. Just three exceptional individuals whom we had brought together as a co-founding team, only a few months before. By the end of the dinner, we committed to invest $100K and thus began our partnership.

Between 2012–2014, when we made our initial investment in Gram, the general consensus among VCs globally was that gaming was a Hollywood-style hit-driven business and that it was near impossible to predict which companies would create the next Blockbuster games. We took a different view, one that was rooted in our experience working with Peak Games, now one of the most successful mobile gaming companies in the world. Peak taught us that it is possible to build an exceptional gaming company from anywhere in the world without raising hundreds of millions or hiring thousands of people. At the time, it was audacious to believe that a European gaming company could reach 100M users within a few years. But we came to understand the scale that is possible with a world class team and a fantastic product. If the team is world-class, has a passion for its product, and is willing to work side by side in the trenches for many years and grit through the inevitable lows then anything is possible.

From humble beginnings, Gram’s achievements today are notable: its initial breakout game, 1010!, has surpassed 100M players globally; Gram helped create a new genre in gaming, hypercasual games, which is distinguished by its minimalistic, addictive, and easy-to-play qualities; their IAP (In-App-Advertising) hit game, Merge Dragons! is currently a Top 50 Grossing Game in the U.S. Apple App Store; and overall their mobile game portfolio today includes nine titles that have been cumulatively downloaded more than 170 million times.

But the journey was not all clean sailing. It took Gram years of experimentation to find product-market fit. There was a tough co-founder break up in the early days. Struggling to attract international talent amidst political headlines in Turkey in 2017, Gram had to establish an additional office in London. Despite more than a few naysayers opining that such a move was a guaranteed failure, Gram successfully transitioned most of the senior team from Turkey to London and went onto hire away some of London’s top gaming talent. Oh, and there was the acquisition offer from a Chinese company that was pulled at the last hour, after all term sheets were signed, due to Chinese regulations. It’s been a wild ride.

At this juncture, we can’t help but reflect on some of the lessons we’ve learned. Every investment teaches you something but given how closely we have worked with the Gram team, the learnings in this case are plentiful and in sharp focus:

1.) Invest in founders with exceptional growth potential. Going through our inbox from 2012, we found an email from Firat to the rest of the Hummingbird team about Mehmet:

“The more time I spend with him, the more I think he is an under-appreciated prodigy. He is very creative, and he is always after the next big thing: He created Sanalika [the largest social gaming company in Turkey with 10M+ players] before Zynga was even big.”

When we first met Mehmet, Sanalika was winding down and Mehmet was struggling to raise a $100K round to pursue his vision of building one of the best mobile gaming companies globally. He was a self-taught coder and musician who had previously worked as a shepherd. He had no schooling and no massive commercial successes under his belt. Nevertheless, we were extremely impressed with his raw intelligence and drive and believed that he was at an inflection point in his journey, poised to build on the learnings from his past failures. As investors, we often try to identify markets with the potential to grow exponentially. But what is more important is the growth potential of the founders we partner with. Though he started out as a talented developer, Mehmet grew into an exceptional leader, attracting some of the top talent in the space, scaling the company from 0 to 77 FTEs across 2 offices with very limited resources. (In the early days, we sat in Gram’s office sourcing and interviewing many of the key first hires.)

We believe that the “under-appreciated prodigies” are and will continue to be one of the best overlooked investment opportunities out there.

2.) Don’t write off your investments too fast. Gram Games had many near-death moments in the past 6 years and the journey felt more like a rollercoaster (with some terrifying drops) than a rocket ship destined for the moon. Though this is rarely discussed in our community, it’s the reality for most exceptional success stories. Following our initial investment in the company, Gram had 2 years of disappointing games while experimenting with different genres and searching tirelessly for product-market fit. Nevertheless, we maintained our conviction in the core team and doubled down on our initial investment. We ended up backing the company with 3 additional rounds of funding in order to provide them with sufficient runway to continue and ultimately succeed. In fact, since Hummingbird’s inception, we have made follow-on investments in ALL of our portfolio companies. We believe that concentrated investments based on conviction, rather than spray and pray, create alpha returns and we will continue with this strategy.

3.) Founder roles may evolve over time. In the early days, the co-founders began as equal co-founders with no clear titles in an effort to have decision making be consensus driven and inclusive, but it became necessary to revisit that dynamic 18 months into the life of the company. After some tense discussions about founder roles, we eventually all agreed that Mehmet should be promoted to CEO. Given Mehmet’s outstanding creative talent and the product DNA of the company, this was the right call for the company at this particular time. There are never any guarantees but flexibility in the early days and a willingness to have tough conversations proved vital.

4.) There are no shortcuts and the culture of a startup is paramount. The Gram team regularly worked until 3am in the morning, and we would find them playing Magic the Gathering together, late at night, when we visited their offices. The founders took minimal salary for the first three years and frequently slept in the office. It was gruelling. Yet, throughout those tough years, the culture at Gram was always unique and was core to their success formula. Every Friday, every team member gathered round to rapidly prototype games that they would then demo to the rest of the team by the end of the day — it was almost a mini demo day every week! Gram embraced the sheer creativity of its employees with a flat organisational structure and gave a level of freedom to all involved that was handsomely rewarded. Comrades in gaming, they also extended their creative camaraderie to music. Mehmet, who somehow learned to play more than ten instruments along with his many other talents, would encourage the team to participate in jam sessions at the office after a hard day’s work. But musical instruments (and ping pong tables for that matter!) are merely a gimmick without the right intent. It’s the energy of a team that defines a culture, not the toys.

Congratulations to the whole Gram Games team, who built a truly remarkable company. It has been a privilege for the Hummingbird team to work with you. Thank you for resoundingly rewarding our belief that exceptional companies can be built from anywhere by exceptional people. We are excited to continue investing in gaming and underinvested geographies. If you believe you are that next special individual, please get in touch.

Having flown below the radar for a long time, we think now is as good a time as any to share our story. It’s a story about choosing the path less trodden and challenging a few golden VC rules along the way. Always searching for a very special entrepreneur to support. We tested 1,000’s of assumptions on what makes an entrepreneur truly extraordinary. Often by accident or dumb luck, we progressed on our quest. We don’t fancy ourselves rock n roll guitarists, but we like to think of Keith Richards who once said, “I play until I start making the right mistakes..”.

Before we dive in and share with you some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way, here’s a quick snapshot of where Hummingbird stands today:

1. Since 2010, we invested in 22 companies in 10+ countries including Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Greece, Turkey, UAE, UK, US.

2. None of these companies had any revenue pre-2010.

3. Combined, these companies are on a $1Billion+ annualized net revenue run rate as of today, scaling exponentially and collectively profitable!

4. Our portfolio evidently has a few outliers with one unicorn, one $100M+ ebitda zebra, but also 7 other triple-digit-million revenue companies, as well as some early stage bets growing at a healthy clip. Our record challenges the accepted wisdom among early-stage VCs that if you aim for outsized wins (aka moonshots), you must accept that 40–60% of your companies will fail. So far, we’ve managed to swing for the fences while consistently getting the ball to bat.

All of this is thanks to some exceptional entrepreneurs across the world whose paths we crossed. If we had forecast these numbers to our shareholders in 2010, you wouldn’t have blamed them for diagnosing us with a severe case of reality distortion. We’re not counting our chickens yet and know that more painful twists and turns lie ahead for our entrepreneurs. But fundamentally, the world has changed since 2010 and some great entrepreneurs are working on a very different scale now. Millions more people are coming online every year. Global winners can be built from anywhere in the world in record time.

This summer, we set out to raise our third fund. In less than a month, we had 100M EUR of commitments, double the size of our initial fund target of 50M EUR. We did not rely on any special tax incentives or the EIF’s of the world. Our LP base consists of 100+ private investors including entrepreneurs who built $1bn+ tech companies, strategic family offices and entrepreneurs who we once backed at seed stage. We are very grateful for our LP base’s continued support, jumping through all the hoops at such a short notice!

We went from an invitation to invest all the way to having the money in the bank in 40 days. We also chose to cap the fund at 80M EUR and resisted the temptation to hit the road and raise a larger fund, say in the 200M EUR range. Why? Firstly, we believe this segment looks crowded in Europe, especially with US funds swooping up many of the best European Series B deals. But most importantly, we want to stay true to ourselves. Our heart is in early stage investments: It’s what we do best.

On that note, we couldn’t help ourselves… Gearing up to the new fund, we already found three great entrepreneurs to back: Instacarro (Brazil), Frontier Car Group (Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, Chile, Mexico, Indonesia), and a stealth company in NY. Hummingbird III is off to a promising start and we couldn’t be more excited by the talent and ambition we are meeting across the globe.

So what’s different?

Our journey sculpted our view on Venture Capital. We have come to believe that to generate alpha returns in the VC business, you can’t be like everyone else. So, how is Hummingbird different? Simply put, we are drawn to entrepreneurs, innovation, and geographies overlooked by others. A few things stand out:

Finding extraordinary entrepreneurs is the core of our investment thesis and we spend more time refining our DNA pattern recognition on extraordinary entrepreneurs than anything else. For us, it’s less about CaC/LTV or TAM but about the entrepreneurs first and foremost. We partnered up with a self-taught coder who was previously a shepherd with no schooling, an overachiever at school who ranked 4th out of >1 million people in a national university entrance exam, a Peter Thiel fellow who entered Harvard at the age of 15, and an art gallery owner who was a top competitor in Magic the Gathering tournaments. An eclectic bunch!

Nomad VC: We go wherever great entrepreneurs are to be found, whether it’s the outskirts of Europe or the emerging markets that are producing the global winners of tomorrow. We search in places, some consider backwaters. Many investors still abide by the rule that they only invest in companies within a 2-hour driving radius of their HQ. We believe that the best entrepreneurs can come from anywhere and in fact, we have found that regionally-focused tech hubs risk transforming into treacherous echo chambers. Hummingbird’s remote VC “offices” will continue to pop up in different parts of the world, mostly in coffee shops.

One step to the left of the crowd: Our best returns have come from those decisions where many raised an eyebrow. Where others go right, we often go left. We are not tech visionaries but we have shown ourselves willing to go against the grain and make investments against consensus. It’s been scary at times. As a result, we are among the first European investors to have backed global winners in cloud storage, mobile-first, gaming and blockchain. Those have turned out to be our best companies.

Selectivity: We have no fixed mantra that keeps us from doing more investments, but we question the traditional VC interpretation of power law distribution. This law can be used an excuse to lower the bar. Rather, we’ve spent years to refine the notion of entrepreneurial excellence. We push ourselves to be patient, sometimes hovering for long periods, and resisting deals or trend fever. We invest with conviction, doubling down on our winners. Unconventional for an early stage fund, we do not “spray and pray”. We’ve done ~20 investments over 5 years, rather than the usual 20 investments per year.

Radical Candor: As time is short, we embrace radical candor (sounds somewhat better than ‘brutal honesty’). A few of our entrepreneurs will wildly exaggerate how crucial we are to them, but in reality we’ve become increasingly modest about our value-add. For some, we spend over 30% of our time helping them hire while others need little in the way of guidance. Every entrepreneur is different. We always listen to our entrepreneurs and provide a sounding board that is both honest and supportive. We’ve noticed that we are one of the few who are comfortable with the ‘hard-to-articulate’ conversations. A traditional board setting doesn’t allow entrepreneurs to be vulnerable or openly address insecurities. When needed, informally, we help to articulate a few taboos (read: “euh, my co-founder has an.. issue”).

Founder-First: Founder friendliness seems to be falling out of fashion these days, particularly in light of the Uber-saga. But in Europe, founder-friendliness never really came into full bloom. In fact, we are miles away from finding the right balance as many of the reputational mechanics of the valley don’t yet exist here. Amazingly, there are still some “screw-you-over” or even steal-your-idea investors out there. Our experience has taught us that the best companies, the global winners of tomorrow, are built by founders who stay at the helm. Hopefully our founders will reward us and continue to be Hummingbird ambassadors, the kind of marketing that money can’t buy.

So Why Haven’t You Heard More of Hummingbird?

If you’ve made it this far, I suspect you’re asking yourself that question. Are we willfully ignorant of the importance of VC branding? Why so quiet?

1. We wanted to experience the complexity (often misery) of building global winners up close, and repeat this a few times before speaking up. One lucky bet would have yielded a narrow perspective on succes. Easy opinions that work in one situation only tend to fly back as a boomerang.

2. We are generally not a fan of conferences. Our favorite breed of entrepreneur seems to be absent. Expert panels don’t break new ground. Rather, conferences amplify the noise. It’s easy to view Buffet as a special recluse, who lives on a farm and spends 80% of the day reading, but he smartly stayed away from buzz or gossip-bait. Investing is about removing noise and seeing value where others don’t. While perfect for socializing, most conferences don’t work for us.

3. Finally, our best entrepreneurs tend to dislike publicity. These entrepreneurs are focused on getting sh*t done. A good portion of our inspiration in life comes from the entrepreneurs we work with. If these special entrepreneurs are so careful with bold claims then we feel we should be equally selective with the publicity we invite.

Last but not least, Hummingbird is special because of a few great people I have the honor of working with. Firat Ileri is one of the youngest VC partners in Europe, and a discrete, smart force of nature (Forbes 30-under-30 seemed to agree). And we wouldn’t have gotten here without the insatiable curiosity and drive of Pamir Gelenbe, who managed to have a strong impact as a venture partner while also working on many other great projects. More recently we expanded our team, check out our team link. Notably Cameron McLain joined us a Principal with an early impressive track record as an angel investor. His first blog post about blockchain got 60,000 views, so if you haven’t read it, please check here.

Talk soon.

Barend Van den Brande, founding partner, Hummingbird Ventures

PS1.

We are hiring. Our latest hire was candidate 4,231 (and we didn’t use a headhunter btw), but we’re still on the lookout for somebody out of the ordinary. If you consider joining Hummingbird, please click here.

PS2. Hummingbird Chronology

2010, Hummingbird raised a first $35M fund, focused on early-stage tech, mostly exploring a few overlooked and upcoming ecosystems in Europe,

2012, Hummingbird II raised $40M with a focus on emerging markets, in particular Turkey with its amazing talent pool, and then,

2014, we raised a $25M Hummingbird’s Opportunities fund, to double down on some of our winners.

To date, all together $100M in funds operating in parallel and cross-investing. We invested initial ticket sizes of $1-$2M, mostly series A, entering at median entry valuations of $5M. Our smallest ticket was $250k and our largest investment is $8M.

2017, Hummingbird III raised $95M.

Originally published at https://medium.com on September 21, 2017.