Why some VCs bet on people over businesses

News Summary

  • What was surprising, said Arora, was that payments were still a huge problem in 2020, particularly as many fuel card companies were already gaining steam.“The first thing that really stood out to us is around reliability.
  • “As an example, in Q4, Tushar took over our risk team and got us from contribution negative, highly negative actually, to being profitable.”Arora said she’s more product and engineering focused, always thinking about how to build a better product and for which customer segment.
  • The company didn’t work out, but Misra impressed Tarczynski.“We told him we want to back whatever you do next, so just keep us posted,” said Tarczynski.A few years later, Misra joined the founding team at AtoB.
  • “We as consumers or businesses take it for granted because it just works all the time, so that was a big eye opener for us, seeing how people have backup cards and backup cash.”Then the AtoB team discovered how broken driver payroll is.
  • The team was still working on the original idea, but Contrary was hooked by the people at this point.“We said, look we don’t care what it is.
  • These fuel cards built by legacy companies like Brex and Fleetcor in particular are running completely outside Visa and Mastercard, so they don’t have the same level of acceptance and network time,” said Arora.
Its been tough to raise funds in the last few years for most sectors, and many VCs will tell you that a startup needs to have a killer productmarket fit before getting that check. But Eric Tarczyns [+10341 chars]