S2E3: Felicis' Viviana Faga on early-stage AI brand development and investment tactics

Fund/Build/Scale

Viviana Faga is general partner at Felicis, a venture firm that invests in seed to Series B startups in several sectors. Since its founding in 2006, the company has backed breakout companies like Adyen, Canva, Shopify and Runway.

Because she’s a former operator with experience in positioning, branding and go-to-market strategy, I asked her to come on Fund/Build/Scale to talk about how she evaluates seed-stage AI investments and share some of the tactics she’s using to help founders “really focus on this idea of a defensible brand.”

Episode breakdown:

• A look at Felicis’ strategy of investing across different sectors and stages
• Viviana outlines areas of interest within AI and clarifies typical investment size
• “If you're a traditional SaaS company, I think it's going to be very hard.”
• How AI startups differ from traditional SaaS in terms of growth/funding opportunities
• “I think TAM is just a false predictor in either direction.”
• “It's hard to start an AI company if you have not been in research or in academia,”
• “Every time there's a hot AI company, there's 15 new YC companies going after that problem 3-6 months later.”
• “Marketing is formulaic, it really shouldn’t scare anyone.”
• Questions AI founders should ask investors to ensure alignment and set expectations
• Viviana shares her resources for keeping up with the latest developments in AI
• “I always ask teams, ‘what's going to happen in five years that will determine your success, and walk me through it.’”

Links:

• Viviana Faga, general partner, Felicis
• Felicis
• NeurIPS 2024 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
• No Priors podcast

Thanks for listening,

– Walter.

• FBS on Substack
• LinkedIn