Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures, emphasizes and articulates his firm’s specific interest in investing in vertical cloud startups.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself a little bit and then we’ll come to Storm Ventures. What path did you follow to founding Storm Ventures?
Tea Hea Nahm: I was born in Korea. We immigrated when I was five years old. I started my career in Silicon Valley as a corporate lawyer working with 200 startups. In 2000, I left law and co-founded Storm Ventures and have been a partner at Storm for the last 22 years.
Sramana Mitra: You have a very long history of technology startups and Silicon Valley. I want to start by asking you for a bit of an overview of how that journey has evolved. How have the trends evolved and how have you evolved Storm Ventures with it?
Tea Hea Nahm: The biggest change we’re seeing right now is the cloud making Silicon Valley technology available almost anywhere. It used to be that you would need to build an engineering team in Silicon Valley to get the best engineering talent. Now with Microsoft Azure, GCP, and AWS, you can be almost anywhere and get access to state-of-the-art technology. Now about half of our investments are outside Silicon Valley. Fifteen years ago, 95% of our investments were in Silicon Valley. Half our unicorns now are outside Silicon Valley.
Sramana Mitra: That is the vision of One Million by One Million – to empower entrepreneurs all around the world. We have a company in Tanzania even. We have seen that trend. We started working aggressively in India for a very long time. The Indian market has really matured. It’s still in the major metros but, in our portfolio, we have companies from non-metro areas of India as well.
Where are you with Storm Ventures today? How is the fund positioned? What is your investment thesis? How do you want to play the game today?
Tea Hea Nahm: We recently closed our seventh fund for $200 million. With our new fund, this is a great time to make new investments. As a firm, we focus on B2B. We’ve invested in over 200 B2B software startups. Twelve have become unicorns including European companies like Pipedrive, Algolia, Marketo, or Tekion. We think B2B is going to continue to go through a big disruption. We’re excited about investing in that space.
Sramana Mitra: If you double-click down a little bit further, where in B2B do you see the deal flow?
Tea Hea Nahm: Obviously, it’s been the adoption of the cloud. As customers are adopting the cloud, they realize they need to replace their entire application software stack. Basically, the entire software stack has been up for grabs. We’ve invested in hundreds of SaaS companies. That continues to be a good area to invest in – just finding ways of automating workflow with SaaS using the cloud.
Now there’s a new trend that everyone talks about – data and AI. We see the opportunity as AI for X instead of horizontal AI. We think there are going to be tens of thousands of opportunities in terms of AI for X.
