VCWire: Interview with Brendan Baker of Rackhouse Venture Capital

Excerpt:

VCWire: Which is your overall strategy?

We’re focused on leading and co-leading Pre-Seed and Seed rounds for teams that are applying AI to real world, unsexy problems with new software. We’re comfortable catalyzing the first or second round that a company does, and work with them through the rest of the journey. 

We love the massive, boring parts of the economy that have historically been neglected by good software. These include supply chain, ERP, industrial automation, manufacturing, commerce, construction, and privacy.

VCWire: What do you like to see in founders?….And what don’t you like to see in them? Is there something which impresses you at a first glance?

We are seeking certain types of founders who we believe can seize this particular moment in AI-driven software. 

Customer-obsessed: They often know the first 5-10 customers they’ll sell to, and getting into design partnerships is straightforward. We watch how many slides it takes for a team to talk about customers. 

High urgency, high pace: More than any time in the last 15 years, pace is key. They need to have high urgency, but also hyper-awareness of how to map the fast-evolving frontier of AI to customer needs, and pivot the path to support that. 

Domain experts: They’ve spent time in the past on the problem they’re solving in the past. They know the opportunities and traps in their area. We look for how specifically they talk about the problem and market context.

Product-centric: While it’s important to have high engineering velocity, translating AI into a product that resonates with customers is a product problem. So we love teams that understand near-term product delivery and longer term strategy. We’ll take that over a team of the world’s best engineers. We look at how nuanced a team is at embedding AI into product flows.

Read the full press release here.