Neda Sahebelm - Founder - Keshty

Breakfast with founders (investors)! 🥐 Yesterday I met with Neda Sahebelm

Neda is the founder of keshty, investor at Alma Angels and fellow all-round business scaler!

We connected over a few discussions around the female investment landscape (both as a founder and investor), so thought it would be great to meet over a breakfast!

Human bias. It's not unnatural to relate and seek out people that are most relatable to you.

We spoke about:

- Proactive vs reactive operations. Build too early and you risk wasting resource, build too late and you can risk everything! Leveraging experienced operators that can see 10 steps ahead is an invaluable way to build an awareness of the path ahead.

- Human bias. It's not unnatural to relate and seek out people that are most relatable to you. After all, it's how we find comfort when we are away from home and it's how humans survived in the early days. The challenge comes in understanding how to bypass that in the context of deploying capital, hiring people or allocating promotions.

- Investing in diverse founders. The narrative can't be on the basis that we're looking at a male vs female; white vs minorities; hetero vs homo. Seeking out the founders that align with you as an investor and the investors that align with you as a founder is a key part to this all. That's why common interests and values can act as a strong path towards investment. If it doesn't feel right now, then it won't necessarily get better.

- Lowering your minimum ticket size to attract more investors, particularly in impact tech. High minimum ticket sizes immediately exclude people from investment rounds. It is ironic that the startup world rallied to reverse the minimum angel investor from £170k to £100k, but those same founders will look for a minimum £25k ticket size. There are enough ways to manage your cap tables today to accept ticket sizes as low as £1k. The diversity of your investors can be a compelling message to your startup.

Lots more we could share, but these breakfasts are 1:1 for a reason!