This week, Raj welcomes Lonne Jaffe and Teddie Wardi. Lonne and Teddie are managing directors at Insight Partners, one of the most active global venture capital and private equity firms. Having come up through the tech world themselves as operators and founders, Lonne and Teddie provide unique perspectives on what investors look for in startup founders and leadership teams. Tune in to hear them discuss the top mistakes entrepreneurs make when pitching VCs, the difference between thinking like an operator versus an investor, and what single quality they look for above all else when evaluating a potential investment. The two also give their hot takes on the hype around generative AI and share insights into the future of the technology from an investor’s point of view. Whether you’re an aspiring founder or just interested in how VCs think, this episode offers rare access to the minds of two managing directors at the top firm, Insight Partners.
About Lonne Jaffe: Lonne is a technology enthusiast who started his journey with a Commodore VIC-20 computer at age 4. He grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, and attended the local public schools until junior high school. He then went to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where he learned computer programming. He graduated from Harvard with both undergraduate and graduate degrees and interned at Microsoft during the summers. Lonne joined Insight Partners in 2017 as a managing director, after serving as the CEO of an Insight portfolio company, now called Precisely (formerly known as Syncsort), a global leader in data integrity software for over 12,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Lonne’s earlier career involved serving as the senior vice president of corporate strategy at CA Technologies and spending 13 years at IBM. At IBM, he was vice president of strategy for a multi-billion-dollar IBM software division and before that the director of mergers & acquisitions for another IBM software division, where he led a number of sizable software acquisitions. Previously, he was director of IBM’s software solutions business catering to the healthcare, life sciences, government, and education industries. At Insight, Lonne has been working in the deeper tech domains of applied artificial intelligence software, data and machine learning infrastructure software, healthcare software, fintech software, cybersecurity software, software development tooling, and some frontier tech areas like quantum computing.
About Teddie Wardi: Teddie joined Insight in 2017 and focuses on high-growth software and internet companies. Teddie works with several Insight portfolio companies and helps lead new investments across both Enterprise and SMB software. Prior to joining Insight, Teddie was a Partner at Atomico, one of the largest European venture funds based in London. He sourced and led multiple growth investments in SaaS companies, being active at both the board and company level supporting rapid growth and international expansion. Previously Teddie worked at Dawn Capital, a SaaS focused early stage fund based in London, where he sourced and led investments in Automile and Showpad among others. Before moving to venture investing, Teddie was the co-founder and CTO of Nervogrid, a leading cloud service marketplace platform. Nervogrid was acquired by ALSO, Europe’s largest IT distributor that is listed on the Swiss stock exchange. Teddie holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.Sc. from Aalto University in Helsinki, where he focused on Finance and Computer Science.