What's up party people? My name is Sunny Reid. This is the Sunny Reid Show. I've got Vic he's with G2C Ventures on the show next. we're going to talk about how the model is flawed and why AI is not a moat. How you doing, Vic?
Great, Vic. How you doing, Sunny?
I'm good. So, I like to start with I guess tell us about G2C Ventures. what's unique about I guess how you see the world? and then, you know, we'll keep it short and sweet for now, but we'll go deeper into it later.
Yeah, we're an early-stage venture firm based in Palo Alto. and G2C really is grit to capital. We see too many ideas and we are really looking for founders with great not just ideas. And pretty much our definition of great is, you know, founders who are ready to really slog it out, have couple near-death experiences and still keep going, you know, and that takes more than capital. So, they bring the great, we bring the capital, we can have a great combination.
I love it. I love your energy. Hey, Vic, I don't know something got a little weird with your audio. It started flickering a bit. Not sure if there's a way to kind of adjust it a bit. Hey, you know, you built in Yeah, you built in physical security and manufacturing. I guess what did those markets teach you that, you know, software people usually miss.
Yeah, look, a lot of times software people think once you ship, your job is done. but physical security, manufacturing, and a lot of the real-life applications, things start when people start using them and start implementing their custom workflows or whatever around that. So, physical security or manufacturing, you're integrating software with a lot of devices. so, that's kind of where the rubber meets the road. So, software part is, I would say, relatively the easy part. Deployment and getting it working is probably a lot harder than a lot of people make it to be. What it really taught me is the resilience that software needs to have with the real world changes, and changes would happen every day. Physical security lives by changes or things breaking. That's what they monitor, and manufacturing shop floor is no different.
Super interesting. Hey, what was the hardest like operational problem you personally had to solve as a founder?
Yeah, you know, a lot of times as a founder, I mean, your goal is to build great software, great solutions. at the same time, the hardest thing is getting people, five departments to agree that this is the right solution to implement, even if you have, you know, security department saying this is great, but you need to bring HR along, you need to bring procurement along the way, and things like that. So, that's probably been the harder is to get the organization spirit behind a project. as easy it is to have a champion do it, but getting, you know, corporate America, corporate Europe, corporate Asia, you know, people do things very differently in each continent, and getting all of them to agree on something, this is that's really been the hardest challenge in making scale. You know, you can do first few sites, but if you want to do something at a global scale, you need to get everybody on board.
And you know, after the exits, you hit a fork, right? Build another company or build Founders. can you walk us through that decision, Vic?
Oh, yeah. That's probably one of those things that, you know, you only do so many times in your life where you say decide what you want to do next in your you know, life and whether it was graduating from college what you want to do next or changing jobs. But in my case, I was changing my career altogether, stopping a founder and thinking about helping other founders, you know? And I.
I hate to cut you off, but it's like the audio is really bad. Is that you can't Can you try something else? Like is there like you don't have headphones or I don't even know if we should do refresh, but it's like robotic.
I can try it. I can definitely try my headphones.
Yeah? Wait, something you did.
Let me do that.
Something you did there fixed it, though. Yeah? Maybe just keep.
Keep going. I'll flag it. Something you did, I don't know, fixed it, but maybe yeah. sorry to interrupt you. Yeah? I think some Yeah, keep going. Okay, sorry about that, Vic.
Yeah. But most of that was, you know, I've been fortunate enough to have couple exits and I thought I can go on and build another company. I love doing that. But you know, how about I use my experience as my leverage and support 40 founders? And that's exactly what G2SVentures is doing. You see some of the logos back there, but really we're out there helping 40 founders having the same discussions that I had in myself, but now I am sort of the sounding board for them and they can reach out to me, you know, we are in Silicon Valley culture. We're working literally, you know, 12 I say 12 hours a day, six days a week we're available, right? We are 12 six There's not even nine six happening in Silicon Valley. So, we are all in all the time. And working with these 40 founders, supporting them, sounded like a much bigger cause to me than just working for my own.
I love that. Cool. Okay, so I guess you said you said one more company is one more company, but 40 founders adds up, right? So what ha- what what's kind of been the hardest part of getting to 40?
Yeah, the hardest part actually is to meet close to maybe Yeah you know on average we meet maybe 300 to 400 founders before we investing in one. And that's really the hard part. Saying all those no's, and not just saying no's by just saying it didn't work out or we pass, but telling the founders why we pass because a pass is never a full pass. in our world it is an opportunity for you to come back in 30 90 days with whatever didn't sit well with us or will not set will not sit well with my investment committee. so most of the time when I do a pass, we tell them very clearly why it is a pass. And that's actually hard to do, at least from my perspective, because the ones that I want to work with, we know we want to work with, we click right away. Founders we do could not work with because we have to do you know, didn't pass our rubric. Letting them know in a way that they improve on it, not necessarily a be.
He's the ignite so your connection, boss, is I don't know what's up with it today, but like I do about 12 of these a day, so I'm pretty solid in terms of my side. I might think it might be yours. We have a lot of people listening, so I want to keep keep marching forward if it's okay, and then you know, we can do a part two properly, Vic, if the audio is really that much of a disturbance maybe further down the line. Hey, I was going to ask you so what is G2C Ventures.
Yeah. well I was going to say you know it's okay. We'll just keep muscling through and you know yeah there's nothing we can do It's okay. And then like I said if it's really bad we can just redo part two again maybe later. Hey, what is G2C Ventures backing at pre-seed and seed and like what does the ideal first meeting look like for you?
Yeah, look we are very aggressively investing looking for working with founders. In this summer alone we had three investments with the air going great exit. So we plan along very well. We typically invest in what we call a system of outcome. A unique combination of generally AI driven software that is rebuilding a workflow a vertical workflow. It could be in construction market. It could be in security physical security and so on. And then charge for outcome not necessarily charge for licenses or seats. It's a unique way of delivering a service and a software and we think this is the right way to move forward because selling software is going to get harder and harder as it gets easier to build but delivering the outcome is what we really focus on and I think it brings more accountability into software where you have to make sure the outcome happens every day. Not something that hey there was a user error or somebody didn't implement it right. that's one of the things that happen in corporate enterprises. So our thesis primarily is not necessarily AI but software and services built around an outcome within a vertical industry. And so looking for founders who have good background in any vertical and we partner from generally with the first check in and not only we help with capital we also help them with go-to-market and the future fund raises.
Really interesting. And just to like double click on that, you said you look for companies that absorb the services layer. Why is that the hard part?
You know, services generally is the messy part. A lot of software companies don't want to do services. is generally frowned upon, you know. It's a messy part. and they would rather have somebody else do the services. But I think in the age of AI where AI is generally very probabilistic, corporates generally want to be more deterministic. They want an answer five nines, right? They don't want, you know, 99.999% of the time the answer needs to be correct. And that really doesn't happen with a software solution that's very AI-focused. So, I think we are at a great place for value where the human in the loop comes in and by design it's not an afterthought for any major thing. Human in the loop is still there. We will generally invest in tools that are end-to-end automation. The human is the one providing the guardrail. So, great examples of our companies, for example, somebody automating a particular workflow for construction industry for RFP. So, not only they deliver the RFP, but they also provide structural engineer review as a human in the loop making sure that the design and so on they are putting out are structurally sound. And that kind of adds to the service. It even also becomes a moat for them.
Super interesting. Hey, back when you were the one raising, how did the investors who eventually backed you actually find you?
It's a great question. I there's no one answer for it. I mean, most of that comes through your network. I do look for founders to reach out to my network just like I had to go out and tell the network. And you know, this is something so true in any business that don't reach out exactly when you have a problem, you know, reach out early, build a relationship. Cuz nobody writes a check within when the first 20 minutes of meeting anybody. They sort of get a signal. So, mostly I reached out people a lot earlier than I was when I was still debating what I was doing. I was reaching out to get feedback, reaching out to the network. So, that would be the ideal way. At the same time, we also love events, just like all of the other VCs host love events. We host interesting events, for example, coming up in October, Tech Week. So, reach out to those events where we are doing something called Founder Unfold, how an investment committee thinks about your idea, not just how general partner thinks about it. But those kind of events are where you can come and build relationship. We won't write a check for anybody that evening, but we'll definitely build a relationship that will lead to a fundraising. So, I would In my case, I was at least thinking, you know, 2 years to 9 months before I was fundraising to building relationship with the right set of people.
Super smart. Hey, you said the model is flower. When did that land for you and like and what did it change?
That was really true starting to become more and more true in 2025 when we started seeing a lot of model companies started offering very similar base in terms of in their model capabilities. You know, they're common APIs guys to access those models. So, a model alone would not solve most of the problem. the model is sort of like an ingredient of the flower. What people really bought buy the cake. You don't buy the flower, right? And they want something that's ready and usable. Well, so sort of up and down talking about in the reference of the five-layered AI cake. It's sort of just a model that model is just a flower but at the same time people want the entire slice of cake whether it's the application model control plane and even some of the infrastructure below it to all come together and want to pay one price for it on an outcome that they level how in the street or exciting that cake was. Nobody really cares about counting every ingredient of it. So, that's what I think we what we looked at was when we look at across the spectrum, model is just one of the ingredient. Hence, AI is not in our thesis. Rebuilding the workload. How you make that cake, how you bake that cake, and how many different flavors you can sell that cake and whether it's red velvet or whether it's a chocolate cake, how you get your customer that's really where we think the opportunity is in getting people to come together and agree on what cake they really want for the company rather than model alone. It's just flour and nobody is excited about the flower by itself.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I guess what does it feel like when you and a founder click and can you tell inside of 10 minutes?
You know, it's very interesting question because we certainly wouldn't write check in like 10 minutes. That hasn't happened yet at least for me yet. But at the same time you can tell how open a founder is within the first 10 minutes. You know, when they start their story, their personal story, how much positive positivity, how much grit they show in what they have done in the past And also a lot of founders talk about my solution, my this, my that. But some I love the founders when I click with them is then they say, "Hey, I was working with customer XYZ. This is what they had told me." So, they'd be able to relate the solution in the context of a real company a real person or a real problem that company shared with them. That gives me a huge validation that this founder and I are going to click a long time. So.
Yeah. that makes a lot of sense. And how do the founders you back actually reach you today? And like which route brings you the best ones?
You know, most of the best opportunities and like all the three deals we just did this summer they came through some referral. and I would say founders who can get to us through referral, LinkedIn, or X or other than many places in which they can get referrals to us. And I think a founder who has the those kind of grits to get to reach out to us, find the right way, pathways reach out to it. They'll also be able to find the pathway to reach out to a CFO or chief security officer or VP of manufacturing because they have the hustle. and so, ideally the best is to get a referral to us, but also come out and meet us at one of our events. We host at least one event a month between San Francisco and Palo Alto. Come out to those events. and often we also host some online webinars. So, reach out to us through those.
So, I guess like what are the next 90 days about for GTC and like what has to be true by the end of them?
Well, you know, the day that since it's an interesting game that 90 days milestone don't move September through November is where most of the action is going to happen, you know, a lot of the deals not necessarily going to happen in December. So, we're looking at meeting as many founders as we can to close out a couple more deals for the end of the year. We have capital deployment allocation. maybe it doesn't mean we must write a check, but more than interestingly, we like to write you a check, so that's where we are. We want to meet a lot more founders. and at the same time, we have to be con- continue to be raising. You know, venture is one of those fun businesses. You continue allocating, but you're also fundraising a lot of times, either for your current fund or getting ready for your next one. So, we're actively raising also a fund two. but both of that is really top of the mind for me.
Brilliant. Vic, so insightful, man. I really wish the audio and stuff would have worked out a bit better, but hopefully it's just my headphones or something and the audience was able to pick it all up. If not, we have to do a part two cuz you dropped some bombs there. I mean, in a positive way. I loved it. real really insightful and thank you so much. Vic, where do people learn more about the fund and where do they learn more about you and then I'll bring this interview to an end.
Sure. GTC Ventures, you know, there's our email there. Great way to reach out to me on LinkedIn. you know, interact with me through Sunny's forum. I think all of these are great places. you know, my I joke with my wife that my job is to meet people and it's probably the dream job I have, so I'm always open to a meeting if you guys have great ideas in the enterprise or vertical space. I look forward to meeting founders and also people who want to learn more about this space.
Brilliant. Okay, hang back for 1 second, Vic. I'm going to bring this to an end for everyone listening live. Thank you so much. Really, appreciate it. And yeah, until next time. Cheers.
