E24: Shruti Gandhi (General Partner, Array VC)

Shruti Gandhi is the founder and General Partner of Array Ventures a data-driven venture capital firm. Six of her portfolio companies have exited to companies such as Apple, PayPal, and Samsung with 10x returns. Shruti spun Array Ventures out of True Ventures. She is also an adjunct professor in the CS department at Columbia University, featured on Business Insider, BBC, Forbes, Venture Beat, and USA Today, and host of the Array podcast.

She also has an MBA from the University of Chicago and engineering in CS at Columbia University.

Follow Shruti’s blog here. You may follow her (@atshruti), host Akash Bhat (@bhatvakash) and our podcast (@thedesi_vc) on Twitter.

. . .

In this episode, we will cover:

1. Why venture capital instead of angel investing (4:16)

2. Process of setting up a VC fund in the US (5:48)

3. How is Array VC structured (6:15)

4. Challenges that come with being a single GP Fund (7:46)

5. How has enterprise investing evolved in the last few years (8:46)

6. How do you evaluate moats within startups that work at the intersection of the AI, ML and data? (12:02)

7. How does Shruti define AI and ML (15:35)

8. What kind of benchmarks should enterprise startups hit in order to be attractive for subsequent round of investors (16:49)

9. Why is data not really a moat? (18:31)

10. How does Array’s network of C-level executives drive value to portfolio startups? (23:37)

11. Investment opportunities within ML (27:07)

12. Rapid fire (32:14)