LA Venture Podcast

EPISODE 180

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Ann Lai — Bullpen Capital

April 5, 2023

Seed
Series A

In this episode with Ann Lai from Bullpen we talk about:

* The metrics that matter for fundraising

* How Bullpen invests in overlooked businesses 

* And how Ann bounced back from her experience with Justin Caldbeck at Binary Capital

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Full transcript

Ann Lai is a partner at Bullpen Capital. Bullpen is known for doing post-seed and pre-A investments.

Prior to Bullpen, Ann was at Binary and played a big role in stopping the horrible behavior that was going on there. Ann has a PhD in engineering from Harvard and is passionate about helping her companies leverage data.

Ann, let's start with something easy. Tell me about Bullpen. So, at Bullpen we invest in overlooked categories, underrepresented founders. So basically anything that is not mainstream over-hyped, that are real good businesses that have performing metrics, et cetera, but are maybe misunderstood in the moment.

Okay, so bullpen has always been at sort of this post seed stage. I mean the market has changed, has Bullpen changed? What fund is this? We're on fund six. So we finished raising this fund November last year. How big is it? $140M and change.