LA Venture Podcast

EPISODE 210

Quick links

00:00 Introduction
01:48 Arteen's entry into VC at Techstars
03:27 Moving from VC to Operating and Back
11:33 Investment strategy after Route
13:23 Importance of distribution in today's market
18:37 Lessons from Route and Commerce Enablement
22:22 Fika Ventures and New Fund Strategy
25:24 How much is working hard, being smarter and/or luck?
27:43 Fika's leadership (Arteen vs TX) and their culture and values
30:56 More on Arteen's background and high school life
32:19 Conclusion remarks

Arteen Arabshahi — Fika Ventures

November 6, 2024

Seed
Series A

With AI enabling copycat products to be brought to market incredibly quickly, the ability to scale and find unique distribution is the new moat. Arteen explains distribution lessons learned and much more from his vantage as Fika's returning partner.

Quick links

00:00 Introduction
01:48 Arteen's entry into VC at Techstars
03:27 Moving from VC to Operating and Back
11:33 Investment strategy after Route
13:23 Importance of distribution in today's market
18:37 Lessons from Route and Commerce Enablement
22:22 Fika Ventures and New Fund Strategy
25:24 How much is working hard, being smarter and/or luck?
27:43 Fika's leadership (Arteen vs TX) and their culture and values
30:56 More on Arteen's background and high school life
32:19 Conclusion remarks

Full transcript

Arteen is with me today in Pasadena. We're actually poolside in Pasadena.

Living!

So nice to have you here on the east side, I hope that we can lure you and your fiancée over this way.

That's the hope. That's my dream. I'm, uh, excited to hopefully end up in a dry heat again from Arizona.

Welcome to a hundred-degree weather. Well, our team, you are part of the OG LA crew, LA tech scene, but as we were just saying, like you and I didn't totally overlap because I joined in 2019. You went to operating in 2020, but originally you worked with TX at the Carlin family office before moving with TX right when Fika was just getting started. You went from Fika to WonderCo and then to a startup route in an operating role. Very interested to hear about that, but you're back at Fika. You guys just announced your 160-million-dollar fund four, congratulations. Try to summarize it, get it all out there.

It is pretty crazy. I mean, it is. It's so funny how, like I, so I moved to LA in 2012 and actually my first job out here was I launched built in LA, and it was awesome because the business model was, you know, we wrote a lot of content and then we had a jobs board. And so for me, it was this amazing excuse at the time, I was like a 21 year old who wanted to move to LA, wanted to be in tech. And I literally got paid to move out here and meet every startup and every VC, And that like snowballed into this like insane series of events over the last like 11 years now.

Didn’t you do Techstars at some point?

Yeah, I did. The path there, if it's interesting was the summer after my sophomore year, I did an investment banking internship in New York, and it took me about six hours to realize that that's not me. Like anyone who knows me, and it knows me for six seconds, is like, that guy's not meant to be an investment banker.