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Leo Polovets

Things Leo Says on Podcasts

General Partner at Susa Ventures and Humba Ventures. Early engineer at LinkedIn and Factual, not-that-early engineer at Google. Investing interests: b2b SaaS, deep tech, and sectors critical to our nation's future.

Where to Find Them

Leo Polovets writes a16z Podcast and writes a16z . They have also been a guest on The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (2 times) and How I Invest with David Weisburd . They also write for Coding VC and Humba Ventures on Substack.

Recently: “E443: Why the Next Trillion-Dollar Startup Won’t Be a Software Company” on How I Invest with David Weisburd (October 2026); “Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated?” on a16z (September 2025); “Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated?” on a16z Podcast (September 2025); “Is Non-Consensus Investing Overrated?” on a16z Podcast (September 2025); “20VC: Why Warm Intros Are Mostly Dumb, Why Ownership is Built On First Check and 4 Crucial Elements To Make Cold Inbound Attractive with Leo Polovets, General Partner @ Susa Ventures” on The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (November 2018); “20VC: Investing; A Game Of Access Or Picking, Why Technical DD At Seed Is Irrelevant & Why A Contrarian Mindset Does Not Always Lead To Optimal Returns with Leo Polovets, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Susa Ventures” on The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (April 2017).

What They Said

“If you make something that's 80% as efficient, but you can get it out in six months, data centers will line up to buy it from you because they just care about time to going live.” — Leo Polovets, How I Invest with David Weisburd

Polovets was explaining why the data-center buildout excites him as a deep-tech investor. Incumbents like Siemens make efficient custom equipment that takes years to deliver. Because data centers are held back by permitting, design and power, he sees room for faster startups, especially in energy.

How I Invest with David Weisburd · 2026-10-16 Permalink → Listen →
How I Invest with David Weisburd Around 38:07 into the episode
Leo Polovets

…is like, I think very, very important. The other part is like, because you're working with, you know, older industries, I think being able to, you know, kind of translate startups to like, you know, what a customer might want that doesn't work with startups, I think is also especially important.

David Weisburd

What are you personally most excited about in the deep tech space?

Leo Polovets

I've been pretty excited about the data center build out in terms of, you know, data centers have deep pockets. All they care about is speed because they're just bottlenecked by so many things like permitting and design and energy generation. I think it's actually a really great opportunity for startups, especially on the energy side, because there's this kind of window in time where you can go compete against like Siemens or some big like power plant company because they might have something that's like very efficient, but it's custom and it takes five years to build. And if you make something that's 80% as efficient, but you can get it out in six months, like data centers will line up to buy it from you because they just care about time to, you know, time to going live. And so I think that's an area I've just been really excited about that, you know, we have this huge buildout. It's probably like one of the biggest buildouts we've had since the Industrial…

David Weisburd

What are some companies in that space that you're very excited about?

Leo Polovets

Maybe to pick a couple that we've invested in. So we invested in a company called Critical Energy. They make geothermal power plants. So the drilling for geothermal has gotten better and better with companies like Furbo over the last few years. But then you still need a power plant to take like the…

David Weisburd

What do you see as the bottlenecks for AI from a physical infrastructure side over the next couple of years? And how do you see that evolving?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“Our biggest misses were ones where we liked everything except the price. And then we passed because of the price. And then years later, it's like, you know, a multi-billion or sometimes $10 billion company.” — Leo Polovets, How I Invest with David Weisburd

Asked what he has learned from mistakes as a seed investor, Polovets says his tactical lesson is not to pass on a company because of price. His fund's costliest misses were deals it turned down only on valuation.

How I Invest with David Weisburd · 2026-10-16 Permalink → Listen →
How I Invest with David Weisburd Around 59:43 into the episode
David Weisburd

If you could go back 13 years ago, right before you started SUSE Ventures, and you could give yourself one timeless piece of advice, just one piece of advice, what would that be?

Speaker 1

So there's like a tactical one and like a philosophical one. So I'd say the tactical one is like, don't pass because of price. Because I think kind of

Leo Polovets

our biggest misses were ones where we liked everything except the price. And then we passed because of the price. And then years later, it's like, you know, a multi-billion or sometimes $10 billion company.

David Weisburd

How do those play out?

Speaker 1

I'm happy to throw out a couple of examples. Like we were interested in investing

Leo Polovets

in Checker in the first round. We were investing in FAIR in the first round. But I think both of those essentially like skipped the seed and went to A. Right. And so, and we were a seed investor. We're like, hey, we'd love to invest. Here's like a seed price that we're pretty comfortable with. And…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

Collections They Appear In

Startups & Venture