Luke Pappas spent his early career in the high-stakes trenches of Morgan Stanley, working under the "Godfather of Tech Banking," Michael Grimes. Now a Partner at NEA, he’s leveraging those "bake-off" battle scars to help European founders scale toward massive liquidity events.

Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction4:01 – The Lore of Michael Grimes: High standards and the Uber/Airbnb "bake-off" stories6:08 – Positioning Snap: Why the "camera company" angle won over public investors9:24 – No room for error: Drawing a live valuation for Evan Spiegel10:11 – From Banking to VC: Applying liquidity-event discipline to early-stage investing12:15 – What an "IPOable" business looks like in 2026: Profitability and terminal value14:52 – The Synthesia Story: What makes a world-class AI founder and storyteller18:01 – Proprietary Data: How Aquabyte uses 8 years of fish photos to create a "gold mine"21:51 – The robotics "Aha" moment25:34 – The Final Frontier: Rare earth metals and the heavy capex of energy fuel cells