Series A investing for free thinkers | Bijan Sabet and Matt Marx
Channel: MIT Venture Capital & Innovation
Date: 2017-06-21

Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital doesn't care about your business plan or patents, he doesn't even care about your business model. Bijan discusses his unconventional views on investing with professor and inventor Matt Marx of MIT Sloan.

The MIT Venture Capital + Innovation Conference is held annually in February at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Thank you to our lead sponsor IBM Research, as well as Solvay, Wilmer Hale, Finnegan, The MIT Industrial Liaison Program, the MIT Startup Exchange, and Startup Hub Boston. Visit http://www.mitvcconference.com/.

Bijan primarily invests in digital canvases and online communities for people at work and at play. He typically invests in startups after becoming a passionate user of the product. In particular, he looks for new approaches to building communities through the sharing of ideas and interests. Bijan led early investments for Spark in Trello, Stack Exchange, Crowdrise, Foursquare, OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga), thePlatform (acquired by Comcast), Runkeeper (acquired by Asics), Tumblr (acquired by Yahoo) and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR).

Before becoming an investor, Bijan led product management and/or business development at GameLogic (acquired by Scientific Games), Moxi Digital (acquired by Digeo) and WebTV Networks (acquired by Microsoft Corporation).

Bijan holds a B.S. degree from Boston College. He lives in Boston with his wife and three kids and is a passionate amateur photographer.

Matt Marx is an associate professor of Entrepreneurship at Sloan. Previously, he worked as a software engineer and an executive at technology startups SpeechWorks and Tellme, where he received six patents. He holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab, and an MBA as well as a doctoral degree from Harvard Business School.