🎧 Funders & Founders #5: Stephan Cizmar, Lorimer Ventures
Empathy, dreaming with the entrepreneur, and Industry 4.0
Hey friends -
🎧 Funders & Founders Episode #5 is live! 🎧
Stephan Cizmar is Co-Founder and General Partner at Lorimer Ventures, a pre-seed through Series A venture capital firm. We talk about why empathy is central to how Stephan invests and builds, what it means to “dream with the entrepreneur,” and the thematic focuses for the firm.
Lorimer takes a unique approach to investing - operating partner first, investor second. It’s a focus on being the investors “they wish they had.”
The theme conversations were particularly fun for me. I found Stephan’s thoughts on Industry 4.0 eyeopening:
There's a cliff of retirement. A lot of these factories and industrial settings are 24/7. They can't stay open. They have to reduce production, reduce output as a result of staffing issues. And so an area of Industry 4.0 that we're looking keenly into is: what is the role of automation software, everything from staffing frontline workers to innovative financing for robotics?
And what does that software stack look like when you're managing assets? You're thinking about uptime. You want to maximize the operational efficiency and the output of an organization. What does that stack look like? We see the dominant platforms, the IBM's, the SAP's of the world starting to open up their cloud offerings, their APIs. They're starting to produce documentation to build on top of it.
Check out portfolio companies Formic (robots by the hour) and Emi (recruiting frontline workers) to see where the theme’s led Lorimer.
Please enjoy this conversation with Stephan Cizmar!
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Cheers,
Jared