Summer Series S1 | Episode 4: Jay Boddu, Angel Investor & VC

🌞 In this Fourth episode of the special curated Summer Series of Do The “_” Thing Podcast: Capital Meets Impact 🌻:

What Investors See Before Success Is Visible: A conversation with Jay Boddu

I sit down with Jay Boddu, an angel investor and venture builder, for a thoughtful conversation about venture investing, founder discernment, early-stage uncertainty, and the tension between impact, profitability, and purpose.

Jay’s journey began in engineering, where he spent his early career building world-class products. Over time, his curiosity moved from how products are built, to what should be built, and eventually to why companies exist, what makes them fundable, and how founders turn ideas into meaningful companies. That curiosity led him into venture capital, entrepreneurship, corporate leadership, and now angel investing.

In this conversation, Jay shares how he evaluates early-stage founders and opportunities — not only through market size or business potential, but through deeper qualities such as intrinsic motivation, mission, resilience, and a founder’s ability to keep going through uncertainty.

Together, we explore:

• What makes a founder worth backing at the earliest stages
• Why great founders are often mission-driven before they are money-driven
• How investors think about great markets, great founders, and timing
• The loneliness and difficulty of building something before others believe in it
• The difference between nonprofit impact, profit-with-purpose models, and venture-backed companies
• How people can think about financial risk when they feel called to solve a meaningful problem

As part of the Capital Meets Impact series, this conversation invites us to look at capital not only as money, but as judgment, timing, conviction, risk tolerance, and the ability to support builders before the path is obvious.

Jay reminds us that there is no single formula for building impact. Some people choose nonprofit work. Some build companies. Some balance profit and purpose. Some give their prime years to a cause. What matters is finding the right structure for the problem, the person, and the moment.

Sometimes the purpose we’re called to do begins long before we know how to name it.

Transcript

Sheela: 0:00

Welcome to the Do The Dash Thing podcast. It's all about doing the dash thing, that unique gift, calling, or purpose only you can bring to the world. This podcast showcases the beautiful things being done by incredible individuals, and it's also an invitation for you to look within, recognize your own gift, and fill in your dash. This is the Do The Dash Thing podcast, and I'm Sheila, your host. This summer, I'm sharing a curated series of conversations with people who are social entrepreneurs, fundraisers, investors, and ecosystem builders who are helping create change in thoughtful, practical, and deeply human ways Welcome, Jai, to DT-T, Do the- Thing podcast. This podcast is about spotlighting your story, how you came to do the work you are doing, what shaped it along the way, and how it has taken form over time, and how your journey helps us understand how impact work is not only built, but supported. Please share with us, uh, your journey into venture investing.

Jay: 1:19

Yeah. Thank you, Sheila. Really appreciate the invite. Uh, before I get into my life story, I do want to give a big shout-out to you because the work you're doing is incredibly useful. There are several in the world who are trying to get an understanding of how to get started in a nonprofit world, and I hope your voice is going to be a very clear voice for them and a calling for them. That being said, so let me share a little bit about myself. I'm Jai Bodu, and currently I wear multiple hats, but one of them is I'm an angel investor. I'm investing fairly heavily into a set of, uh, very early-stage, uh, startups. A little about myself, uh, I came to US right after my undergraduate degree. I was intrinsically curious, and I was always exploring ways to live life in a much better way. Uh, I did my undergrad in India, realized that the best opportunity is not just in terms of work, but in terms of, uh, living, exploring life was in US, so I decided to come to US. I was an engineer by training, and so I decided to, to pick a engineering job and spent my early career building essentially world-class products. Uh, as I started to evolve and grow as a person, I realized that engineering was largely about the house. How do you build a product, and how does it work and how does it change, uh, lives? But a lot of it was the building part. As I matured as an engineer, I realized that there was a layer on top of it which was, uh, the w- what you build or, you know, how do you even figure out what you want to build or what is the product that you want to develop? Uh, that led me to move to the next layer, which was essentially into the what phase, the, the business side of it. So I moved to product management, and I learnt a lot about what to build, why does it matter, why do the customers care? And as I matured through the, that particular journey through product management, there was a bigger calling around the why. It is, uh, even why do companies exist? Uh, what makes a good company? What makes a bad company? What makes a company fundable or not? And that curiosity led me to venture capital. Uh, I joined a large venture capital fund which had about a billion dollars in, uh, US, and a sister fund which had about a billion dollars in Paris, uh, with a very small number of partners. So I got front seat of a table where I could see a large number of early stage and mid stage, uh, companies both in technology and life sciences, and that's where I understood the why part. Uh, after a few other journeys around starting a company, selling a company, and being a, a corporate executive, S&P 500 company, I'm spending now most of my time investing in founders and in doing angel investing and helping other founders build their companies. I think that's, uh, somewhat of a short description of my life evolution and where I am here right now.

Sheela: 4:43

Thank you for that share, Jay. And building on that, As you have been doing this, when you decide to support an idea or a founder, uh, what are you really responding to beyond the obvious signals?

Jay: 4:58

when I go look at a founder, there are a set of attributes which I really care for. The first thing is they're very intrinsically motivated. They are fundamentally mission-driven people who are totally wedded to the idea of solving something which is a true human need. Uh, they want to do it in a different way. They want to do it better, but they want to solve it. More often than not, money is an after effect or is an after fact, not necessarily something which they're fundamentally driven at. They're extremely aware of the fact that when you build business, you need to be very profitable, but that is not what drives them. Drive to them in most cases is that they're very keenly intent on their mission of solving a problem Something somebody s-shared with me a long time ago still stands in, in my mind, which is great founders have poorly developed sense of fear. They just want to go solve the problem. They don't necessarily look at the hurdles. They essentially look at, here is the ways we can solve the problem. I intersect that with great opportunities, and, uh, in the way I invest, the opportunities typically mean that it's a very large addressable market, and when capitalized will create a substantial company, both in terms of revenues, in terms of impact through the number of people hired, and most importantly, the impact of how many people or how many customers or how much of the customer value it creates. I think those are the things which I really look at. And To add a bit more, uh, I learned very early on to play to my strengths. Uh, there are different investors that have different strategies. Some go very specialized, very deep into narrow space. There's some who are really general. To me, uh, there are a few things which I feel are my strengths, and I kind of play upon them. One is I do believe that I have a good understanding of how the world changes and have somewhat of a strategic view around what are those that really impact. Have a reasonably good understanding of what a good entrepreneur is, and largely to do with the fact that I've had an opportunities to work with hundreds of extremely capable entrepreneurs. So I have now a good filter around who is a good person who can essentially build a great company. And so I kind of find a great intersection of great markets and great founders, and if a founder wants to solve a problem which essentially in what I consider to be a great market that is ripe for disruption, I go invest in them. And, uh, to add, maybe I can just give you an example. Uh, I just was reading an email from a company called Cashe, C-A-S-H-E. I had met the founder, very humble person, about two years ago. We're having a chat, I realized that this person was very mission-driven, was not a very, uh, loud person, but he knew what he was trying to do, and he wanted to go disrupt or essentially provide a service to people who have very highly appreciated stock, and that usually means a lot of people who are in Silicon Valley. And so he decided to go start a company that would essentially help them alleviate or essentially manage their appreciated or concentrated stocks in the right way. I liked him, had a chat with him, kind of tracked him for almost a year, and finally invested in him In the last two years, they went from essentially zero revenues to about $1.5 billion of assets under management. And that to me is, is a great example of a great market need, which is people have highly appreciated stock, and a great entrepreneur who was very intent on solving this problem. And so he's doing a phenomenal job where now the company is a darling in the startup world.

Sheela: 9:10

What tends to make you lean in towards something, especially at an early stage when there is still uncertainty?

Jay: 9:21

Early-stage companies, by definition, are uncertain, and in the rare case there are very certain chances of their growth to something really big is relatively low. There are instances where it has happened, but more often than not, it's a journey. It's full of surprises. More startups that I have seen become successful have had instances where they were very close to either being shut down or been going bankrupt or not making the next paycheck, so that's just a part of the journey. The right founding team has the stomach to go through those, and, uh, it's somewhat of a learnt judgment from my side, where when I look at certain teams, I realize that they can do it, and there are certain other teams which you kind of realize that they just don't. I mean, I think that's just part of, I call a learned judgment, which I have developed.

Sheela: 10:16

I would love to zoom out a little. What are some realities of building or funding early-stage work that people often don't see?

Jay: 10:25

Building early-stage startups is a very lonely, extremely difficult, and more often than not, less paying than an equivalent corporate job. People somehow read and are attracted by these fables of success and significant public attention, but in reality, it's a very difficult job, very lonely, pushing a rock uphill and listening to 100 noes before getting a yes, and it can be challenging. It's not for everybody. The second element which most people kind of misunderstand is that to build a company, you need to go understand who the right customers are, who the right investors are, who the right partners are, who the right co-founders are. And especially those who are working in large corporations, you almost have to l- unlearn everything you've learned to go build a startup. The bigger companies typically tend to have a brand which is kind of a given, whereas for a startup, more often than not, nobody knows who you are, what you're building. And now, you know, there's a famous saying that, "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you build. Now what are you trying to sell me?" And those who have the stomach to go understand and kind of succeed in that world is what is required to be in that business.

Sheela: 11:50

What are the different intersections you have seen in the corporate world and nonprofit founders you must have seen in your experience?

Jay: 11:59

I would probably structure it a bit differently. What do I see in nonprofit organizations, or what is it not in nonprofit founders and who in corporates have done well? Um, to me, those who are working with in nonprofit are fundamentally impact-driven. They really don't necessarily think in terms of the outcome being significant profits, but the outcome being significant human impact. It is you're changing the humanity. You're changing the way the world is, and they pick a dimension, and they want to make, in that dimension, the world to be a much better place Several of us, um, or several people join corporations or they join big companies early in their career because it's something either what they've been told is the right thing to do, it's something their parental upbringing is or was and helped them shape their thinking, or it could be financial reasons. So there's multiple reasons why people do what they do. And there comes a point in time for several people I know where this strong sense of changing the world, strong sense of going beyond money to fundamentally create an impact in the world, that takes over. And, uh, that's when big, good nonprofits get funded or get scaled. And, uh, I think it's just, uh, a time or a place in a person's life that they go do it. I've seen people who have held very high senior exec roles in big corps go do it. I've seen people right out of college do it. So it just is a very personal choice which makes each person make, you know, each person who get, who gets into nonprofits do it their way.

Sheela: 13:57

Thank you for that share, Jay. On bringing this to someone who might be listening, for someone who sees a meaningful problem but is hesitant because of financial risk, how would you invite them to think about that tension?

Jay: 14:15

It's a very nuanced question. I think there's multiple ways to think about it. One is, is it even right thing to go build a nonprofit, or is it maybe the right thing to build a company which is not nec-necessarily trying to maximize the profit, but trying to find the right balance between impact and profitability? Right. So that's one, one dimension to consider. More often than not, a large number of truly nonprofit organizations are better off having a slightly different lens of, hey, let's go have money involved in the equation. It's not necessarily just, just blindly go maximize it, but let's essentially do it in a way it still caters to our, , customer base or our audience who essentially cares for that, but doing it in a way where it's a fine balance. I think that's one dimension. The second dimension is that a lot of people kind of go take a look back into their own lifestyles. There is a significant spend where I've seen people who say that, "Hey, you know, I used to have this kind of a, quote-unquote, 'expensive lifestyle.' I am going to repurpose my life where I'm going to essentially maybe live with a different mindset of where, what my spending behavior is, but instead go focus my life with the purpose of changing the world." So it's essentially thinking either I call the revenue or the money side, or essentially the cost side, and different people have done it differently. I don't think there is a single answer that fits everybody. It's just finding the right blend. And, uh, the last one is there's some people who say, "Hey, you know, I'm going to commit X number of years of my prime life or of my life at any given point in time to serving this cause." And when you go look at life holistically, sometimes saying, "Hey, you know, I'm going to spend some time on giving and some time on making money, and I'm going to order it in the way that's appropriate to me," I think is fine. Some people do it in their 20s, some people do it in their 50s. Some people do it s- anywhere in between. And so I don't think there's a unique answer. I just think the answer depends on who the person is.

Sheela: 16:39

I think that will resonate with a lot of people, and that's a helpful way to hold that tension rather than resolve it immediately, . This has been, uh, really insightful to hear, Jay, and, uh, I appreciate you taking the time, uh, to share your perspective. Thank you for being a guest on DT_T podcast.

Jay: 16:58

Thank you, Sheila. I think the work you're doing is truly amazing. I do hope that the listeners will really understand and appreciate how much work goes in actually even, even creating something like a podcast, and the amount of work you're putting to make sure the others who feel motivated, empowered, and just have the strength to go pursue their dream or their calling. So thank you very much, Sheila.

Sheela: 17:25

Thank you. I appreciate it. I receive it all humbly. Do the Dash thing. If you would like us to celebrate your unique gift or maybe even feature you in a future episode, please subscribe to the Do the Dash Thing podcast and share your dash with us. Just answer these three simple questions. What is the gift that brings you happiness? When did you first recognize it in yourself? How are you sharing that gift with others today? As I always say, look within yourself and recognize the unique gifts that are in you. Then fill in the dash, your dash, in the community and the world around you. Sharing your gift brings happiness to you and helps build a better world. Tune in next Tuesday for another episode of the Do the Dash Thing podcast. Thank you for listening, and don't forget to subscribe.