VC Voices: Altair’s Ryabenkiy on AI & being customer centric

Without top tier tech tools, it would be nearby impossible for HR leaders to do their jobs successfully.

The good news is that HR and workplace tech innovation has not been dampened by a challenging economic environment – and vendors are continuously attracting funding and acquisition opportunities.

A vital partner in the ongoing growth and success of the future of work tech space are investors. Not only do they provide capital that helps startups bring their ideas to life, they are also on hand to support founders stand out in the crowded HR tech space.

Investors make sure that companies are playing to the pain of HR leaders, and genuinely helping them to solve their problems and improve the world of work for the better.

So, here at UNLEASH, we decided to take a peek behind the funding curtain, and pick the brains of our essential HR investor community in a new editorial interview series titled ‘VC Voices’.

Igor Ryabenkiy, founder and managing partner, Altair Capital.

We are starting off the series with a bang by interviewing Igor Ryabenkiy.

Ryabenkiy founded global investment fund Altair Capital in 2005.

He now serves as managing partner, leading Altair’s early stage investments into startups based in the US, Israel and Europe.

While Altair doesn’t only invest in the future of work space – it also focuses on the fintech, insuretech and digital health sectors – three out of seven unicorns in its portfolio are well-known HR names: Miro, Deel and Turing.

For Ryabenkiy, other portfolio highlights include Thriver, Benepass, PitchMe, Paragon One and Together. They may not yet be unicorns, but they are doing great work in transforming the working lives of HR and employees for the better.

In this exclusive UNLEASH ‘VC Voices’ interview, Ryabenkiy shares his personal route to investing, his top advice to founders, plus incredible gems of insight on all the emerging workplace trends HR leaders need to know about.

Allie Nawrat: How did you get into investing? What is one piece of advice you would you give your younger self? 

Igor Ryabenkiy: I started investing when I still ran my startup, my group of companies; I did angel investments. But I didn’t know enough of the basics of investment. I just did it, I didn’t care.

After I sold my group, I was free to go wherever I wanted. I wanted to become a teacher, a professor, because that was the experience I had before. But I found investing an interesting approach for me – it is like teaching but with positive feedback.

For me, it was a no brainer to go into investing. I was a programmer, a startup founder, I had a group of companies, so I knew all parts of the journey. I get the early stages, but I also get relatively large companies with thousands of employees.

I have a very interesting job. I get to hear about new ideas, new technologies, new solutions. I speak to the greatest minds in the space; I work with them and help them in some ways. They teach me more than I teach them.

I’ve been doing this job for 10 years, and it really keeps me energized.

AN: What do you look for in a startup pitch? What are the common mistakes you see? What makes a company really stand out in the overcrowded future of work space?  

IR: Mistakes are normal, but, I would say, for the ideal pitch, first of all, the founder or team of founders must really understand what they are talking about. They must be able to communicate, articulate, and draw attention to the great idea.

Then I will evaluate their qualities as a founder – do they have a proper team in place? Are they able to communicate? Do they know their potential market and how the idea could be useful to people or businesses?

I care about the suggested business model – is it scalable? Do they know their finances? How fragmented is the market? What efforts have you made to reach customers?

I always ask about the competition – who are they? How are you going to handle them?

The last part, which is very important, I only want to support teams that are focused about one project and are eager to that project.

Often people come to us with several projects, they work in five startups [and] they can’t decide, they are sitting on the fence. So many ideas are great, but they have no chance of being marketable.

[It is about having] a great solution that will solve an issue for your customers.

AN: Which startups and technologies are hitting the nail on the head for their customers, HR leaders?

IR: This is why I supported the projects in my portfolio. We have 10 unicorns, and the three in the future of work space (Miro, Deel and Turing) became unicorns in three years; that’s very quick. They found this pain, had a large number of users and started to scale quickly.

Miro really gets to a new level of distributed team cooperation – that is so important. That’s why it has 50 million users, and most of the Fortune 100.

Deel makes it much easier to hire globally; it is an employer of record. Turing helps to fight the shortage of engineers, and make the people processes more efficient.

When I look at companies like Thriver and Benepass, [their success] shows that employers understand how important it is to get proper employee motivation.

With Together, people want to find better paths for their professional growth and give other people the possibility to share knowledge; that’s requested by employees, by companies.

I also see a lot of depth and application to implement artificial intelligence. It makes it easier to form project groups, to find employees, and make the hiring process more efficient.

AN: You mentioned AI; it is a huge topic of the moment.  What are the most exciting tec innovations on the horizon for HR and the future of work?

IR: Today, everybody’s excited about AI. Hype brings in a lot of projects and companies, but I am not going to touch every project.

Five, six years ago, everybody was in love with blockchain. I still believe in this technology, and there is a lot of security promise, which is important for companies in the HR field. There is just not enough adoption.

AI adoption is the same – there are signs that it’ll come, but today it is not here at all. It is very difficult for businesses to adopt a rough idea or a rough technology.

So, companies need to offer real business applications, and good user experiences. Without that, people will not adopt it.

The use cases that I see for [AI in the] future of work are being able to work with unstructured information, the ability to extract information from different sources, acting as a copilot to bring your expertise to the next level.

Those are the tools that I am paying most attention to; people need to think about new ways of doing business.

For me, generative models are more secondary because they’re already addressed by big players. I also see that a lot of the development is open source.

AN: Final question; name an individual who inspires you, and why? 

IR: I admire Sam Altman, from before he was CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of the most successful startup accelerator, Y Combinator. I saw him in this role, and he was absolutely inspiring in helping teams.

I also admire Elon Musk, because he is able to find and develop excellent ideas, which change lifestyles.

UNLEASH | VC Voices is a monthly Editorial interview series where we profile leading investors in the HR tech and future of work space. Stay tuned to see who next month’s voice will be!

Got a great product that you believe could solve HR leaders’ challenges? Submissions are still open for the UNLEASH World Startup Award – here is everything you need to know!