495. From CTO to $500M AUM: Entry Point Discipline, Why People Matter at Every Stage, and the AI-Driven Future of Banking (Victor Orlovski)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Victor Orlovsky joins us today from the Bay Area. He's the founder and managing partner of r one three six Ventures, a mid and late stage firm investing in startups across The US and Israel. Earlier in his career as a CTO, Victor helped build one of the largest digital banks in Europe. He's invested in companies including eToro, Rescale, Granulate, DESI AI, and Airwallex, amongst others. Victor, welcome to the show. Hi, Nick. Hi, everyone. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. It's such a pleasure to have you. I would love to hear a bit about your path and your backstory to becoming a VC. Well, it's probably very common story for people who come and live in Silicon Valley. I'm the first wave of immigrants to the valley. So, my kids actually regularly, like, put some surveys in schools where they just describe how they moved to California as, like, first wave of immigrants. So I think that there are, like, many people like that in California, especially the Bay Area. I was born and raised in Uzbekistan. Many people don't know where it is. So it's a Central Asian state of former Soviet Union. So it was a pretty diversified culture with over 100 nationalities. The city was destroyed by a major earthquake in 1966 before I was born. And, it was, like, rebuilt from scratch. Basically, 95% of houses were destroyed. Not that many casualties, unfortunately, because there was, like, one or two stories buildings. But this, place was known for, like, 100 nationalities being living there. And, well, I got my first PC luckily, I think in 1986, and I probably was one of the first people in in Soviet Union who got that. My father brought it from abroad. And, I started programming really early enough. So graduated from college with software engineering major degree and started working in banking. So it's not like I like banking a lot. That just happened. So my next thirty year well, little bit last twenty five years of career I spent in banking was CTO and two largest banks in the region and, actually built first model bank prior to iPhone era, which was between 2001 to 2004. We reached almost a million consumers, prior to iPhone era, so it was a feature …