Why Not Every Good Business Is a Good Investment - Alexey Bulygin (Verb Ventures)
Innovation and Private Capital x auliumShow Notes
Not every good business is a good investment — and for venture capital, the gap between the two can cost billions. Alexey Bulygin of Verb Ventures explains why intellectual honesty from founders matters more than polished pitch decks, and why his fund focuses on the unsexy, archaic backbone of global trade: a $33 trillion market still running on fax machines, Excel spreadsheets, and paper documents transported in buckets.
Verb Ventures invests in digital platforms that help businesses source, transact, move, and settle B2B trade deals. The thesis is simple: roughly five trillion dollars in annual leakage exists due to inefficiencies and fraud in global trade infrastructure. Disruption in this space is hard, boring, and capital-intensive — which is exactly why generalist VCs avoid it and why Verb sees opportunity. The conversation unpacks how tariffs and supply chain shocks create natural market pull for platforms, why Verb has maintained a 0% write-off rate to date while targeting concentrated 10–15x returns rather than chasing power-law home runs, and how the firm thinks about exits in a world where IPOs are statistically improbable.
🚢 Ofiniti is digitalizing maritime fuel trading — an industry where a bucket pushed on a rope between barge and ship remains standard practice 🔥 Installio tackles the UK's heat pump installation bottleneck, where the government mandates 600,000 installs per year but the market delivers 100,000 📉 Verb assumes roughly 30% write-offs in its portfolio model but has lost zero companies since its first 2020 deal 🎯 Saying "no" is 70–90% of the job, and founder honesty about problems beats sugarcoated hockey sticks 💼 M&A-driven exit environments in B2B infrastructure offer liquidity paths venture generalists overlook
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About Alexey Bulygin [Founding member at Verb Ventures]:Founding member at Verb Ventures, a London-based fund investing in supply chains and trade infrastructure with just over €30 million under management across two funds. The fund backs companies digitising sectors that have long relied on personal networks and paper-based processes, including maritime fuel delivery, cross-border notarisation, and heat pump installation. Prior to Verb Ventures, he studied economics in Moscow before moving into venture capital.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/
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