Focus on Egor Abramov, Businessman and Founder of the Fort Ross Seed Fund

Egor Abramov, businessman and investment director of Fort Ross Ventures, discusses current technologies of the venture capital market.

Egor Abramov is a businessman and founder of Fort Ross Ventures, which is responsible for the management of several investment funds. The company cooperates with well-known corporations and regularly invests in venture capital markets in the USA, Israel, and Russia.

 

Egor Abramov on the Fort Ross Seed Fund

In 2020, Fort Ross Ventures founded the Fort Ross Seed Fund to invest in early-stage Russian startups. According to Egor Abramov, many of these startups do business in Russia, but are planning to enter Western markets. However, it is relatively difficult for them to apply directly to American venture capital funds on their own–it is much more efficient to tackle this process through a proven partner.

At the same time, most startups make the same mistakes when entering Western markets time and time again. For example, a company may not have a functioning board of directors. In order to create one, startup managers need time to prepare–something out of the ordinary for American venture capitalist funds. At any rate, it is important for startups to meet certain business criteria, and the Fort Ross Seed Fund can help with this.

According to Egor Abramov, businessman and investment director of the fund, almost any startup that creates an interesting and useful product has the opportunity to work with the Fort Ross Seed Fund. Of course, much depends on the focus of attention of investors, but in general, if the founder of a startup is able to prove the solvency of their project and an independent analysis is able to confirm their proposal, then the company is very likely to get approved.

 

Trends and Current Technologies

As in any other market segment, venture capital has its own trends. That being said, Egor Abramov believes that in order to understand which technology or industry is on the rise at a certain point in time, it is necessary to take into account many factors. Timing is one, and it is an objective assessment of the state of the market by the founder of the startup. Luck, however, is also important–you can’t get far without it.

Egor Abramov is a businessman, and this grants a certain legitimacy to his attitude towards trends. He believes that individual technologies on their own cannot be promising. Rather, the priority should be to understand the market situation as a whole. If there is such an understanding of general market interest, any startup can become profitable.

The entrepreneur cites the example of the company “DoorDash”, an American food delivery service similar to the Russian service “Delivery Club”. This project was launched back in 2013, when people had never heard the word “pandemic” and rarely ordered food online. At that time, it is unlikely that even the most meticulous analyst could have calculated that this industry would develop at the rate it has and that the project would skyrocket in value.

Moreover, DoorDash had big problems with well-established competitors, because of which they simply could not find money on the market. The project started to grow only after a savvy investor put $500 million in the project. Subsequently, during the pandemic, it was able to snatch the market from its competitors.

That being said, as Egor Abramov points out, market trends in general need to be taken into account. For example, during the same pandemic, people went online in virtually all aspects of their life. Social networks, virtual shopping, and video streaming services became popular, to name a few. As it stands today, that trend is continuing on its upwards trajectory.