Australian tech venture capital is mostly run by fund managers. Fund managers understand the numbers in a business and may not be ready to invest in a startup until those numbers look good.

Yet the real value in a tech startup is in the 'intangible assets' — the unique technology being built, and the quality of the team building it. Without those intangible assets, the numbers are never going to look good.

It's the quality of those intangible assets which is the most important factor in determining whether a startup fails, or whether it becomes another Canva, another SafetyCulture, or another Atlassian.

The quality of a product and the team building it is apparent well before the business is reporting strong numbers. So if you know technology is built and understand the people writing the code, you have an advantage.

At M8 Ventures we apply our experience in building technology products and running technical teams to help us make smarter investment decisions, earlier.

Code and product teams might seem 'intangible' to a fund manager, but they're very tangible to us.