Leo Polovets

Who they are

Leo Polovets is General Partner at Susa Ventures — a Caltech competitive programmer who was LinkedIn's second engineering hire and co-founded Humba Ventures, a sister deep-tech fund covering nuclear energy, robotics, and defense.

Person

Leo took a BS with Honors in Computer Science from Caltech, where he was part of the world-finalist ACM programming team and placed 5th in the 2001 Top Coder Invitational — a signal that competitiveness and quantitative precision were baked in early. He went to Google after graduation on the payments fraud detection team, then joined LinkedIn as its second engineering hire, building core products from near-zero. After LinkedIn he did big data infrastructure at Factual, with stints at Thomson Reuters and Microsoft also in his background. In 2012 he co-founded Susa Ventures — a seed-stage firm that has backed Robinhood and Flexport — and launched it when seed investing was still being defined as a category. A decade in, he co-founded Humba Ventures, a sister fund going deeper into hard technology: nuclear reactors, surgical robots, defense tech, advanced robotics. The through-line is systems-level thinking applied first to engineering, then to capital allocation. He writes publicly at codingvc.com and a Substack, posting frameworks on startup evaluation, his 'bundles of risks' de-risking approach, and what he calls 'delightful Trojan horses' — and his 2017 Software Engineering Daily appearance, 'The Coding VC,' captures how deliberately he bridges operator and investor identity.

Company

In 2026, Susa Ventures launched Fund V at $175 million, its largest vehicle yet, continuing to focus on seed-stage founders. The fund follows a strong track record: Susa claims a unicorn rate of approximately 10% at the seed stage, roughly ten times the industry average, with notable exits including Robinhood's IPO and acquisitions of Casetext and Expanse. In April 2026, the firm participated in a $100 million Series E for Chapter, showing continued activity across growth-stage follow-ons. Leo leads the fund's quantitative sourcing efforts, with co-founders Chad Byers and Seth Berman and partner Eva Ho rounding out the partnership.

Market

Susa competes and co-invests at the seed stage alongside firms like Initialized Capital and Cowboy Ventures, focusing on enterprise software, fintech, AI, healthcare, and logistics. The broader venture market has been under pressure — median pre-money valuations for Series B companies declined 32% year-over-year as of late 2024, creating a tougher mark-up environment even for strong seed franchises. Susa's data-driven sourcing and Humba's deep-tech orientation position it as differentiated from generalist seed shops, though it remains firmly in a competitive early-stage field.

Network

Leo co-founded Susa Ventures with Chad Byers and Seth Berman, both of whom remain in the partnership. Eva Ho is a partner at Susa bringing operating and investing experience to the team.

Chad Byers· General Partner, Susa Ventures
Seth Berman· Co-founder, Susa Ventures
Eva Ho· Partner, Susa Ventures

How they likely show up

Long tenure at Susa Ventures since 2012 — over a decade running the same fund → thinks in fund cycles and portfolio arcs, not short-term deal flow sprints.
Leads quantitative sourcing at Susa and built a proprietary data pipeline for investment sourcing → data is not just a theme he invests in, it's how he personally operates.
Competitive programming background (5th place, 2001 Top Coder Invitational) → likely brings a problem-decomposition mindset to diligence — breaks ambiguity into structured sub-problems.
Co-founded Humba Ventures as a sister fund while still running Susa → high agency, comfortable managing two institutional vehicles simultaneously.
Writes frameworks publicly (codingvc.com, Substack, Medium) on startup evaluation and de-risking → prefers explicit mental models over intuition-only investing; likely responds well to structured arguments.
Possibly — based in Dallas-Fort Worth rather than SF despite running a historically SF-based seed fund → may be deliberately skeptical of coastal consensus thinking.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific framework from codingvc.com or his Substack — 'bundles of risks' is a named concept he's articulated publicly, and citing it signals you've read past the headline.
→ Ask about the transition from operator to investor — he's talked about it explicitly on the Visible.vc podcast; it's clearly a formative narrative for him.
→ Don't pitch warm intros as a sourcing advantage — he's publicly argued on 20VC that warm intros are 'mostly dumb,' and cold inbound is a deliberate part of his strategy.
→ If you're talking about deep tech, anchor to specifics: nuclear, surgical robotics, or defense are the named sectors for Humba — vague 'hard tech' framing won't land.
→ He's a quantitative thinker who built his own sourcing data pipeline — come with numbers and defensible data, not vibes.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on Fund V — Susa just closed $175 million, its largest fund yet, in 2026; asking what's different about the investment thesis at this scale versus the early $50M fund is a natural and specific entry point.
Bring up 'delightful Trojan horses' — that's the title of his Full Ratchet appearance and a named concept in his public writing; it signals you've engaged with his actual thinking, not just his bio.
Ask about Humba Ventures as a design choice — running a deep-tech sister fund (nuclear, robotics, defense) alongside a software-focused seed fund is an unusual structural bet worth unpacking.

Discovery questions

You've written publicly about evaluating startups as 'bundles of risks' — how has that framework held up across Susa's portfolio exits like Robinhood and Casetext?
What prompted the decision to stand up Humba as a separate fund rather than just expanding Susa's mandate into deep tech?
You built a proprietary data pipeline for quantitative sourcing — how much of Susa's deal flow does that drive versus relationship-based inbound, and has that ratio shifted with Fund V?

Avoid

Don't lead with generic VC talking points about 'thesis fit' or 'founder-first investing' — he has published specific, named frameworks on startup evaluation and is likely to disengage if the conversation stays at that altitude.

Make it yours