JLL Spark Managing Partner Raj Singh: Investor by trade, tech enthusiast at heart

When I was little, I had a metal pencil case, meant to store pens, erasers and ink blotters (ask your parents, or grandparents or an LLM) for schoolwork. But mine only had one thing in it: magnets, of all shapes and sizes. I was obsessed with them, and later, with the magnetic fields they produce and eventually the impact on electrical fields, motors, actuators and so on. This passion for technology is what eventually got me into computing, and venture capital. 

Passion is an overused word of course but having the drive and desire to achieve something, almost anything (especially in a startup), is a pre-requisite of success. Necessary but not sufficient, I know, but without it you won’t get anywhere as it is a truism that being successful is extremely difficult and if you’re not willing to push through endless obstacles, it just isn’t going to happen. 

So, when I think about the metrics I use to evaluate an investment opportunity, the founders are always top of the list. We know it won’t go smoothly, we know there will be challenges along the way, so which entrepreneur has that ability to spring back from adversity? Which of them has that rare ability to be hyper focused yet open to advice? And which of them would you want to be your side in the trenches, when the market is at its roughest? 

And, in the technology for the built world arena, things are indeed at their roughest, which means that customer traction is hard to come by, as is investor support for your vision. Current market conditions are difficult; from the customer side the continued uncertainty and high interest rates are pushing customers towards delaying spending decisions and so affecting tech/startup spend. The inflated valuations of 2021/22 are hampering startups that want to raise new capital and the combination of these factors mean that we’ll see an acceleration in capital being redeployed to other areas. 

That difficulty in the industry is why JLL Spark is such a good fit for startups – we’re practically alone (unique is another overused word) in being able to both invest meaningful capital into startups that focus on real estate and also bring industry expertise and distribution. We’re not perfect, but in the VC industry where perhaps 10% of startups actually make it, we are able to help shift the odds a little more to the entrepreneur’s side. 

When people ask me why JLL Spark is successful I often say it because of the paragraph above, and because we are nice people. The second part is a gentle joke, but it is actually true. Yes, we strive to see every deal in built world technology, and we strive to answer every entrepreneur that contacts us looking for funding, cold email or warm intro, in just the same way, but doing it the right way is as important as doing it at all. Because, like magnetism, electricity and force, everything is connected. 

Connect with Raj via LinkedIn.

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