Tip of the Spear: Laurent Ohana, Senior Advisor at Ohana & Co.

December 16, 2025

By The Artemis Fund
The Artemis Fund believes technology can create prosperity for all. With offices in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Nevada, Artemis leads seed rounds for companies creating resilient families, individuals, and businesses across the US.
Tip of the Spear is an interview series highlighting The Artemis Fund’s expert network. In this edition, we sat down with Laurent Ohana, Senior Advisor at Ohana & Co., an international investment bank providing M&A and Capital Raising advisory services to consumer and technology companies, whose personal clients include(d) The RealReal, WhoWhatWear, Versed, Violet Grey, Vera Wang, 3.1 Phillip Lim, RTFKT, and Rice University/OpenStax.

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Q: You’ve been an investor, founder, and advisor. Which of those experiences most shapes how you assess or support founders today?
A: I usually tell people I’ve been on every side of the table. I’ve been on the table as the main dish. I’ve been under the table as the person everyone assumed was dead. I’ve been on the buying side, the selling side, the fundraising side, every angle you can think of.
Building a startup forces you to live through all these different “lives.” You’re never just dealing with one stakeholder; you’re managing a moving web of constituencies all at once: investors, employees, customers, and suppliers. You need all of them, all the time.
That’s why I laugh a bit when I hear narratives about someone starting a company “just with AI and a laptop.” You might be able to build a product like that, but you can’t build a business or get an exit without managing those relationships.
If you vanish on your investors for a year, the moment you come back they’ll think, “Now you need us.” If you mistreat employees, they’ll remember that when you need them most. If you squeeze your vendors, they’ll remember that when you need flexibility.
So it isn’t one role that shaped me the most; it’s the combination. The biggest lesson is that you’re constantly bringing people on board and keeping them there. Forget that, and it will eventually cost you.
Q: You’ve seen several tech and market cycles. What’s changed most about how founders earn trust and capital? Or has it stayed the same?
A: The cycles matter, but less than people think. Technology changes; needs don’t.
Tech is just a way to fulfill an underlying need, whether that’s entertainment, productivity, communication, or wellness. When a new technology wave comes along, everything in the middle gets reorganized: how products are built, how services are delivered, how distribution works. But at the endpoint, you still have a human being or a business deciding whether to buy something at a given price. That part doesn’t change.
Founders sometimes get caught up in the disruption and forget to ask the most basic question: Will someone actually buy this? At this price?
In every cycle, you have this temptation to believe that “everything is different now.” But a lot of things don’t change, even when everything seems to be changing. You still need to fulfill a real, enduring need better than what existed before. You still need to maintain strong relationships with the people who will help you get from point A to point B: investors, employees, customers, vendors.
So yes, the tools change. The language changes. The pitch decks change. But the fundamentals of earning trust and capital are surprisingly stable.
Q: Across all these cycles, what’s one trait you consistently see in founders who actually make it through the hard times?
A: The combination of excitement and optimism is critical. You need to want to get up in the morning and push, every single day. That energy and enthusiasm is what creates momentum and gets others to join you.
At the same time, naïve optimism is dangerous. If someone is wildly optimistic but blind to risk, that scares me. They only see the upside, and that usually ends badly. But founders who weigh upside and downside equally often end up paralyzed, unable to make a move.
So I tend to favor people who lean toward the upside, but who still understand that things can go wrong. You need to believe deeply in the world you’re trying to create so that others can believe it too.
Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about changing how things are done. You’re asking people to imagine a different reality. “Today we do it this way. Tomorrow, imagine that we’ll do it that way.” That requires infectious enthusiasm. If a founder doesn’t believe their own story, no one else will.
Q: When companies reach inflection points—selling, raising, restructuring—what early decisions usually make the biggest difference?
A: One of the most important things is respecting market signals and being humble about timing.
I often hear, “We received a great acquisition offer, but we’re not ready to sell.” My immediate response is: Do you think that buyer will still be there when you feel ready?
I’ll give you two real examples.
In the first, a friend raised money at an $80M valuation. Amazon came in with an offer: $400M. His investors said, “No, this will be worth a billion.” Two years later, he was bankrupt.
He personally walked away from what might have been around $25M because a board member wanted a slightly better fund return—maybe an extra half million in personal carry. That board decision effectively blocked this founder from a life-changing outcome.
In the second case, another founder raised money and then, just six months later, a large strategic showed up—the obvious, ideal acquirer. The investors said, “Don’t sell, it’s too early.” He said, “This is the buyer we built this company for. They are here now. They may not be here later.” He sold. Everyone made 6x in six months. And still, people complained that he sold too early. But he walked away with $40M.
The lesson is simple: the market speaks. You don’t control time, or space, or the world. When the market is giving you a signal, whether it’s an acquisition offer, a financing opportunity, or a clear shift in demand, you need to pay attention and act, not cling to a theoretical future.
Q: You’re working across AI, data privacy, and consumer brands. What’s one area or type of founder that gives you genuine optimism right now?
A: If I say AI, it sounds cliché. But it’s true.
We’re in one of those rare periods where a new technology wave (like the early Internet) is reshuffling the entire deck. It’s opening up a huge number of entry points. Yes, most attempts will fail. That’s always true. But because the opportunity space is so wide, the absolute number of winners will be meaningful.
If you launch a skincare brand today, the odds of a $100M outcome are not very high. If you launch a strong AI company, your odds are still low, but much better in relative terms. Maybe a million people will try; 1% succeeding is still a large number of companies and a lot of wealth creation.
On the other end of the spectrum, I’m very interested in wellness. The more ephemeral and virtual our lives become, the more people will seek physical, grounding experiences.
You can imagine someone following a meditation routine designed by an AI “yoga agent,” which is almost absurd in its technological layering, and at the same time they’re desperate for something that feels real and embodied. The more unreal the world becomes, the more people will look for anchors. I think we’ll see both trends, hyper-virtual and deeply physical, growing alongside each other.
Q: What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
A: Hire slowly. Fire quickly.
When I was in my early 30s, I raised a lot of money, bought a company, turned it around, and opened an office in London. I hired 37 people there fairly quickly.
Within six months, the market turned. My board told me, “You need to save money. Shut down London.” The person I’d hired to run the office resigned rather than fire the team. So I flew over with my HR director, arrived at 9 a.m., and by 5 p.m. I had personally fired everyone. All 37 people in one day.
I will never forget it. I felt like I had truly failed them. I’d pulled them out of their prior roles, convinced them to trust me with their careers, and six months later I was telling them it was over. It forced me to ask: Why did I hire 37 people that fast? How could I be that irresponsible?
That’s where “hire slowly” comes from.
The “fire quickly” part is about not letting the wrong person sit in a critical seat. A seat with the wrong person in it is worse than an empty seat. When someone is obviously not performing, everyone knows it. Good people will leave because that person is still there. That one person can block others from doing their best work.
Firing is one of the most difficult things you’ll ever do as a founder or leader. It’s emotionally heavy. But avoiding it makes the damage much worse for the company, for the team, and often for the person who’s in the wrong role.
Be very thoughtful about who you bring in, and be decisive when it’s not working.
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