Bootstrapping Course: Welcome

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Featured Videos

The Startup Velocity Question: What Hinders Acceleration in VC Funded Companies?

I have been running 1Mby1M since 2010. I find myself saying to entrepreneurs ad nauseam that VCs want to invest in startups that can go from zero to $100 million in revenue in 5 to 7 years.

Startups that do not have what it takes to achieve velocity should not be venture funded.

Experienced VCs, over time, have developed heuristics to gauge what constitutes a high growth venture investment thesis. 

The Accelerator Conundrum: Navigating Your Path to Startup Success

The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus on customers, revenues and profits. 1Mby1M’s mission is to help a Million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue and beyond. Sramana’s Digital Mind AI Mentor virtually mentors entrepreneurs around the world in 57 languages. Try it out!

Alright, let’s cut through the noise and get to the brutal truth of the startup accelerator world. Many entrepreneurs, starry-eyed and naive, leap headfirst into 3-month accelerator programs without truly understanding the long-term implications. It’s time for an incisive commentary, a necessary dissection.

Course Coupons to Learn Entrepreneurship Essentials in the Age of AI

AI and vibe coding can help you build a product faster than ever, but building a product is not the same as building a business. Entrepreneurs still need to know how to identify opportunities, validate demand, position a product, price it, find customers, build a sales process, and make smart decisions about bootstrapping or funding.

Our Udemy courses cover these essential entrepreneurship methodologies alongside practical courses on building AI and technology startups. This month, you can save up to 85% on selected courses, including courses on startup validation, positioning, pricing, market sizing, B2B sales, bootstrapping, AI startups, and more.

Methodology:

How to Test New Startup Ideas with Sramana Mitra: TRY1MBY1MOCT2026TEST

Positioning for Tech Startups by Sramana Mitra: TRY1MBY1MOCT2026POS

Pricing for Tech Startups by Sramana Mitra: TRY1MBY1MOCT2026PRI

Featured Videos

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Heriberto Diarte, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Catalyzer Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In other words, you’ve structured the funds to play the small exit game as opposed to just mindless unicorn chasing.

Heriberto Diarte: Yes. We want the unicorn. Don’t get me wrong. We want the big company. So we’re going for that, but for all of our companies, we have an intermediate stay, but they are going to get the option to be acquired earlier for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sramana Mitra: Well, I think the problem that we see is this. The difference between mindless unicorn chasing and being more judicious about how you play your cards is how much money you raise in those companies. If you raise too much money, you price yourself out of small exits. If you keep yourselves capital efficient and focused on profitability and focused on, as you said, free cash flow and all of that, then the option of going for small exits remains.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Heriberto Diarte, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Catalyzer Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you talked about the stage at which you like to come in. What check sizes are you writing?

Heriberto Diarte: $2 to $5 million. We can go up to 10, but we normally do $2-$5 million, and then we reserve 40%.

Sramana Mitra: And so $2-$5 million is in seed and Series A, and then you have follow-ons after. You do follow-ons as well?

Video FAQs

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Heriberto Diarte, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Catalyzer Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. So, folks, those of you who are listening, I want to just highlight one thing that Heriberto Diarte said earlier, that his VC fund is not interested in these shallow wrappers. Now, at 1M by 1M, we don’t mind wrapper companies because wrapper companies actually do fine as bootstrapped businesses. They don’t do very well as venture-funded businesses because the defensibility is not there.

To be able to build a venture-funded company, you cannot have 100 companies doing the same thing. But if you go into a low entry barrier business, you will encounter a lot of competition. Those dynamics are okay with bootstrapped businesses. They’re not okay with venture-funded businesses. So coming back to Heriberto, I know you have an investment thesis also around your fund size. Tell us more.

Salesforce Wants to Accelerate AI Adoption with Fin Acquisition

Salesforce’s (NYSE: CRM) continues to up the ante on AI through acquisitions. The market keeps projecting a SaaSocalypse for Salesforce, but so far the company’s financial performance has been outstanding. Earlier this summer, Salesforce also announced its biggest acquisition of the year, its fourth largest to date.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Heriberto Diarte, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Catalyzer Ventures (Part 1)

Heriberto Diarte, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Catalyzer Ventures, offers a point of view that is refreshingly down to earth. His fund is $100M, tightly focused on specific sectors where the partners have deep domain knowledge, and they aim to build capital efficient businesses that can make money off smaller exits instead of mindlessly chasing portfolio-making unicorns. 

October 15 – 745th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 745th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, October 15, 2026, at 8 a.m. PDT / 11 a.m. EDT / 5 p.m. CEST / 8:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to Pitch and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback from Sramana Mitra, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to Attend to watch and learn.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be Interested.

Roundtable Recap: October 1 – The Danger of the Everything Pitch: Why Focus Is the Ultimate Founder Superpower

At today’s roundtable mentoring session, an ambitious founder pitched a startup concept that immediately set off every alarm bell in the room. His business plan was an exercise in strategic sprawl: seven distinct revenue surfaces, targeting two massive and culturally complex geographic markets simultaneously (Africa and India), while attempting to run B2C and B2B models side-by-side. To cap it off, his Total Addressable Market (TAM) calculation relied on a top-down macro-projection, and he was actively looking to raise institutional capital on this chaotic foundation.

It is a classic symptom of early-stage delusion. Founders often believe that projecting massive complexity and omnipresence makes them look visionary to investors. In reality, it signals a profound lack of focus, operational naivety, and an imminent recipe for cash-burn disaster.