1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: As you are looking at this space, what is the scope and scale of the number of startups operating in North America? Zain Jaffer: I saw 500 startups last year. That’s just what I tracked in my CRM. The number is mind-boggling. With any industry, only a few will make it. I don’t

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the PropTech part of your work. You said you’re doing pre-seed and seed in that sector? Zain Jaffer: Yes. Sramana Mitra: What’s the geographical boundary of this? Zain Jaffer: We try to stay focused on the US market. We are also open and have done many companies that plan to

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Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In this 2017 relationship with Nutanix that you started, how far did you go with Nutanix customers before you went into the next partnership? Simon Taylor: We didn’t look at it like that. We looked at this as a multi-cloud Backup-as-a-Service platform. When you’re building with a strategic technology partner, you need to

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 1)

Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital, discusses trends in PropTech. Sramana Mitra: Our focus today is primarily on the investing that you had recently started. If you want to set some context about your entrepreneurial background, that would be great. Zain Jaffer: As soon as I discovered computers, I started to mess around, code,

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a Niche E-commerce Company to $20M

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Niche e-commerce still produces compelling success stories. Read on to see how CEO Brian Lim built iHeartRaves. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Brian Lim: I

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Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The business partner who has all these outsourcing companies, is he Slovenian? Simon Taylor: Serbian actually. He still runs a large outsourcing company. We spun out from them. We started moving very quickly. We added our first 500 customers in our first year. We added a thousand in the second. Sramana Mitra: This

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Roundtable Recap: May 5 – Spotlight on the Ohio Startup Ecosystem

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Bill Baumel, Managing Director at Ohio Innovation Fund, one of the pioneers of the Ohio startup ecosystem. CaterBite As for entrepreneur pitch, we had Boddu Venkat Sujith from Visakhapatnam, India, pitch CaterBite, a concept arbitrage on EZCater, a Unicorn. You can listen to the recording of

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julie Lein, Managing Partner at Urban Innovation Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The narrative in the media is how much money have you raised. The maximum focus is on the people raising the most money. That is a flawed way of evaluating companies. There are a lot of innovations that are done in a capital-efficient way. As such, they have a lot more options. The

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