1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kelly Perdew of Moonshots Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the definition, in your case, of late seed and early Series A? What metrics are you looking for?

Kelly Perdew: Typically, there’s an MVP. They’ve found a problem where they’ve either built a solution for and have started selling that to more than one client. They’ve raised some money. Usually, it’s in the $200,000 to $500,000 range that helped them to get to that point. Frequently, that’s friends and family, credit cards, and maybe one or two angels.

Interestingly enough, a lot of our deal flow comes from the ecosystem itself. Techstars, YCombinator, and 500 Startups are already curating lots and lots of entries to select the company that they think could be the most viable. Criteria in terms of where we want to invest is they have some revenue traction, there are clients that are repeat customers, most of the management team is built together, and they think they’ve found a place in the market. We like to invest where there are very distinct milestones we can see and help them achieve on the way to the next round of financing.

Sramana Mitra: What about sector?

Kelly Perdew: As you might imagine, not every military veteran or great leader comes out and goes into the same sector. My partner and I do have some domain knowledge. I’m helping my wife build her fifth company. This is direct to consumer advertising and media agencies. She’s previously sold four of them; three to a public group and one to MDC. I’ve helped build up the existing company to about 50 employees, and it’s growing pretty dramatically. Anything that has to do with ad tech and direct to consumer, I’ve got a pretty deep domain expertise on that.

My partner Craig Cummings built and sold his company to Daimler-Benz. It was called RideScout. Then he moved on to Daimler-Benz M&A team, which focused on the US. He was evaluating and analyzing potential acquisitions or investments in the mobility, transportation, and automotive space. In those categories, we have a lot of expertise, but we also have a lot of cyber security companies. Two of our first three companies that we invested in have a cyber focus to them.

Sramana Mitra: What about geography?

Kelly Perdew: We are geographically agnostic. I realize you have a worldwide audience. We only invest in the United States. We’re certainly not averse to looking at things wherever it makes sense.

Sramana Mitra: You’re both based in Los Angeles?

Kelly Perdew: I’m based in Los Angeles and my partner Craig is based in Austin, Texas. Geographically, we’ve invested all over the US. In fact, our biggest check went to a company in Columbus, Ohio. We really are agnostic.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kelly Perdew of Moonshots Capital
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