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. 

From $100k to $1 Million: 10 Videos to Watch

You’ve got customers. You’ve got some level of validation. You’ve got, perhaps, a reasonable degree of product market fit. If you have managed to get past $100k in revenue, that tells me that you have some sense of who your customers are, why they are buying what you have to offer, and how to sell to this customer base.

Entrepreneurs whose revenue falls between $100k and $1 Million experience a very specific set of challenges while following the light at the end of the tunnel. For such entrepreneurs, I have recorded a series of 30 seconds videos addressing their unique concerns. >>>

Featured Videos

Some Small-scale Startup Ideas for Indian Entrepreneurs

To help inspire Indian entrepreneurs to spot opportunities for startup businesses, I’ve shared several startup ideas with the lens of developing small, bootstrapped businesses this year. Some of these ideas take a second, smaller-scale look at projects that I wrote about back in 2009 in Vision India 2020 and were originally designed to scale to very large numbers, to become billion dollar enterprises. These ideas are specifically written for Indian entrepreneurs, but could also be adapted to other markets as well.

• High Quality Eldercare In India – Back in 2009, one of the projects I had developed was called Care. The premise of the project was that the number of millionaires are increasing in India by leaps and bounds. At the same time, many of these families have need for in-home caregivers to take care of their ill, mentally-ill, or elderly family-members. Care would provide trained in-home caregivers in domains such as Alzheimer’s. And Care would source its staff from among women in disadvantaged situations – battered, abused, abandoned women who needed safe, secure family situations to be part of. I took another look at this project and found the idea to be quite amenable on a smaller scale.

>>>

5 Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social

Mobile devices, especially smartphones, are growing their footprints at an unprecedented scale. Alongside, the mobile app proliferation is gaining tremendous adoption. At the same time, social media is profoundly changing all aspects of business and social communication. The following industry leaders guide us through the developments in Mobile and Social, as well as offer suggestions for new venture opportunities.

• Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom – This conversation highlights how businesses overlay mobile virtual networks on top of wireless carrier networks for specific use cases.
• Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve – This discussion delves into the depths of what can be tracked and what is being tracked in maximising the impact of mobile apps in industries like travel and hospitality, retail, gaming, etc. It’s a very good view into predictive and analytics-based targeting, real-time actions based on specific business goals, and the related domain. Very interesting conversation!

>>>

5 Thought Leaders in Big Data

Today the significant opportunities for entrepreneurship currently exist in the application layer of the Big Data industry. The platforms and plumbing are already in place.

The most exciting opportunities are going to be available to those entrepreneurs who harness the power of big data, but couple it with intense domain knowledge in specific areas of business. These five thought leaders are good examples of how to do that.

• Mike Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets – Marketing technologies are hot these days, and Metamarkets is doing some cutting edge analytics in the media buying area. Very interesting.
• Krishna Venkatraman, Senior Vice President of Analytics at OnDeck – The online lending industry is going through rapid changes with the advent of big data and machine learning in processing loan applications. Krishna discusses OnDeck’s workings.

>>>

5 Thought Leaders in Vertical Cloud

We’ve been covering the Vertical Cloud trend extensively this year. The following in-depth interviews with five leaders in Vertical Cloud offer an opportunity to get up to speed with the developments.

• Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva Systems – Peter Gassner is a self-described late bloomer. In a wonderfully authentic interview, Peter describes here how he turned his mid-life crisis into a multi-billion dollar market cap company. Veeva, in 2016, will do well over $500 million in revenue and trades at a market cap of over $4 billion. There’s nothing foo foo about this company. It’s raw execution. I love this story.
• Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho – Zoho has been a tremendous success story in the cloud. During this interview, Sridhar Vembu discusses his strategy for the next phase of growth, and his general observations about the dysfunctions in the cloud ecosystem. A compelling conversation, must read.

>>>

5 Thought Leaders in Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) trend is significant, and will blossom over the rest of the decade. Actually, IoT has been around for a while, and I have been interviewing leaders in the field to share why things are accelerating now and where the gaps are. Here are five conversations to help give you a broad perspective on IoT today.

• Colin Sutherland, Co-Founder of Geotab – There’s a ton of data being generated through vehicle telematics that need apps to make sense of. Entrepreneurs looking for problems to solve – please read on!
• Bob Witter, CEO of Device Solutions – North Carolina, at one point, had a large concentration of cellular technology companies. Today, some of that talent has come together around IoT.

>>>

5 Thought Leaders in Cyber Security

As seen from some of the biggest news headlines in recent weeks, Cyber Security is clearly becoming a bigger challenge every day. All websites, apps, and enterprises are exposed, vulnerable. The following discussions with some leaders in the industry explore the topic in depth, and offer some pointers to open opportunities for entrepreneurs.

• Thycotic CEO James Legg and Founder Jonathan Cogley: Password management is a nightmare. See how the industry is evolving.
• Anand Adya, CEO of Greenlight Technologies: Cyber Security is fraught with all sorts of risks. We discuss application security here as it pertains to malware intrusion.

>>>

A Startup Idea for Unique Artisanal Fabric-based Products

In 1M/1M, we have a wonderful company from Ahmedabad, India, the capital of the Indian state of Gujarat. The company is called The Creative Artisans, and it specializes in artisanal fabrics. Gujarat, for the uninitiated, is a region of India known for its textile industry.

Creative Artisans supplies custom fabrics to major fashion houses like Ralph Lauren, Eileen Fisher, etc. and has already crossed the $1M revenue threshold. They have artisans working with many different techniques – Indigo, Ikat, block prints, Tie n’ Dye, Khadi (Yarn and fabric crafted by hand) embroideries, etc.

In working with them, however, I also see a wonderful opportunity for apparel, accessories, and home furnishing designers to develop products and build small/medium e-commerce businesses using artisanal fabrics.
>>>

5 Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence

After publishing my recent article, Must-read Articles on Artificial Intelligence, in which I’ve shared my thoughts and concerns about AI, some have asked for more.

Here are my in-depth interviews with five (actually six) thought leaders who are deeply engaged in artificial intelligence development today that I hope will provide a good overall perspective on where and how AI is being applied today, where AI stands in 2016:

• Or Shani, CEO of Adgorithms. Over time, the entire profession of media buying will be obliterated. Algorithms will do all the work. This is one of the sectors most vulnerable to be entirely automated by AI. Or Shani speaks on the theme and provides a great example of what is already happening.
• Andreas Wieweg, CTO and Andy Peart, CMO of Artificial Solutions. Have you used Siri? Have you used Amazon’s Echo? Have you used any other natural language activated by personal assistant? The world of AI is rife with speculations on where this field is going, and this discussion is a wonderful expose on that topic.

>>>

Must-read Posts on Artificial Intelligence

My deep concerns over the impact that Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and over-automation will eventually have on society have led me to write several thought-provoking articles to help raise awareness while course correction is still possible.

Whichever way the future unfolds, we do have some time in hand. The kind of mass scale automation that may eventually come about is still 50-100 years away, most likely. Still, there is a very high probability that massive degrees of automation WILL eventually come about. Huge displacement of workers WILL take place due to such automation. Given that eventuality, are we facing Utopia or Dystopia? My prediction, unfortunately, is the latter.
>>>