1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tea Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you read the open source trend? The commercial open source trend has also been going gangbusters. A lot of interesting companies have come up with that trend. What are you seeing in your deal flow?

Tea Hea Nahm: Open source is great. You’ve got Databricks and others. Customers like open source. You want to go with what customers like. The challenge is, if it’s open source, how do you compete with your competitors especially if a big platform decides to adopt the open source? That’s what we look at. We like open source as long as we believe that the company could still have a differentiated position that will generate meaningful business for them.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: SurgePays CEO Brian Cox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the gating items on the education side? What are the needs of this community on education?

Brian Cox: It’s funny you ask that, but that thought had crossed my mind. I have two sons in high school. I was thinking about education and how boring school is sometimes but how interesting learning is. We were talking this morning about how I took three years of a language. I got an app now where I’ve learned more Spanish than I ever learned in school because it’s fun. Fun is functional.

Cloud Stocks: Analysis of Smartsheet’s Outfit Acquisition

According to a recent report, the global enterprise collaboration market is expected to grow 12% annually over the next few years to reach $101.7 billion by 2028. Smartsheet (Nasdaq: SMAR) recently announced its quarterly results that outpaced market expectations.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Waveform to $8M

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Waveform CEO Sina Khanifar started tinkering with bootstrapped entrepreneurship way back in college. When we spoke in 2020, this had certainly paid off.

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?

Sina Khanifar: I was born in Iran. We moved to the UK when I was one. My parents did their PhDs in the UK. After they returned to Iran, the war broke out. They thought the best choice would be to go back to the UK. They ended up not returning.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tea Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You are comfortable investing in the nuances of SaaS, AI, AI for X. How about two trends that have come on my radar? PaaS for instance. There is a vertical SaaS trend that is going gangbusters right now. You find industry verticals where you have opportunities to do cloud and AI. You have interesting workflow automation and data-based solutions.

You touched upon horizontal AI not being as big of an interesting area for you. If you remember, Salesforce started off with a very niche solution although in a big market. Then they also opened up their platform. They have spawned a lot of companies including some large players like the Veeva’s of the world. These are unicorns that are built on top of Salesforce.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: SurgePays CEO Brian Cox (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You have come this far and you are in 8,000 stores, and you have done it with commission reps.

Brian Cox: Yes, and by finding smaller companies that have plateaued. We were able to acquire them and rebrand them. It doesn’t matter what kind of services you’re giving that clerk behind the counter if he doesn’t realize that this is more convenient.

Sramana Mitra: Aside from wireless prepaid and you talking about broadband wireless, do you have other products that you sell?

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: CleanConnect CEO David Conley (Part 4)

David Conley: There are two different things to think about. Energy companies have two different types of budgets. They have OPEX budgets and CAPEX budgets. They have this other mechanism that they use called AFE. AFE is essentially investor money in a well. These operators are raising money and putting that money into the upfront cost to build a well and amortize that over time. They can depreciate all of their losses immediately. It’s a special tax treatment that they have.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Booksy Co-founder and CEO Stefan Batory started a software development company in Poland with a few other partners. Today, he’s running a high-growth, VC-funded SaaS and marketplace business in the US. Awesome journey! Here is our conversation from early 2020, plus you can listen to our podcast interview from 2021 here.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born, raised, and in what kind of background.

Stefan Batory: I’m from Warsaw, Poland. I was born and raised in one of the poorest parts of the country. I got a scholarship and went to a high school here in the US back in 1994.

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