Roundtable Recap: November 3 – Spotlight on Longevity Startup Opportunities

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Sergey Jakimov, Co-founder and Partner at LongeVC, a firm focused on the Longevity space. We discussed trends and opportunities in this sector full of whitespace waiting for the entrepreneur’s magic touch.

13 Layers

As for entrepreneur pitches, we first had Justin Perron from Lexington, Kentucky, pitching 13 Layers.

Climate CRO

Next, we had Dr. Justin Lancaster from Barnard, Vermont, pitching Climate CRO.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

>>>

Featured Videos

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity (Part 3)

Heather Hiles: I spoke to the incoming class at Hass business school. I looked at hundreds of folks there and saw a very small minority of black and brown faces and even a smaller minority of folks who are from this country. I said, “How many of you are planning to go into investing?” Most hands went up. I say, “You’re at a deficit because you will be missing whole groups of opportunities of founders with who you have no interaction with and who will be creating the best solutions in the world.”

At Black Ops, we were able to get many LPs from the likes of Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Andreessen Horowitz. The VCs realized that there are communities of founders that they never encountered. I’m talking to 15 founders a week. We see the best and the brightest in our community and we will invest in them.

Thought Leader in Financial Technology: DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think this is a valuable discussion for people trying to understand equity crowdfunding. There need to be guard rails to protect consumers. I have seen what happened in the dot com crash. A lot of people got completely creamed out.

Rebecca Kacaba: Those were public stocks, generally en masse.

Sramana Mitra: Everything. There were public stocks and there were these friends and family investors. This is still happening. It’s not like it’s not happening still. People have dreams of making money off of startups.

Video FAQs

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped with Services to $20M

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

VisiQuate Founder CEO Brian Robertson is a serial bootstrapper. In fact, he always bootstraps using services. Terrific entrepreneur to learn from.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Brian Robertson: I’m from Northern California. We’re not in the heart of Silicon Valley, but up in Sonoma County. I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but I was only there for two weeks. My dad was in the Navy. His family was from the Midwest and we were there for a short period.

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity (Part 2)

Heather Hiles: I wound up working with Bill and Melinda Gates at their foundation and did a lot of investing and learning about the investment process. I realized I love capacity building and investing in them. That’s what led, in part, to being a co-founder of Black Ops Ventures where I was Managing Partner. The investment thesis there was that 100% of the money we’re investing is into black-founded tech companies. That’s being run by my partners very well.

Thought Leader in Financial Technology: DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba (Part 4)

Rebecca Kacaba: Equity crowdfunding limits the amount you can invest. It’s in proportion to what your income is. I don’t fundamentally believe that, because you don’t meet an income threshold, you should not have a right to make an investment. The amount that they can invest caps how much they can lose. I think what you’re saying is because doctors make a lot of money, they know how to invest. That’s not necessarily true.

Sramana Mitra: I’m not saying that. That doctor is a customer of the product that Modernizing Medicine is selling. They have a visceral understanding of what that business is because they are the customers.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a SaaS Company with a Paycheck and Scaled

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

I love doing stories of entrepreneurs who are long-time readers of the 1Mby1M blog. Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar is one of them. This is a wonderful story from 2020 of how he scaled a SaaS company from Coimbatore!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Saravana Kumar: I was born and brought up in India. I was from a city called Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. After finishing my master’s in 2000, I got an opportunity to work in London. I took my exam on a Friday and I got the job on Monday morning in London.

>>>

595th Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 595th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, November 3, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!