Catching Up On Readings: ET Startup Awards 2022

This feature from The Economic Times covers the winners of the annual ET Startup Awards across nine categories including Startup of the Year and Bootstrap Champ. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Movius CEO Ananth Siva (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’ve talked to some CEOs who are in that business as well. Key employers are keen to monitor what employees are doing on their time. They want to see what are the activities on the device. You get into this thing about the employees’ devices being monitored by software that the employer is putting in. That’s how employees are getting around that – getting another computer.

Ananth Siva: That’s a fair comment. Fortunately for us, all our customers have seen that we have that ethical wall created, for example in Microsoft InTune, Blackberry Dynamics, and WhatsApp Business from Movius. Enterprise financial services customers have all been able to give their employees the opportunity to have a business interaction that doesn’t cross the wall. This has been validated.

Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a B2C business?

Victor Allis: Yes, it’s for voters. The strange thing is, there’s no revenue. There is no business model at the time. All we’re trying to do is to get people to use it to vote. I always believe that if you do something that adds value, there’s always a way to get people to invest in it or pay money. We have a lot of policy questions. People make choices based on it. We can take all these choices and add them up and we could predict that a candidate would win. Our poll was actually closer than most polls.

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594th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Kyle Asman, Backswing Ventures

Kyle Asman is Managing Director at Backswing Ventures, a firm that has a non-Unicorn investment thesis.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Movius CEO Ananth Siva (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Just to play devil’s advocate, there are plenty of businesses that are not on T Mobile. If you wanted to get to those businesses, working with those carriers would make perfect sense.

Ananth Siva: That’s how we approached this in the first place that might be the case. If you look at the client base that we have, some have already been quoted in the press. You probably have enough connections to ring a few of the Wall Street banks and if you ask them how they are solving the SEC problem today, they will tell you that they made one decision.

Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You took money from private equity that gave you some liquidity to the founders and gave you growth capital to move to the next phase.

Victor Allis: Only liquidity to the founders. This is what was happening. I moved to the United States in 2010. We did a bit of press release. Suddenly, everybody was knocking on my door offering us money. I said no. They said, “That’s exactly why we want to give it to you.”

Sramana Mitra: I have a saying that VCs love to come to the rescue of victory.

594th Roundtable Recording with Kyle Asman, Backswing Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Roundtable Recap: October 27 – Non-Unicorn Investment Thesis

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Kyle Asman, Managing Director at Backswing Ventures, a firm that has a non-Unicorn investment thesis.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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