1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When something fits your investment thesis, what do you want to see in the company when you’re doing a seed investment? What is the earliest stage check that you’re comfortable writing and what do you want to see? Do you want to see paying customers or a certain MRR?

Yanev Suissa: A lot of these firms have, what I would call, nonsensical rules. Some of that is indicative of how a startup is performing, but I don’t think it should be a barrier. Our seed deals are not pure tech risk in that a product is already developed. It may not have all the features and it may not be in scale, but it’s deployed in some way so you can test it and play with it.

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Twin Brothers Building a FinTech Venture: Stephen Roche and Gabino Roche, CoFounders of Saphyre (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You learn a tremendous amount in failures. It gives you the time to pivot. There are a lot of pivots involved in finding product-market fit. Having the time to do that pivot without going bankrupt is very helpful.

Gabino Roche: Just to tie to the freedom of failure and pivoting, at the mobile app company I was running, when you come up with an idea like Saphyre and you’re trying to get clients to adopt it; you may have an initial idea that’s really good, but you have to put yourself in the selfish interest of the potential partners and clients that you want to win. You may want to build something else to get to your idea.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 1)

Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures, discusses his firm’s successes as well as its investment thesis. Vertical Cloud is one of the key ones with an emphasis on Enterprise Data Platforms.

Sramana Mitra: You have big news. Let’s catch up.

Yanev Suissa: We did big closings on our third fund. Our performance has been top 5 percentile in the industry. We’ve been doing a great job. Things have been chugging along at SineWave.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Virtual Company to Scale

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

When we spoke in 2020, Lilia Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify, had built a virtual company with zero employees, all freelancers and scaled it without outside financing. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey.

Lilia Stoyanov: I was born in Bulgaria. It was part of the communist block before 1989. After that, I moved to the UK and I traveled a lot.

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Twin Brothers Building a FinTech Venture: Stephen Roche and Gabino Roche, CoFounders of Saphyre (Part 1)

Gabino and Stephen have built a wonderful FinTech company and tell their story with wonderful flair and candor.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where were you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? You are twin brothers. I think this is my first case study of a twin-brother entrepreneur.

Catching Up On Readings: AI 100 2022

This report from CB Insights ranks the 100 most promising private AI companies in the world that are working on diverse solutions designed to recycle plastic waste, improve hearing aids, and combat toxic online gaming behavior. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

591st 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Anirudh Damani, Artha Venture Fund

Anirudh Damani is Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund. We have a terrific discussion on the Indian Startup Ecosystem and its trends.

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Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: When you decided to pick on, what was the process?

David Chmielewski: My initial endeavors were around disputes. It was always near and dear to our hearts. For Joe, one of the other co-founders, that’s where he started. His first job was at Bank of America as a call center agent. This was the fundamental use case.

More important than that, having a good business case for clients when we sell. We can save our clients so much money by selling them dispute systems. Some of the other products didn’t have the business value that disputes do. It wasn’t a technology decision; it was more around how we can make our clients successful and to what level we can save them money.