Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what you’re seeing in your deal flow as well as in your portfolio in terms of interesting trends. Early-stage deal flow is indicative of what’s happening in the pipeline of technology and interesting developments. What are you seeing? What’s interesting?
Christopher Mirabile: Asset prices are stupid right now. That’s difficult because doing the kind of investing you and I do, you have to be disciplined about price and about staging capital. Those are difficult circumstances. I feel like there’s a lot of hype about crypto. We’re not paying much attention to that. I’m sure that’s going to be an important technology down the road, but that’s not the focus for us.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Who was going to build the product? You are not a technical person, right?
Peter Ord: I sent my resignation to my boss when I was on vacation. Part of the reason was, I had gotten a number of calls from car dealers who were upset with the implementation during my vacation. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My wife was still frustrated that I went downstairs, got white paper from the business office, and I just stayed upstairs in the hotel room the whole day just mocking out what the system should look like.
>>>I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Winter Dream I
Winter Dream I | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Brush Pen | 9 x 12, On Paper
Sramana Mitra: To be able to get to $20 million with $1.4 million, you have to bootstrap. That’s something we believe in and promote extensively. We are with you on this line of thinking. Like you said, these large funds can only invest large amounts of money. Otherwise, their human capital-to-capital ratio doesn’t work out.
Christopher Mirabile: They just can’t manage that many deals. It’s interesting. You read about large exits all the time. You think they grow on trees. There are a couple of dozen billion-dollar startup exits at most from 400,000 to 500,000 startups created in the US each year. Pushing an entrepreneur to a high-capital, big exit path is, statistically speaking, dooming him to failure.
>>>Abinash Saikia, Co-founder of EnCloudEn and former 1Mby1M Premium member, has successfully bootstrapped his venture to an exit and discusses the process in great depth.
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Sramana Mitra: You said you joined the company where they were going to do homebuilder, but then the company imploded. Did you talk about one or two companies?
Peter Ord: One company. The company I joined had a product that catered to automotive dealers. They also aspired to build a similar product for homebuilders.
Sramana Mitra: That automotive product did work. In that implementation, you learned that the implementation was cumbersome and complex. Is that what you’re saying?
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Winter Road I
Winter Road I | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Brush Pen | 9 x 12, On Paper