1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the PropTech part of your work. You said you’re doing pre-seed and seed in that sector?

Zain Jaffer: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the geographical boundary of this?

Zain Jaffer: We try to stay focused on the US market. We are also open and have done many companies that plan to expand to the US. They may also be based anywhere in the world but they just happen to have US customers. Ideally, the US is the top focus though.

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Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In this 2017 relationship with Nutanix that you started, how far did you go with Nutanix customers before you went into the next partnership?

Simon Taylor: We didn’t look at it like that. We looked at this as a multi-cloud Backup-as-a-Service platform. When you’re building with a strategic technology partner, you need to understand what matters to them. When you’re scoping, what workloads are important for them? How are their customers buying? It’s those questions that you want to answer strategically.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 1)

Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital, discusses trends in PropTech.

Sramana Mitra: Our focus today is primarily on the investing that you had recently started. If you want to set some context about your entrepreneurial background, that would be great.

Zain Jaffer: As soon as I discovered computers, I started to mess around, code, and design things. I’ve always been at it trying to build things. Sometimes, it worked out. Most of the time, it doesn’t. I have had a lot of attempts. All you need is to be lucky once. It can change your life completely. I had a big exit. It was $718 million back in 2019 when I started an advertising tech company.

Video FAQs

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a Niche E-commerce Company to $20M

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

Niche e-commerce still produces compelling success stories. Read on to see how CEO Brian Lim built iHeartRaves.

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?

Brian Lim: I was raised in LA County. My parents immigrated here to escape communism in China and Cambodia. I grew up very poor. We bootstrapped our company back in 2010 with $100 and turned it into a $20 million a year company.

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Netflix Searches for Alternate Monetization Opportunities

Earlier this week Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) reported its first-quarter performance that failed to impress the market. With the global pandemic restrictions easing, the company appears to be struggling to attract and grow its user base.

Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The business partner who has all these outsourcing companies, is he Slovenian?

Simon Taylor: Serbian actually. He still runs a large outsourcing company. We spun out from them. We started moving very quickly. We added our first 500 customers in our first year. We added a thousand in the second.

Sramana Mitra: This is a crowded space. What was so special about HYCU?

Roundtable Recap: May 5 – Spotlight on the Ohio Startup Ecosystem

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Bill Baumel, Managing Director at Ohio Innovation Fund, one of the pioneers of the Ohio startup ecosystem.

CaterBite

As for entrepreneur pitch, we had Boddu Venkat Sujith from Visakhapatnam, India, pitch CaterBite, a concept arbitrage on EZCater, a Unicorn.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julie Lein, Managing Partner at Urban Innovation Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The narrative in the media is how much money have you raised. The maximum focus is on the people raising the most money. That is a flawed way of evaluating companies. There are a lot of innovations that are done in a capital-efficient way. As such, they have a lot more options. The exit option is larger. They are not so dependent on a constant infusion of capital to sustain themselves.

Julie Lein: I agree wholeheartedly. We call those vanity metrics. Capital raise and valuation are extremely important barometers, but they’re not the only ones. They’re the ones that tend to get the most coverage in the media.