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

Julie Lein, Managing Partner at Urban Innovation Fund, discusses pre-seed and seed funding in companies focused on the betterment of cities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get you and Urban Innovation Fund introduced to our audience.

Julie Lein: I’m the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of the Urban Innovation Fund. We are a venture capital firm that invests in startups shaping the future of cities. We invest across a variety of verticals. These are what you might consider more traditional smart city sectors like transportation, energy, PropTech.

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Leveraging Channels and Slovenia to build Successful Businesses: Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU (Part 1)

Simon offers excellent insights into creating an unfair advantage with unique engineering team leverage in off-center locations. He also discusses creative channel strategy techniques.

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?

Catching Up On Readings: LatAm Startup Ecosystem 2022

This feature from Crunchbase News analyzes what the Latin American startup ecosystem will look like by the end of 2022. There were 18 unicorns in LatAm in 2021, and the stabilized confidence in the region will drive new opportunities, and more diverse players are expected to enter the space. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

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573rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Steve Eskenazi, Angel Investor

Steve Eskenazi is an Angel Investor, and we had a number of interesting trend conversations.

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Colors: Fall Reverie VI

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 – Fall Reverie VI

Fall Reverie VI | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9  x 12, On Paper

Applying AI to Lead Generation: Rev CEO Jonathan Spier (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We have tried to move the software industry into this DIY model. The whole SaaS industry is a DIY model. Ho and I were talking about the opportunity to do a DIFM (Do It For Me). Years ago, I coined another phrase to describe those – SaaS-enabled BPO.

There is technology, but the technology is being used by the services agency that is applying that technology to achieve significant results, but people are not using the software. They’re using the functionality of this vendor. It sounds like you are doing DIFM kind of model.

Jonathan Spier: When I signed on, that’s the model. Now, we’re doing both. At the end of the day, you want to solve the problem for a customer. That’s where you unlock a lot of value. Never mind the definitions put on it.

573rd Roundtable Recording with Steve Eskenazi, Angel Investor

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

Applying AI to Lead Generation: Rev CEO Jonathan Spier (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about use case. By the way, there’s another company that used to be called InsideSales that’s now called Xant. They’re working on the same problem.

Jonathan Spier: We know a bunch of these. We know enough to know that we’re unique. In companies, there’s a process that companies follow whether it’s explicit or not. They identify a target market. They identify an ideal customer profile. They turn the teams loose.

By the way, one of the things that attracted me to Rev is the customer list – Zendesk, Adobe, Splunk, Salesforce. It’s a heck of a customer list. There’s a place where the process falls down where a company says, “Here’s our target market.”