Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain CoFounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you launched on the app store while you were in YC, what was the regulatory status? Did you go through all these individual state-wise regulatory approval processes for all of them?

Carl Memnon: One of the learnings that came out of Arizona was that we don’t need to be the lender on record. In order to get a financial institution to deploy this technology, we needed to get to that point of maturity in terms of the product.

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August 18 – 586th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 586th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, August 18, 2022, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be interested. All are welcome!

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You said you invest mostly in enterprise software. Can you elaborate more about what is your enterprise software investment thesis? Let’s talk about your enterprise software strategy.

Cameron Kramlich: Our core strategy has to do with the shape of our team. Our deepest background is in software. Software is quite complicated. You have everything from platform plays to applications. When you look at our team, we have a whole bunch of experts that are part of companies of all sizes. We’ll look at a company that needs a good CMO. We’ll take a public company CMO who’s looking for a new project for a couple of months. We’ll put him in that job. We get a company that needs a CTO or an engineer.

Video FAQs

585th Roundtable Recording with Mohanjit Jolly, Iron Pillar

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

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain CoFounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: After you graduated from Arizona, were you successful in raising funding?

Carl Memnon: Absolutely. We spent a lot of time on the product itself and taking the learnings from that program and implementing it into the product. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the sandbox itself was the thing that allowed us to raise money in the same way that YC will help facilitate raising money. What it did do is it allowed us to get the company in a position where we could raise money.

Roundtable Recap: August 11 – Exit Options for Indian Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar, and a long time player in the Indian startup ecosystem. Among other topics, we had an interesting discussion about Exit options for Indian startups.

Interamplify

As for our entrepreneur pitch, we first had Natalia Aldama from Mucia, Spain, pitching interamplify, an SEO service.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Best of Bootstrapping: An English Major who Bootstrapped a Tech Company

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

Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9, had done an excellent job of bootstrapping his tech company without a tech background when we spoke in 2019. Inspiring story for many in his shoes.

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?

Kevin Groome: I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. I went to school there. I had the good fortune, in those early years, to be around a bunch of people who weren’t famous at that time but went on to be very famous. I went to History class with Jeff Bezos. I went to English Literature class with Michelle Obama, and I even went to acting class with Brooke Shields.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some case studies. Pick your favorite companies that have come together in this fashion. Tell us some stories of what did they start with. When they came to you, what did they have? What did you see that prompted you to get involved fully?

Cameron Kramlich: One company that we’re excited about is Cycle which is a container management platform. There, we have an unbelievably gifted serial entrepreneur who’s the CEO. He’s done an incredible job building a great business with incredible metrics. We’re helping him build out his team and a better sales organization.