From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 1)

Manish discusses his various experiences with customer validation in great depth, as well as his journey from being a hard-core developer geek to a successful entrepreneur CEO who has raised multiple rounds of venture capital from top firms including Sequoia Capital.

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?

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570th Roundtable Recording with Anupam Rastogi, Emergent Ventures

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

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When did you reach some level of cruising altitude? What year would that be?

Dheeraj Pandey: We were still the fastest to half-billion in 2015. Along the way, there were jitters. There’s always turbulence. In 2015, there was turbulence when the Intel issue came up. They had a massive number of bugs on the server. They started to put more stuff in their folder. The Intel processor had an immense issue on the server-side.

Video FAQs

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping to Exit

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

Over the last decade and more, I’ve had the privilege of working with a large number of bootstrapped entrepreneurs. These include self-financed companies and also modestly capitalized startups that operate in a capital-efficient manner applying the principles of bootstrapping. [You can take our free Bootstrapping Course to review these.]

For our Seed Capital series of podcasts and blog interviews, I’ve interviewed hundreds of investors, especially micro-VCs and angels who are playing in the early stage game.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chandra, Managing Director at Arkam Ventures (Part 4)

Rahul Chandra: I very strong selection criteria that have a lot to do with growth. Growth is a big factor. Let’s say I’m part of a micro-finance investment cap table. My response is, in India, if you’re not doing things with the right scale, it’s not going to mean anything.

It’s a lot like how impacted investors invest which is not expecting the same financial metrics to come too soon. You give companies time to grow. In that interim, things look crazy.

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the size of your Blumberg Capital round? What milestones were you able to achieve with that?

Dheeraj Pandey: It was a million and a half. Word spread out that three Aster Data people had started a company. Lightspeed came within 10 months and we raised a $10 million round and converted the safe. We were trying to use our skills to try and build a distributed system story around one of the favorite movements at that time – virtualization.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gans Subramanian, Managing Partner at Hourglass Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple of examples to illustrate what you’re saying with some more visceral understanding. Pre-seed is a very interesting field of investment. There aren’t that many pre-seed funds.

Gans Subramanian: There’s another company in the cybersecurity space. These founders have a clear view of the problem. They are technical founders and have a path to $100 million in 24 to 36 months. This is pre-seed. The founders have been talking to us for the last six months.

Catching Up On Readings: Venture Funding in Q1 ’22

This report from Crunchbase News analyzes the trends in venture funding in the first quarter of 2022. There were 34 private companies newly valued at $1 billion or more in a disclosed funding in March 2022, compared to 49 in February and 46 in January. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.