384th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Gaurav Jain, Afore Capital

Gaurav Jain is Managing Partner at Afore Capital, a firm focused on pre-seed investments. This is an excellent conversation for entrepreneurs looking for insights into pre-seed.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alastair Mitchell of EQT Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with EQT Ventures was recorded in December 2017.

Alastair Mitchell, Partner at EQT Ventures, talks about the European Startup Funding trends.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What size investment do you make? Help our audience get to know your investment activity.

Alastair Mitchell: EQT Ventures is a relatively new firm that is about 18 months old. We started out of Sweden, the Silicon Valley of Europe. It’s an amazing place with a phenomenal track record of building some global companies. When we started off, we were a $630 million fund. >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 6)

Jared Shusterman: Quite frankly, a lot of these guys don’t trust the bigger brands that they sell. The number one game changer here in helping these guys was to be cooperative and, in effect, reap the benefits of that cooperation. It then came down to funding. We put a stake in the ground even in our industry around making sure that we are, by far, the best in helping manage and spend the funding that’s coming from the brand down to the local partner.

It has allowed us to position ourselves particularly for the client profile that I described. I described three things. They sell to an independent sales channel. Two is, they have a comprehensive set of marketing tactics that the channel partner uses. The third is >>>

Video FAQs

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What prompted you to go dig into jewelry? What was the trigger for jewelry?

Jared Shusterman: We had a family friend who who was a consultant for jewelry retailers. I was lucky enough to spend some time with him and actually attended a show with him. I was able to speak to a lot of the retailers at the show as we pitched our concept.

Rather than going back and starting a full-time job, we felt that we had something. This was around the time that Constant Contact was starting to get popular with email marketing. I moved back in with my parents. For the first four to five months, I >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Florida: SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman (Part 1)

SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman shared his wonderful bootstrapping story with me in 2017.

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?

Jared Shusterman: I was born in Miami, Florida. I’m one of the few South Florida natives. I grew up in a middle class family that had a very heavy focus on education. After I graduated high school, I went to the University of Virginia. I got a Bachelors degree with a Finance and Marketing concentration. Shortly after that, I moved out to San Francisco and worked for an >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Daniel Gulati, Comcast Ventures (Part 1)

Excellent discussion on the e-commerce startup trends and what can and cannot be venture financed at this stage, and why.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Comcast Ventures.

Daniel Gulati: I’m currently a Principal of Comcast Ventures based here in San Francisco. I focus 100% of my time on seed and early stage investments in consumer internet companies. About half of my work is in e-commerce and marketplaces. The other half is everything else within consumer Internet – digital media, social media, mobile. Prior to joining Comcast Ventures, I was actually on the operating side. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Chris Astle, CEO of QSR (Part 1)

A point of view on Big Data from Australia.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as QSR. Please set some context for us.

Chris Astle: Thank you for inviting me to participate. I’m the CEO of QSR International. QSR International is a software publisher of a product called NVivo. We provide software that helps organizations look at the human aspects of their data and help them to understand the insights that make decisions powerful. Our business is 30 years young. We originally came out of a university here in Australia. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Paul Nelson, Chief Architect at Search Technologies (Part 1)

This discussion highlights a set of open problems in Big Data.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Search Technologies.

Paul Nelson: I’m the Chief Architect for Search Technologies. Search Technologies is a global search engine and Big Data firm. We specialize in search engines, search engine installation, and anything related to data processing. We have some 200 consultants around the world, and we also do a bit of product development usually to fill in key missing components in the industry. >>>