235th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Jason Lemkin, Storm Ventures

Jason Lemkin, prior to becoming a VC, was the CEO of EchoSign, a digital signature SaaS vendor that Adobe acquired some years back. This was an excellent discussion and offers very concrete pointers to where you might look for white spaces in the cloud computing space to do new ventures.

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316th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Bryce Roberts, OATV, Indie.vc

Bryce Roberts, Managing Director, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), and Founder, Indie.vc, discusses the issues with the venture capital financing model, and explored alternatives.

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233rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Naren Gupta, Nexus Ventures

Naren Gupta, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners – a firm with an excellent track record of investing in the Silicon Valley – India corridor, but with a global market point of view – shares his insights, nuggets, and interesting wisdom. He is a veteran investor who is also strikingly polite and humble.

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Video FAQs

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Arish Ali, CEO of Skava (Part 1)

Can you imagine what a retailer has to go through these days in their effort to stay cutting edge? Amazon is innovating at a furious pace, and all online retailers are scrambling to keep up. This interview discusses some of their challenges.

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

Arish Ali: Skava is a Silicon Valley-based startup that was founded in 2002 in San Francisco. My co-founder and I wanted to bet big on mobile. This was 2002 >>>

Probability of Raising Funding

I run One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) – a global virtual accelerator for startups. 2017 is our seventh year. And one particular trend keeps me awake at night. Thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurs have approached us for help with their funding at a stage where their chances of getting funding is ZERO. We can’t help them, regardless of how powerful our investor connections are. We can’t help a startup get funding before they become fundable. It pains me to see how many entrepreneurs have no idea what makes a startup fundable.

So, my humble advice to all entrepreneurs: please learn to assess your own probability of getting funded. Watching this 2 minutes 53 second video would be a very good start if you need a crash course in fundability.

Want introductions to Angels and VCs? A fundable and validated business is a must. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 1)

Feris and Ryan wanted to work together on a new venture. They first built a services company, then introduced an OEM product, and eventually bootstrapped a product under their own brand. The company has recently raised its first venture money after many years of being in business as a profitable, growing entity.

Sramana Mitra: One of you should probably get started. I want to go back to the very beginning of your journey, and learn about your pre-Bay Dynamics story. Where were you born, raised and, in what kind of background?

Feris Rifai: I was born in Beirut, Lebanon. That’s where I was raised till I was 18 years old. I then came to the United States to go to college. I went to school at Indiana University. It was a great experience for me. Throughout my journey when I was much younger in Lebanon, it was a bit of a difficult upbringing because we couldn’t find a way to get safety to be a part of our lives. I think it’s taught me a lot. It has helped me be, believe it or not, very optimistic. >>>

278th 1Mby1M Roundtable Recording with Modernizing Medicine CEO Daniel Cane

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

Roundtable Recap: January 16 – Investors Fund Businesses, Not Concepts

During today’s roundtable, we had a couple of formal slide presentations, and a number of shorter dialogues.

Direct Dialect
First, Thelson Richardson from Miami, Florida, pitched Direct Dialect, a language teaching application. Thelson started off by saying that he wants to build 700 products that covers English to Spanish, Dutch to French and every other permutation under the sun.

I spent the allotted time explaining to Thelson, this is not how companies are built. He needs to build ONE product and figure out how to bring it to market at the face of serious competition from players like Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur.
>>>