Roundtable Recap: September 19 – Startups Spanning Brazil, Egypt, India and Silicon Valley

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Rodrigo Baer, Partner at Redpoint eventures, Brazil. Rodrigo provided a very interesting overview of his firm and what’s happening in the Brazilian eco-system.

ORBAI

Up first we had Brent Oster from Gilroy, California, pitching ORBAI, an AI startup.

Fikra Kids

Then, Mohammed Talaat from Cairo, Egypt, pitched Fikra Kids, an EdTech venture.

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Roundtable Recap: September 12 – Services Startups Offer Great Bootstrapping Platforms

During this week’s roundtable, we had a comprehensive discussion about a small services business that is already in revenue. Unlike many in the industry, I am a big fan of services businesses because they provide excellent bootstrapping capability. If you build a strong services business, you create for yourself options. You can use the services revenues and cashflow as a platform from which to build something more scalable with faster growth.

Seven Boats

Today, Debajyoti Banerjee from Kolkata, India, pitched Seven Boats, a digital marketing and training business that has customers, revenues, and profits. There are techniques that can be applied to this business to scale it faster, introduce productization principles, repeatability, etc. Very promising.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Roundtable Recap: September 5 – Spotlight on Kolkata Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had a very active Q&A session with entrepreneurs from around the world sharing their projects.

Vawsum.com

As for the pitches, we had Aditya Maheswari from Kolkata, India, pitch Vawsum.com, an Ed Tech company from India that has already achieved close to $500,000 in revenue run rate. The company shows excellent potential. You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here.

I was also recently in Kolkata and did an in-person roundtable that you can watch here:

Those pitching included:

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Roundtable Recap: August 29 – Startups Spanning Indonesia, Nigeria, Guatemala and a YCombinator Case Study

During this week’s roundtable, we had Ryan Chan, CEO and Founder at UpKeep Maintenance Management. Ryan has bootstrapped with a paycheck and subsequently, gone through YCombinator, followed by raising $13 Million. Great case study.

Travling
As for the pitches, up first we had Daniel Agung Pratana from Indonesia pitch Travling, a local travel app.

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Roundtable Recap: August 8 – An Innovative Take on VC Funding

During this week’s roundtable, we had Jonathan Nelson, CEO, Founder at Hackers/Founders, and Managing Director of Hack Fund V. Jonathan discussed an innovative take his fund is taking on VC funding.

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Roundtable Recap: August 1 – A Conversation on Niche E-commerce Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had Sean Dawes, Co-founder at Modded Euros, as our guest. We discussed the state of the union in niche e-commerce startups in the shadow of Amazon’s dominance.

BetterPT

As for the pitches, up first we had Greg Peters from New York, NY, present BetterPT, a SaaS company catering to hospitals that have physiotherapy units. The company currently has $50k in MRR and is executing nicely.

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Roundtable Recap: July 25 – Deep Dive into FinTech Investing

During this week’s roundtable, we had Doug Atkin, Managing Partner at Communitas Capital Partners, as our guest. Doug has extensive experience in FinTech and this conversation explored the nuances of that sector.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Roundtable Recap: July 18 – A Conversation About India’s Next 400 Million Consumers and the Startups Targeting Them

During this week’s roundtable, we had Rahul Chandra, Managing Director at Unitary Helion Ventures, as our guest. Rahul provided an excellent overview of the opportunity around India’s next 400 million consumers.

The pitches today were all from women entrepreneurs.

Empower

First up, we had Soya Somanathan from Chennai, India, pitch Empower, a digital service for helping non-STEM kids find their career paths through content and mentoring.

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