Roundtable Recap: August 24 – Do One Thing Well and Monetize Rapidly

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Paroon Chadha, Co-founder and CEO at Passageways. The company has been bootstrapped from Indiana to $10 million ARR and has recently raised funding. Textbook case study of our mantra: Bootstrap first, raise money later.

DraaSync
As for pitches, we had Alex Sanginov from East Bay, CA, pitching DraaSync that claims to “make learning simple”. The pitch doesn’t explain how and needs use cases to illustrate its core concepts.

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Roundtable Recap: August 2 – Conversation with a Successful Woman Venture Capitalist

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Dafina Toncheva, Partner at US Venture Partners, an expert in Cyber Security. We discussed a variety of topics including the shifting of Series A metrics to $2M-$3M ARR for SaaS companies.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Roundtable Recap: July 26 – Wonderful Social Impact Projects

During this week’s roundtable, we had several wonderful social impact projects.

Humaniq
We started with Andrey Gidaspov, pitching London and Luxembourg-based Humaniq, a mobile banking project catering to African unbanked consumers. They already have 400,000 users. The compnay has raised $5 million in an ICO already.

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Roundtable Recap: July 19 – Try to Find a Blueprint to Build Your Startup

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest John Stewart, CEO at MapAnything. John discussed how he has bootstrapped his company using the Bootatrsapping Using Services on Salesforce.com blueprint.

Space-Eyes
As for entrepreneur pitches, we started with Jatin Bains from Camden, NJ, pitching Space-Eyes. The company is a maritime analytics company trying to pivot to a satellite data company for which it needs to buy satellites.

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Roundtable Recap: July 12 – Laser Sharp Competitive Positioning is Compulsory in Crowded Markets

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, who discussed his investment principles. It was an excellent discussion!

Elastic Storage Solutions
As for entrepreneur pitches, we started with Udo Neustadter from Ottawa, Canada, pitching Elastic Storage Solutions, a company addressing the ballooning storage needs of the digital universe. I asked for a thorough competitive positioning exercise, including input from storage buyers on how they’re evaluating solutions.

Velox Networks
Next, Martin Nygate from Singapore pitched Velox Networks, an Asian competitor to RingCentral-like hosted PBX vendors. The company is executing well and is already in revenue.

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Roundtable Recap: July 5 – Scaling Tech Companies From Europe

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Gero Decker, Co-founder and CEO at Signavio, an enterprise software company that has successfully scaled to $20 million in ARR from Europe. They have also made a successful entry into the US market and raised financing from a US venture firm.

GiftVolo
As for entrepreneur pitches, we started with Shelly Gupta from Foster City, California, pitching GiftVolo, an app that brings service providers together with consumers to make the gifting of popular services possible and seamless.

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Roundtable Recap: June 28 – Fat Startups vs. Lean Startups: A Conversation with Waikit Lau

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest investor and serial entrepreneur Waikit Lau. Waikit has a refreshingly open attitude towards investing in very early stage companies. Wonderful conversation.

Wonderlend Hubs
As for entrepreneur pitches, we started with Ram Ramdas from Mumbai, India, pitched Wonderlend Hubs, a FinTech company that focuses on 15 second loan application evaluation on behalf of financial institutions in India. Very good execution thus far, and an excellent company with great promise.

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Roundtable Recap: June 21 – Validate and Get to Paying Customers ASAP

During this week’s roundtable, we had four entrepreneurs pitch their projects.

Anlyz
We started with Swetha Uday, recipient of a NetApp scholarship to the 1Mby1M Premium program, from Bangalore, India, pitching Anlyz, a Cyber Security company. Anlyz has four POCs in the works with lighthouse customers right now.

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