1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heidi Roizen of DFJ (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 Heidi Roizen, DFJ was recorded in March 2016. 

Heidi Roizen, Operating Partner at DFJ, discusses her important article, “How to Build a Unicorn From Scratch – and Walk Away with Nothing,” and imparts crucial lessons to entrepreneurs on how to look at terms in a venture financing situation.

Sramana Mitra: We have been living in world of unicorn mania. We have tried to put some perspective on this issue. There are good sides to the unicorn mania. There are bad sides to the unicorn mania. Let’s start with one

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Lemkin of Storm 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 Jason Lemkin was recorded in October 2014. 

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.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a small window into how you look back your journey as an entrepreneur. Let’s start with EchoSign now that you have so much experience behind you and you’ve had a chance to consider the cloud landscape from a VC’s point of view. >>>

Gender Equality IS a Man’s Business: But it’s a woman’s work to influence participation

By Guest Author Anita M. Sands

Twenty-three years ago, I embarked upon my professional life as a physics student in Belfast. This foray into adulthood included two immediate discoveries: my commencing class was only 10% female, and I was to be taught almost exclusively by male professors. Needless to say, it became obvious that doing well would mean not only mastering the intricacies of quantum mechanics but also dealing with some fundamental laws of nature: getting along with the guys. >>>

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Solo Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and a Virtual Company: Cedric Savarese, CEO of FormAssembly (Part 1)

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

Cedric’s story is a textbook case study of the kind of entrepreneur we want to see emerge and grow in every corner of the world: a solo entrepreneur who is a developer and a product guy capable of getting to validation while holding onto a day job. Today, Cedric has almost 50 employees spread around the world, and while it maintains a small office of fewer than 10 people in Indiana, the bulk of the company has scaled as a virtual workforce. Excellent model, and I encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to read this carefully.

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? >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>