1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You probably know this. In 1 Million by 1 Million, we have taken a different approach than the typical venture capital mantra of “blitzscale out of the gate, go big or go home.” We don’t believe in any of that. We do “bootstrap first, raise money later,” and that has produced a lot of very interesting success stories. FreshWorks was incubated in 1Mby1M. The first three years of FreshWorks were here. We didn’t raise money for FreshWorks until they had paying customers.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Let’s do a B2B case study.

Mohanjit Jolly: Let’s do a B2B case. About a third of our portfolio consists of US Delaware companies that are building products from India. Chennai seems to be the hub for most of our enterprise companies.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations. Wonderful. Now, I have a question based on what you said, because I remember what you told me when we last spoke about your B2C investment thesis.

Are you still thinking that the first five to ten million dollars of revenue in B2C brands in India are online only, and then they go omnichannel?

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The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus on customers, revenues and profits. 1Mby1M’s mission is to help a Million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue and beyond. Sramana’s Digital Mind AI Mentor virtually mentors entrepreneurs around the world in 57 languages. Try it out!

Accelerators are infrastructure. They either amplify founder leverage or they create friction — by extracting equity prematurely, by imposing a one-size-fits-all timetable, or by pushing fundraising before product-market fit.