The Accelerator Conundrum: Navigating Your Path to Startup Success

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!

Alright, let’s cut through the noise and get to the brutal truth of the startup accelerator world. Many entrepreneurs, starry-eyed and naive, leap headfirst into 3-month accelerator programs without truly understanding the long-term implications. It’s time for an incisive commentary, a necessary dissection.

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Financing

Raising money to build a startup is a huge challenge. To be able to raise any money at all, you must first understand how investors think. We have developed the following courses catering to entrepreneurs in different stages of their entrepreneurial journey.

Roundtable Recap: April 5 – Please Do NOT Go Into Ultra-crowded Market Segments

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures. Tim discussed at length his firm’s investment thesis, unique relationships with CIOs, and some of the industry trends he sees.

Seven Technologies
As for the entrepreneur pitches, Rajesh Prabhu from Bangalore, India, pitched Seven Technologies, a bootstrapped services company that wants to get into developing a CRM product. Neither Tim nor I saw the merit of the strategy, considering that CRM is an incredibly crowded space.

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Featured Videos

392nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Patricia Nakache, Trinity Ventures

Patricia Nakache, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses the firm’s investment thesis and some issues encountered by women in technology.

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204th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Nilanjana Bhowmik, Converge

Nilanjana Bhowmik, Co-Founder and General Partner at Converge, a new fund started after serving as the long time General Partner at Longworth Capital. Their focus is B-to-B tech on the East Coast.

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205th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Clint Chao, Moment Ventures

Clint Chao, Co-founder and General Partner at Moment Ventures, discusses the vertical niche opportunities in the tech industry.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Achler of MATH Venture Partners (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 Mark Achler was recorded in October 2017. 

Mark Achler, Managing Director, MATH Venture Partners, discusses their investment strategy and the industry trends.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about MATH Ventures. What is the focus of your firm? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make?

Mark Achler: We’re based in Chicago. We’re a $28 million fund. We’re just launching our second fund as well which will be twice the size. In our first fund, we made investments of $500,000 to a million dollars. Typically, we’re early stage investors. We do some Series A and seed investing. >>>

206th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines, Webb Investment Network

Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines, both Directors at the Webb Investment Network, discuss their firm’s investment thesis.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ho Nam of Altos 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 Ho Nam was recorded in April 2016. 

Ho Nam, Managing Director at Altos Ventures, makes a clear distinction between capital efficient company building and the “grow at costs in all sorts of unsustainable ways” philosophy. These are two distinctly different ways of building businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we start by you introducing Altos Ventures and your core philosophy about investing? Obviously, it’s somewhat different from other VCs out there. I would like our audience to learn how you look at the venture landscape and how you and your colleagues at Altos have come up with a differentiated positioning for the firm. >>>

391st 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Ben Mathias, Vertex Ventures

Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures, India, discusses the trends and dynamics of the Indian startup eco-system, including exits. India needs exits at this point, even if they’re relatively small exits.

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392nd Roundtable Recording On March 29, 2018: With Patricia Nakache, Trinity Ventures

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

Roundtable Recap: March 29 – Hairy Issues for Women in Technology

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Patricia Nakache, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discuss the firm’s investment thesis. The discussion included issues about women in technology.

Lucid Vascular
As for the entrepreneur pitch, Prashant Chopra from Foster City, CA, pitched Lucid Vascular, a medical imaging technology using Augmented Reality that I found fascinating.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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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. >>>

209th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Anshu Sharma, Angel Investor

Anshu Sharma is an active angel investor who invests in Silicon Valley and India. Anshu has deep experience in the enterprise software space, and a thoughtful, sophisticated perspective. He is one of the early investors in Nutanix, which currently has a market cap of over $8.5 billion in the public market.

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208th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Ashwini Anburajan, 22X Fund

Ashwini Anburajan, Founding Partner of 22X Fund, a tokenized fund that is investing across 30 portfolio companies. It’s a very interesting experiment and you will enjoy listening to some cutting edge FinTech thought leadership.

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207th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Dennis Joyce, Alliance of Angels

Dennis Joyce, Investor and Member of Alliance of Angels, talks about the largest Angel group in the Pacific Northwest.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled 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 Nitin Pachisia was recorded in October 2017. 

Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures, discusses pre-seed and seed investing.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Unshackled Ventures. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make?

Nitin Pachisia: We’re a very young pre-seed fund. We started about three and a half years ago. For our initial investments, we invest exclusively at pre-seed stage, which is effectively pre-product in most cases. We focus on immigrant founded companies. >>>