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.
>>>T.M. Ravi is Managing Director and Co-founder of The Hive, a venture studio. The discussion touches upon a couple of key issues: the prevalent incubator/accelerator model of 3-month classes, we agreed, is bogus; and the Future of Work: Utopia or Dystopia?
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There are shifts happening in the world of seed investing.
Questions are emerging:
How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream? How does an angel investor (or an entrepreneur, for that matter) mitigate the Series A gap? How do you parse Unicorn mania? As an angel investor, you could get buried under later stage liquidation preferences. How do you protect yourself?
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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Greg Besner, Founder and CEO at CultureIQ. Greg is a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor. We discussed both his journey as an entrepreneur, lessons thereof, as well as his methodology and philosophy of angel investing.
WT InfoTech
As for the pitches, up first, Tarun Sainani from Lancaster, UK, pitched WT InfoTech. Tarun has a mobile app that has been live on Android and iOS for five years. While the app has a good number of downloads, it needs to monetize a lot better. We discussed the strategy.
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Daniel Gulati, Principal and Head of Seed Investment Practice at Comcast Ventures, discusses e-commerce startup trends and what can and cannot be venture financed at this stage, and why.
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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Swati Chaturvedi, Co-founder and CEO at Propel(x), an online platform where entrepreneurs are connected to angels. Swati and I discussed some of the key trends of the seed financing eco-system as viewed from Propel(x).
One of my observations is that we’re in 2017. Lots of stuff has already been built. Nowadays, there aren’t so many wide, open opportunities out there. But there are many, many niche opportunities. Some of these businesses need to be built with very small amounts of capital – $1-2 Million, and sold for $10-15M. I asked Swati if there is appetite in the Propel(x) community for this type of investment? And what about a notch smaller? Invest $250k-$500k and sell for $5-$10M?
Ashmeet Sidana, Founder of Engineering Capital, a seed-stage venture fund focusing on infrastructure technology, had a lot of insights to offer, and delivered one particular piece of wisdom that is close to my heart. He says, funding is like candy. Don’t eat too much candy. Whole wheat bread and proteins are customers and revenues. That’s what you should focus on. Brilliant analogy, don’t you think?
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Ann Winblad, Co-founder of Hummer Winblad, is one of the most successful women VCs in our industry, and as I mentioned in my introduction, I have never heard her whining about bias against women. One of the most encouraging things she discussed today is how her firm is sourcing interesting ventures from all over the world, not just Silicon Valley. Mulesoft, one of their hot portfolio companies, had its CEO based in Malta, originally!
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Bryce Roberts, Managing Director, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), and Founder, Indie.vc, discusses the issues with the venture capital financing model, and explored alternatives.
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