Best of Bootstrapping: Founder Bootstrapped to $10M Using Services

Founder Sameer Maggon discussed bootstrapping SearchStax to $10 million using services with me in 2021. Excellently navigated journey! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, and in what kind of background? Sameer Maggon: I grew up in Delhi. I did my engineering in Computer

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1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I see. I’m going to go a little bit to a 30,000-foot level and ask you to comment on what else you’re seeing in India that we should keep in our vision, in terms of trends or developments or concerns. What’s going on?

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. I gave a talk recently at Kellogg about Indian startups: Past, Present, and Future. The recording will be available soon. We’ll publish it and you can take a look. One of the things I said is that India has this background in the services industry; the services industry came out of low-end

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1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What have you invested in that has passed all these diligence tests and emerged as something that looks like it could stand on its own without getting blindsided.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Deep domain knowledge is where a lot of those exit barriers come from, right?

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Yes. When you see these deals that are starting to find some velocity early on and coming to you with that as one of the proof points, what are you seeing? What kind of go-to-markets are you seeing that are giving them this kind of velocity? I understand that it takes fewer people

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1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you say you write the Series A checks, what are you looking for in the ventures that you’re willing to come in at the Series A? Let’s start with your specialty, which is worldwide B2B SaaS.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 1)

Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures, discusses his firm’s AI investment thesis.