1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your investment thesis around online education right now? Jason Stoffer: I don’t really do education either online or offline. The biggest area of opportunity in education is post-college. What you see is an environment where when I graduated college in 1999, it was very easy to get a job. You had

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch topics a little bit to look at some other categories that you tend to invest in. You like to invest in education it seems – online education. I saw that you’ve invested in Course Hero. We’ve done a big story on Andrew. I love what Course Hero is doing. Huge numbers

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: My observation is the venture capital industry needs to really get a lot more savvy and sophisticated about the discipline of merchandising if it really wants to play in this B2C brand world. Especially in domains like fashion and design it’s all about merchandising and curation. Jason Stoffer: Look at Mickey Drexler. It’s

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (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 Stoffer was recorded in September 2014.  Jason Stoffer, General Partner at Maveron – a consumer-only venture capital firm that has had a successful track record of investing in e-commerce ventures ranging from eBay,

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tod Francis of Shasta Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Not all of e-commerce has the mobile characteristic. For example, if I want to do fashion shopping, I am absolutely not interested in doing it on my mobile. I want it on my cinema display. I want to have as much information as possible.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tod Francis of Shasta Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where in the grand spectrum of possibilities, in which markets, which segments do you see venture-scale brand opportunities in? Tod Francis: I hate to dodge this question, but I think it’s actually hard to sit here and say this category and not that category because it’s about how the entrepreneur sees the execution

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tod Francis of Shasta Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One of the things that I’d like to point out is we work with people at a very early stage. It’s not always viable to start with your own product. This is where the parallel with the department retail business comes in. If you look at the P&L’s of department stores like Macy’s

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tod Francis of Shasta 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 Tod Francis was recorded in September 2014. Tod Francis, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, starts with a discussion on the history of retail, all the way from shoe stores, to departmental stores, and back

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