Sramana Mitra: Have you invested in any of these ICO-based or token-based ventures? Vinny Lingham: Yes, I’m going to do another one called Augmentors. It’s a gaming product. They have a really good token called Databits, which they’ve spun out. It’s basically an augmented reality game. It’s pretty fascinating. Sramana Mitra: What is your estimate
Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Vinny Lingham was recorded in November 2017. Vinny Lingham, Co-founder and CEO, Civic.com, and Managing Partner of Newtown Partners, discusses his investment thesis in B-to-C seed ventures. We also discuss the role ICOs are
Sramana Mitra: That’s not a common practice in the US by the way. That is a practice that is more unique to India. Because of the proliferation of micro-VCs , people are starting to think. The other side of the equation of this unicorn mania is that the larger funds are doing very large series
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.
Sramana Mitra: That actually gives me a segue into my other question. India stupidly fell into the unicorn mania as Silicon Valley did in that period. All this unicorn-chasing valuation and this kind of mania around being an entrepreneur took off. My original thought was India is a more conservative country. People are frugal. People don’t
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
Sramana Mitra: So your hypothesis is that a lot of these surplus IT workers with different levels of IT expertise will get absorbed by, at least a portion of them, the startup ecosystem – the technology startup ecosystem. Mohit Gulati: I would refrain from using the word will get. I would use the word should
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