Tim Guleri: Second, we are a hungry partnership. We have a large network of friends in the ecosystem boomerang entrepreneurs to us. We have a young team of investors that are active in the ecosystem by market. For instance, we have a person that is dedicated to the Midwest region to reach out to B2B
Tim Guleri: Point number one is that it would be hard. It takes too much capital. The second is data. For AI to succeed in any domain whether you are building a horizontal platform or bespoke AI for a particular application set, you have a lot of data to train these models. Data tends to
Sramana Mitra: I was thinking about some of the work that we are doing right now around PaaS which is also a distribution innovation. One of the reasons why Salesforce has been successful as it has been is because it managed to do SaaS products but they also did this PaaS strategy early on. They
Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few case studies. You have developed a very informed perspective on this. Walk us through a couple of examples of what they came to you with and what you saw. What was the business model or distribution model that made them successful? Tim Guleri: The easiest example to give you
Sramana Mitra: One of the big successes of Latin America is Mercado Libre. They were my clients when I was consulting many years ago. I have known them for a long time. That company was a team from Stanford, so they knew how to raise venture capital. In the early stages, Mercado Libre was rather
Sramana Mitra: Would you invest in concepts? Tim Guleri: Yes, we do and we have. The bar for the experience of the team in that particular pain point that they are going after is extremely high for those investment bets. You are betting on the future based on the experiences that they might have had,
Sramana Mitra: When I look back to when I started in the technology industry, it was the mid-90’s which was the beginning of the internet. There was still stuff like dial-up internet. Today, a lot of founders have not experienced a non-internet life. These are young people who are digital natives and many of them
Tim Guleri is Managing Director at Sierra Ventures. We have a terrific discussion on Business Model Innovation and Distribution Innovation that Tim believes trumps technology innovation. We go through some excellent examples. Do check it out! Sramana Mitra: Let’s welcome Tim Guleri from Sierra Ventures. I have known him for a very long time. I