1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some examples of what you’ve invested in that are representative of your investment thesis. Pick one that you are proud of and one that would tell us more about your company.  Fabrice Grinda: First of all, we are thesis-driven, so we think through and ask ourselves, “Okay, where is the world

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs, discusses his firm’s investment thesis around marketplaces. Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s session with a conversation with Fabrice Grinda, the founder partner at FJ Labs. Let’s get you acquainted with our audience. Tell us a bit

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about areas in which you are looking for companies. Ashmeet Sidana: There are two recent trends that I have observed and have started talking about. One builds on an old trend that data is the new oil. This is where data is an important commodity that drives businesses like Google, Twitter, and

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There are a lot of SaaS platforms that are entrenched in enterprise workflow and they have a lot of customers. The one that you are talking about is going after customers that are deeply entrenched in Zoom for example. To what extent is a company like this leveraging that deep penetration of another

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: A few weeks ago, I talked with an old friend of mine who I’ve known for 20 years. His name is Murli Thirumale. He’s done several startups in the storage space. He built Portworx and sold it to Pure Storage. Pure storage is like an old storage company that was a hardware company

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The motivation for the infrastructure layer, whether it’s storage, security, or networking, is not very different. Timeline-wise, it’s behind. Let’s play out the argument with me for a second. For an application layer SaaS company that has achieved $200 million ARR by selling one product, there are a lot of companies in the

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the second company? What sector was it in? Vishesh Rajaram: I’m not going to name the second one too much. This is a company that was developing tools to enable developing 3D and VR content for e-commerce. They were acquired by a large retail e-commerce group.  Sramana Mitra: Also in India?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I would say that the platform and the service world right now is under the assumption that most of the infrastructure layers and innovations are already in there. Domain knowledge for a particular functional layer is where the innovation is happening whether it’s Shopify for eCommerce, Atlassian in the enterprise collaboration space, or

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