1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Exactly. Our spectrum is broader. Yours is specifically the ones that who will get funding. Geoff Ralston: Forgive me, but I disagree, Sramana. You’re broader than the batch, but YC is broader than that. When I first wanted to start a company in the ‘80s, none of this content was available. Now, there’s

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: At 1Mby1M, we are in the pre-Series A zone. We don’t care if it’s at napkin stage. We work with that entire spectrum of pre-seed, pre series A. Typically, investors have steered clear from companies that operate in this mode. This category uses virtual company architecture extensively. What are you seeing? What is

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to unpack what you said. COVID has been a gamechanger. Until COVID, you wanted people to come and be in Silicon Valley for the three-month program. What is your current perspective on geography? Can they be from anywhere? Geoff Ralston: It is certainly true that the pandemic left us with

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator (Part 1)

Geoff Ralston is President of Y Combinator. We had a terrific discussion on what we each are seeing in the startup ecosystem. Sramana Mitra: Geoff has been involved with Y Combinator right from the beginning. Why don’t we take a look back on the evolution of Silicon Valley and Y Combinator.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Daniel Cohen, General partner at Viola Ventures, discusses AI, PaaS, and deep tech investments. Sramana Mitra: We have known each other for ten years. We have observed the industry for a very long time. We often have guests with whom we’ve had long relationships.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you back these seed-stage companies, what are you looking for? It’s not inexpensive to build like this, so are you writing checks on a concept based on the background and domain expertise of the entrepreneurs?  Ken Elefant: Most of our investments in Sorenson Ventures are pre-revenue. It could just be an entrepreneur

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: On your point on needing smart engineers to do things, it has always been my observation that there are only a finite number of those people. We need abstractions and we need ways to enable and equip people who are not these really smart engineers. This is one of the reasons why I

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you are investing in such companies that are supplemental to other ecosystems like the Zendesk ecosystem and others, are they getting substantial support from those ecosystems? In the case of Salesforce, they have a marketplace in AppExchange and Zendesk has been trying to support the ecosystem as well. What is the experience

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