The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus
Sramana Mitra: The next question I’m going to ask you is that you said you have different heuristics and different nuances from one segment to another. Could you give us some examples of what you check for one industry and how you structure another? Krishna Venkatraman: If you’re looking at a landscape that has a seasonal
Krishna Venkatraman: In the case of understanding credit-worthiness, for example, the signals that will allow us to make good decisions reside in many different places. The first is information you get from Bureaus. That will tell you something about how businesses have been discharging on their past obligations. How did they behave when they had
The online lending industry is going through rapid changes with the advent of big data and machine learning in processing loan applications. Krishna discusses OnDeck’s workings. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with talking a bit about yourself in setting some context, and also introduce our audience to what OnDeck is doing in the realm of Big