Sramana Mitra: How do you parse unicorn mania? Mackey Craven: By unicorn mania, do you mean the number of companies that have billion-dollar plus valuations that are still private? Sramana Mitra: A lot of things. There’s unicorn mania in that there’s so much capital. There is a rush to fund these later stage companies and
Sramana Mitra: There’s another dynamic, which is a lot of these seed stage investors who are working in the very early stages are exiting into those kinds of mega rounds that come in Series B and C. That is a very healthy trend because I think these two segments are different. It could take a
Sramana Mitra: You’ve been investing for a while. Let’s look at your 2017 deal flow. Give us some flavor of what trends you are seeing. How many deals do you see in a year? How many do you invest in? What are the highlights of the trends in that deal flow? Let’s just focus on
Sramana Mitra: It also gives you a flavor of how good a product it is. Is the product really meeting the needs of the customers? I think churn is a very good indicator of that. Mackey Craven: Coming back again, it really doesn’t have to do with revenue scale. It has to do with validating
Sramana Mitra: One of my observations is lots of stuff have already been built. Nowadays, there aren’t so many wide open opportunities, especially in B2B that you can consistently build billion-dollar companies. There are many niche opportunities. Some of these businesses need to be built for very small amounts of capital – $1 million to
Cindy Padnos: We structure our seed investment with, at most, three other co-investors, but typically have one co-investor. We think it’s really important to be investing with like-minded investors. It’s also a bit dangerous to have a very large fund writing a small check into your seed round. It’s a significant signaling risk if that fund
Sramana Mitra: I have a specific question that relates to our community. We have a global base of entrepreneurs. Very often, entrepreneurs have their development teams elsewhere, whether it’s India, Eastern Europe, or other parts of Europe, but they’re aware of the fact that if they’re going for enterprise customers, North American customers are the
Sramana Mitra: Let’s flip that question around. Now that you have been in this business for a while and you have an investment thesis, what are you looking for? Can you pinpoint where do you want to invest in? What kind of industry trends and segments of the B2B space are of particular interest to