1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the first one that you talked about where you are doing transcription, what vertical applications are you going after?  Daniel Cohen: Most of their revenue comes out of the education industry. These are online courses that need to be transcribed. That market has been growing so fast because of COVID. Everything is

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I am going to start double-clicking down on your AI investments. Vertical AI is something that we have seen a lot. I have one specific question that I want to stick around with you for a bit. You may have read my PaaS article. For those of you who are listening and who

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How big is Viola’s current fund? Daniel Cohen: We have a few funds at Viola. We have a venture fund and a growth fund. Overall, we manage $3 billion, which is a big number for Israel for sure. I focus my time on the venture’s early-stage side. The early-stage side is about $1

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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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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, the company can access each enterprise on their different levels of vulnerability and then present that as an opening part of the sales cycle. Ken Elefant: They have invented this space called Attack Servers Management. They could go into an enterprise and quickly bring up an analysis that shows the vulnerabilities.

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

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-founder at Sorenson Ventures, talks about trends and his investment thesis. Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your funds. I know you have been working with your fund one and you are in the middle of raising your fund

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