1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo of Next Coast Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The geographies that you’ve mentioned, we have quite a bit of experience in some of them. Utah is really booming. Utah has taken that bootstrapping ethos to the ultimate levels of success. They have seen company after company bootstrap to success. Utah really stands out. Michael Smerklo: We think this is a major

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo of Next Coast Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. I would definitely like to learn more about EverlyWell. I’ve seen a company like this – Iris Wellness, which dealt with the issue of the physicians not wanting to process. None of the physicians were equipped to deal with it. I’m very curious about how she is handling the interface with

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo of Next Coast Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about some examples of what you have really invested in and more about the ones that are conviction investment. Michael Smerklo: I’ll give you one example. I’m on the Board of a company called EverlyWell in Austin, Texas. This was an idea that we were looking at. This is disrupting the lab

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo of Next Coast Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the current fund size? $50 million is a small fund size to do $5 million to $10 million checks. Michael Smerklo: We ended up being way oversubscribed for fund one. We ended up being just under $90 million for fund one. It was twice larger than we expected.  Sramana Mitra: To

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo of Next Coast Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Michael Smerklo was recorded in April 2019. Michael Smerklo, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures, talks about some of the ventures his firm has invested in and the philosophy in

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Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah (Part 9)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold John: My favorite situation is when I have a founder who is strong in technology, but also has enough business acumen to be the CEO. That is when we have the strongest team, where you’ve got a tech person who’s essentially the CEO/CTO. The first 12 to

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Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold John: So, Boom Startup Capital 2010, LLC was the exact name of the entity that took in money, and then invested in each of the 10 companies in the inaugural year, 2010. We took in enough money for the investment and a bit more for expenses. That

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Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: What are your metrics for success? John: Traction in the form of investment, revenue, profit and exits. We always have the companies report at every meeting (a) validated customers, (b) users, (c) true customers, and (d) revenue.