Yesterday, I spent an hour chatting with Subrata Mitra, one of the Partners at Indian seed fund Erasmic, which has been in the news recently for attracting Google as a Limited Partner. I have been writing often about the Indian seed investment situation: Concept Arbitrage, Venture Capital in India, Too Much Money, Too Few Deals
By Jörg Überla, Guest Author More than 65O IPOs and the highest number of venture-backed IPOs since 2000. These are not the latest figures for the U.S. market, but the 2006 figures for Europe. What’s more: During the same period, the U.S. have seen just 224 IPOs with a volume of €35 billion, half the
By Calvin McElroy, Guest Author Entrepreneurship in Canada is hard. I have spent over a decade leveraging skills, knowledge and relationships developed from a successful corporate career – while trying to master the art of starting and developing early stage companies. Although the job is challenging and gratifying, it seems a day doesn’t go by
By Gerry Langeler, Guest Author Here is a sure-fire bet: Gather a bunch of entrepreneurs to talk about venture capitalists, and before long the conversation will turn to the issue of control. “If we take VC money, the next thing you know, they’ll be in control, and we’ll be out on our collective ears.”
In this final segment of our interview, we discuss some of the current business initiatives, as well as potential exit strategies. My thanks to HP for providing us with his insight to allow us all to benefit from his experience. I also sincerely hope that all the cleantech entrepreneurs and VCs out there would pay
I continue my discussion with HP regarding management teams, and then begin to explore other challenges like incredibly long sales cycles of ERI’s business, which makes forecasting and cashflow management very complex. In fact, with 18-36 month sales cycles, it makes me wonder to what extent our VCs who are rushing to Cleantech would have
Finding the right team to lead a company is very important, and perhaps an area where many entrepreneurs struggle as they cannot attract the right people, or delineate responsibilities clearly or effectively. HP has had the foresight to make difficult management changes as necessary to ensure the success of ERI.
Coming from a strong finance background, here we see how HP and his partners make decisions from both the perspective of the investor and the entrepreneur. This makes for a very interesting study.