Sramana Mitra: India has been incredibly productive. Europe has started producing interesting companies. They want global customers and they want to set up shop in the US. European firms often prefer the East Coast. Is that a model that you are okay with? Yanev Suissa: Oh yes. We’ve never been a five-minute-away firm. I grew
Sramana Mitra: When something fits your investment thesis, what do you want to see in the company when you’re doing a seed investment? What is the earliest stage check that you’re comfortable writing and what do you want to see? Do you want to see paying customers or a certain MRR? Yanev Suissa: A lot
Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures, discusses his firm’s successes as well as its investment thesis. Vertical Cloud is one of the key ones with an emphasis on Enterprise Data Platforms. Sramana Mitra: You have big news. Let’s catch up. Yanev Suissa: We did big closings on our third fund. Our performance
Sramana Mitra: You are comfortable investing in the nuances of SaaS, AI, AI for X. How about two trends that have come on my radar? PaaS for instance. There is a vertical SaaS trend that is going gangbusters right now. You find industry verticals where you have opportunities to do cloud and AI. You have
Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Storm Ventures, emphasizes and articulates his firm’s specific interest in investing in vertical cloud startups. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself a little bit and then we’ll come to Storm Ventures. What path did you follow to founding Storm Ventures? Tea Hea Nahm:
Sramana Mitra: How long do you think it will take for India to catch up? Mohanjit Jolly: The next year will be a challenging one. When the next bull run starts, India is going to be playing a pretty big role in the outcomes. I’m less interested in the term unicorn; I’m more interested in
Sramana Mitra: One of my observations on Now Float is that selling to SMBs in India is hard. Mohanjit Jolly: That’s right. The dichotomy in India is – Indians love to be pampered as customers. Sramana Mitra: High-touch, low-value sales. Mohanjit Jolly: Exactly. They want the high touch but the unit economics don’t work. That
Sramana Mitra: Why did you make the decision of focusing on India-for-the-world? Mohanjit Jolly: One of the reasons is I’m sitting in Palo Alto. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in India. Having said that, I have colleagues who are in India and the Middle East. They do have