Sramana Mitra: The deal size at which you had to meet in person has vastly changed. You can do large deals and raise investments without meeting in person. That is a massive shift and a massive removal of friction in scalability, fluidity, and velocity in any company’s growth trajectory. John Frankel: Totally. It is amazing
Rajeev Madhavan: It’s no longer enough to provide a set of solutions. You have to provide the entire platform as a solution. Salesforce was the first one to apply this. I was one of the first customers when I was at Magma deploying Salesforce. We had the same VC as Salesforce so I had no
Sramana Mitra: The AI sector of the industry, which is not actually a sector but a horizontal technology that is being applied to all kinds of sectors, has exploded even with the downturn. The amount of money that has gone into AI startups globally is huge. It doesn’t seem to have missed any beat in
Sramana Mitra: What are the kind of things that you have invested in AI? What is your investment thesis on AI? Rajeev Madhavan: In AI, we have a company called Reflection which has been doing e-commerce. Today, when you shop on many of the websites, you and I would get the same webpage. You may
Sramana Mitra: What has been the experience at your fund in your existing portfolio companies as well as new investments? John Frankel: We were very concerned in March and April that our companies would be hit hard. Some were hit hard, however, since we predominantly invest in secular rather cyclical businesses our companies held up
Sramana Mitra: There are a couple of questions that come into my mind as I am listening to you. First in the battery company, how did you do technology validation in making this investment? What did the company come to you with? What was the decision to assume that this team can build this technology?
John Frankel is Partner at ff Venture Capital. We had an extensive discussion about Covid’s impact on the startup ecosystem, the changes we notice, so forth. Sramana Mitra: Let’s catch up. How has the pandemic year been? What are you doing these days?
Rajeev Madhavan: You have IoT devices like headphones where you do not need to replace the batteries. First, it untethers the device from all the electrical connections that you need. Second, it gives you the ability and the freedom of not being tied to a bunch of battery replacements that you have to go through.