316th 1Mby1M Roundtable Podcast with Bryce Roberts, OATV and Indie.vc

Discussion with Bryce Roberts, Managing Director, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), and Founder, Indie.vc. We covered the issues with the venture capital financing model, and explored alternatives.

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: 156 customer calls that you made gave you real conversations about real customer problems. Even though you didn’t sell what you went out to sell, this was a great opportunity to immerse yourself in customers and learn what they were really looking for. Gaurav Dhillon: This is AB testing to the power of

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Venture Capital in Slow Growth Markets: India, EdTech, Cleantech

There are a number of relatively slow growth markets in which we do a lot of business: India and EdTech are two examples. These are also two markets that I am passionate about, and have covered prodigiously for a long time. In a way, these markets, and many others that have similar characteristics, share very

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How To Fund A ‘Fat’ Startup

These days, we focus a lot more on lean startups than startups that require capital to get going. The entire industry has moved away from the ‘fat’ startup category. However, infrastructure software, hardware, networking, chips – they need capital. Even in cloud software, to build complex technology like personalization and analytics requires some investment. How

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Adriaan Van Wyk, CEO of K2 (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That is a great story. It says a lot about Cameron’s interest in funding you, and also that they really were a value-added firm. Adriaan van Wyck: It has been fascinating. It is something that is not typical for VCs – sometimes they have to get out funds, there is pressure, you have

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Adriaan Van Wyk, CEO of K2 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The way your customer map has developed so far, how does that distribute among large customers, mid-sized customers and small customers? Adriaan van Wyck: There is a fascinating trend there. A 100- to 150-employee organization is where we become relevant. We have smaller organizations that use our software as well. In terms of

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Adriaan Van Wyk, CEO of K2 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise any financing in the early phase of your company? Adriaan van Wyck: When we started to become successful in Asia and in the U.S. – Merrill Lynch and Intel were early customers – the company was growing at a pace the three individuals couldn’t keep up with. We took some

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Adriaan Van Wyk, CEO of K2 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the segmentation? When you are looking for customers, where are you looking? Adriaan van Wyck: That is a very challenging question for us to answer right now. If you think about what I just said, it applies to almost every organization out there. It is a discipline we have to think

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