1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The other point I want to make in this discussion is that AI is not only generative AI. There are many, very powerful problems that are being solved with AI, but not necessarily generative AI.

The Startup Velocity Question: Repeatability Drives Fundability

Founder-led sales is acceptable for the Seed round.

It is NOT acceptable for Series A or beyond.

At the minimum, you need a Repeatability Hypothesis to raise a sizable venture round.

The Startup Velocity Question: Positioning Drives Repeatability

There’s a common problem with Founder-led Sales: Positioning changes on the fly on a daily basis.

The Startup Velocity Question: Positioning Drives Segmentation

What problem does your product solve with a unique unfair advantage?

What ideal customer has that problem?

These questions are at the heart of Positioning.

The Startup Velocity Question: TAM Drives Fundability

More often than not, an honest Total Available Market (TAM) analysis yields small or medium sized markets. This could range from $50M, $100M, $200M to $500M.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: All right, let’s discuss the second example.

Ashmeet Sidana: Sure, another example I’m very proud of is a company called Robust Intelligence. Again, I was the first investor and they did a good job. CEO Yaron Singer, PhD from Berkeley, was at Harvard when he observed the hallucination problems with the development and deployment of AI models.

The Startup Velocity Question: Segmentation Matters

An acute lack of understanding of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and an inadequate Market Segmentation result in artificially bloated TAM.

Often, Segmentation is too broad.

Let’s look at an example.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 1)

Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital, talks about his AI investment thesis. It’s a wonderful discussion that not only entrepreneurs should listen to, but investors should also listen in to calibrate their own investment thesis.