Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 6)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

John: Having that video capability built into Angelsoft has been nice. I had one entrepreneur, for instance, who put his application in a few weeks ago. He just walked around the room on a Friday night saying, “We’re about to ship our Beta version. We’re going to send it off to Apple here to go into the Apple store in a couple of hours.” >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Would you please go over the core benefits of your program one more time?

John: We give access to our deep channel of partners and customers. We have more than 250,000 customers that range from enterprises all the way down to small, medium sized businesses; access to both individuals and technology here in Citrix, but also in the much broader technology world we live in. >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many companies do you plan to fund and accelerate this year?

John: It depends on how much we invest per company. We’re looking at something in the 12 to 15 range initially. We’re funded over the next several years. >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Do you have any particular industry preference?

John: We’re very software focused. We have seen an applicant who has a hardware piece of the solution to help accelerate it, but for the most part, we’re just going to be focused on software.

Citrix is very much horizontally focused and infrastructure focused. We tend to look for solutions that span across industries and solve core issues for businesses. >>>

Business Incubator Series: John McIntyre, Citrix Startup Accelerator (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How much funding support does Enterprise Ireland usually provide to those entrepreneurs who are qualified?

John: It’s in the low hundreds of thousands. If you go to the Enterprise Ireland site, it specifies that it changes with time. Obviously, over the past few years, Ireland’s gone through some changes. In fact, Ireland’s looking to entrepreneurship more than ever to get them through their recessionary period that was caused mostly by land speculation and real estate speculation. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Pravin Gandhi, Seedfund – Mumbai, Bangalore, New Delhi, India (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Vandana Upadhyay

Irina: You invest not only in technology companies but in companies in other sectors, right?

Pravin: Yes. India has many opportunities and challenges; technology adoption is not the best here. There are enough opportunities in different business models on how to do things better and more efficiently. We have done a bunch of hospitals in class B and class C cities. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Pravin Gandhi, Seedfund – Mumbai, Bangalore, New Delhi, India (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Vandana Upadhyay

Irina: How do you find your current deals?

Pravin: We have been in the game since 1990. Individually, we are quite well known in the early-stage business. Because we have been around, we have a very good network with investment bankers, and we are very active in TiE. The CarWale deal came to us through an angel who had invested in this company that was also known to me. >>>

Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Pravin Gandhi, Seedfund – Mumbai, Bangalore, New Delhi, India (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Vandana Upadhyay

Pravin: So, we went with an idea of a $50 million fund. It turned out to be quite easy to raise and within six months we were all ready to go. We had interest from variety of funds. We could have raised more money but we didn’t because for us this itself was an entrepreneurial challenge to prove that this concept works. >>>