Investor Introductions For Entrepreneurs Outside Silicon Valley

Can I get introductions to relevant investors, customers, or partners—even if I’m not in Silicon Valley?

Yes, 1Mby1M does facilitate introductions to relevant investors, customers, and partners, even for entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley. Here’s a breakdown:

The Ultimate 1Mby1M Decision Guide: Comprehensive FAQs for Prospective Entrepreneurs

Prospective entrepreneurs, get answers to all your questions here.

• Will 1Mby1M help me become truly investor-ready, not just pitch-ready?
• Can I get introductions to relevant investors, customers, or partners—even if I’m not in Silicon Valley?
• Will I get actionable feedback on my business model, go-to-market strategy, and product-market fit?

Do Not Chase Investors Before Chasing Customers

Sridhar Vembu built Zoho with zero outside funding to a billion-dollar ARR SaaS company. I wrote the first piece ever written on him in 2007 in my Forbes column. No one had yet heard of Zoho. But VCs were already salivating.

Sridhar validated my philosophy of how I advise startups when he came to see me in 2007.

My philosophy has remained the same at its core.

Do not go to VCs as beggars. Go as Kings.

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Build Your Company Before Chasing Venture Capital

Are you trying to get into Y Combinator? Beware, they have a 98% rejection rate. They need to see that you are building something that can be blitzscaled with gobs of venture capital. Blitzscaling, however, is NOT the only way to build a successful company.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later is a MUCH better strategy than Blitzscaling with ridiculous amounts of capital.

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Ownership Still Matters

Ownership matters. If you end your startup journey with a $50 million exit and own 60% of the company, you make $30 million dollars. But if you have raised a ton of money and own just 5%, you need a $600 million exit to make that same $30 million. Much harder to get to.

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What Makes Your Startup Hard to Copy

AI is making it easy to build ultralight startups. AI is also making it easy for copycats to flood the market with competing products. Investors HATE a market full of copycats. If you are looking to raise funding, you have to be able to establish a defensibility thesis.

By and large, if you are building something that plugs some short term technology gap in a larger AI platform, that is not a defensible play.

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The Accelerator Conundrum: Navigating Your Path to Startup Success

The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus on customers, revenues and profits. 1Mby1M’s mission is to help a Million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue and beyond. Sramana’s Digital Mind AI Mentor virtually mentors entrepreneurs around the world in 57 languages. Try it out!

Alright, let’s cut through the noise and get to the brutal truth of the startup accelerator world. Many entrepreneurs, starry-eyed and naive, leap headfirst into 3-month accelerator programs without truly understanding the long-term implications. It’s time for an incisive commentary, a necessary dissection.

How You Can Plan for an Early Exit

Did you know that the vast majority of acquisitions happen in the sub $50 million valuation range?

The best way to make money off such acquisitions is to build a startup with capital efficiency. If you can bootstrap, great. If not, raise small amounts of money so that you own a large percentage of the pie at the time of Exit.

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