
Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures, and formerly Head of Corp Dev at Twitter, SuccessFactors, and McAfee and Akamai discusses exit strategy from the buy-side perspective at length.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you talk a little bit about your background in corp dev doing acquisitions from the buy side from various significant companies before you switched to the venture side.
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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Deepak Balakrishna, Co-founder CEO of Adya, which was acquired by Qualys. Deepak was in the 1Mby1M program, and I had introduced him to Qualys. We reviewed his lessons from the trenches, steering a Bootstrapping to Exit transaction.
CMD
As for entrepreneur pitch, we had Bijay Mitra and his team from Bhubaneswar, India, pitch CMD, a services company that aims to transform into a product business.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Seong Kim, Corporate Strategy & Development for Chegg Inc., discusses exit strategy within EdTech.
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Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures, and formerly head of Corp Dev at Twitter, SuccessFactors, McAfee and Akamai, discusses exit strategy from the buy-side perspective at length.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | RSS
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Seong Kim, Corporate Strategy & Development for Chegg Inc., to discuss exit strategy within EdTech.
Relai
As for entrepreneur pitches, we had 1Mby1M Premium member Claudia Giannoni from London, UK, pitching Relai, a real estate marketplace leveraging the SaaS-enabled marketplace trend that we like a lot.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Sramana Mitra: What range would you put on your first two categories?
Steven Mitzenmacher: It’s so subjective. I used to live at a time when an enterprise software company could expect a 2.5 to 3 times revenue to be an appropriate multiple. Then you get into the SaaS world where it’s 30 to infinity times. Similarly, now being in the world of professional services, you used to live in a world where 1 to 1.5 times was appropriate. Now you see sexy cloud consultancy companies selling for 4 to 6 times revenue.
>>>Sramana Mitra: If we want to send you deals to look at, you are a perfectly good point?
Steven Mitzenmacher: Absolutely. Our mandate is to be knowledgeable enough that we can be a quick filter. Quick no’s are better than long maybe’s. We can help you intelligently navigate the organization in terms of where your opportunities are.
Sramana Mitra: I know you’ve recently switched to Rackspace. Have you created this map already? Do you have a sense of what is going to be your focus?
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