209th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Anshu Sharma, Angel Investor

Anshu Sharma is an active angel investor who invests in Silicon Valley and India. Anshu has deep experience in the enterprise software space, and a thoughtful, sophisticated perspective. He is one of the early investors in Nutanix, which currently has a market cap of over $8.5 billion in the public market.

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207th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Dennis Joyce, Alliance of Angels

Dennis Joyce, Investor and Member of Alliance of Angels, talks about the largest Angel group in the Pacific Northwest.

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6 Investors Discuss their Portfolios via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Entrepreneurs can learn a lot about investors from their process of evaluating the funding-worthiness of startups. Within the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum, I have asked investors to talk a bit about their own investment portfolios. What have you invested in and why? When did the entrepreneur come to you? At what stage and with what metrics? What convinced you to invest? In the following interviews, each investor shares the kinds of businesses in their portfolios and explains why they were drawn to those companies.

Susan Mason, General Partner at Aligned Ventures, talks about the dysfunctions of the broader venture capital model, and what her firm is doing to address those. Excellent conversation.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Padmaja Ruparel of Indian Angel Network (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the fund?

Padmaja Ruparel: $70 million. The IAN platform represents a way of raising money from $30,000 to almost $7 million. All they need to do is to keep performing and growing the company and money will be available. I think that this is the new gap that we have identified. This is the new gap where we have positioned the fund. The second that we have done is 60% of the fund is raised.

We started operations and investments in six companies all in a period of a quarter. Interestingly, the entire 60% has been raised in India. This is domestic money. It’s hard to raise money in India and therefore, they raise a lot of money overseas. We have >>>

7 Investor Podcasts Cover the Series A Gap

In the current investment climate, where capital is moving further and further upstream with all these larger funds wanting to invest in much larger Series A deals, entrepreneurs (and investors) need to find a way to mitigate the Series A gap. There’s clearly a Series A gap, with 50,000 to 70,000 seed-stage investments happening while only 1,200 to 1,500 Series A’s take place. Each of the following investors recently discussed this situation with me, along with other current entrepreneur-investor issues, during 30-minute podcast interviews. Startup entrepreneurs who need financing must be mindful of the Series A gap.

Nate Redmond, Managing Partner at Alpha Edison, a VC who has put trust-driven ventures at the center of his investment thesis. It’s a very interesting conversation for both entrepreneurs and investors to listen to.
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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Padmaja Ruparel of Indian Angel Network (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Sapience was our portfolio company as well. What about the more recent ones? What have you invested in the last couple of years?

Padmaja Ruparel: There is LogiNext which is in the logistics space partnered with Sapience. If you look at FarEye, they are tracking logistics. This is a completely real-time tracking system. They partner not only with e-commerce players but a lot of other B2C players. There are companies in the agri space that have grown.

In India, the marginal farmers don’t have money for capital equipments. Companies are bringing the equipment on a lease model. The small farmers are able to rent out these equipments by the hour. It’s like Uberization of farming equipment. It’s very interesting >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Padmaja Ruparel of Indian Angel Network (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit about geography as it pertains to IT and IT-enabled services. That includes healthcare IT. Our audiences are focused on IT-enabled services. One core algorithm that we have picked up from the way Indian investors are operating by working with them is that they like all the SaaS, cloud, AI, and all of these companies to be facing the US market or the global market.

When it comes to those kinds of ventures, they prefer that these companies do not sell into the Indian B2B market. They want the B2B SaaS to be sold to the global market. Of course, there is the consumer B2C products that are India-facing that people are still interested in. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Padmaja Ruparel of Indian Angel Network (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Padmaja Ruparel was recorded in December 2017. 

Padmaja Ruparel is Co-founder, Indian Angel Network (IAN), and Founding Partner, IAN Fund. She has been a key player in shaping India’s still somewhat nascent startup eco-system. Those interested in Indian startups and the funding trends should read on.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Indian Angel Network and the journey you’ve had building it. What is going on there now? What is working? What is not working? What have you learned through this process? >>>