573rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Steve Eskenazi, Angel Investor

Steve Eskenazi is an Angel Investor, and we had a number of interesting trend conversations.

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573rd Roundtable Recording with Steve Eskenazi, Angel Investor

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Roundtable Recap: Startup Trends Discussion with Steve Eskenazi

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Angel investor Steve Eskenazi. We had a number of interesting trend conversations.

iBay

As for entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Pradheep from Singapore pitching iBay. The company has significant traction.

Capriquota

Next we had Olabode Qudus from Ogun, Nigeria, pitch Capriquota, a concept stage venture with a little bit of validation.

BEI.RE

Then we had Ranga Krishnan from San Jose, California, pitch BEI.RE, a prop tech venture that also has some degree of validation.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francis Simisim of Original Pitch Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How does the Filipino ecosystem interface with the rest of the Southeast Asian ecosystem? Where are the partnerships that you’re seeing?

Francis Simisim: Philippines is an island on its own. It’s somewhat purgatory. We are raising smaller money than a regional VC’s ticket size. If they raise locally, it’s a big round and it’s too expensive. We are in a tough place. We are still establishing a lot of the regional partners.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francis Simisim of Original Pitch Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is an example of a local problem that is non-copycat? We have a term for that. We use a more elegant term for that. We call it concept arbitrage.

I’ve been extensively involved in the Indian startup ecosystem. I always encourage concept arbitrage because it’s a very good way for entrepreneurs to learn how to be entrepreneurs and get things going.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francis Simisim of Original Pitch Ventures (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 Francis Simisim was recorded in June 2019.

Francis Simisim is Partner at Original Pitch Venture Capital based in the Philippines. We had a very good discussion on how that ecosystem is developing.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about yourself as well as Original Pitch Ventures.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Bice of Verge Fund (Part 5)

Bill Bice: If you have a business and you want help in growing, there are literally thousands of options out there. It’s another way of saying that nobody has gotten great at doing it. That’s the problem that we’re tackling.

We’ve built a marketing automation system that automates whole industries instead of being designed to be implemented in one company at a time. The data advantage that we get from that is really significant. Internally, we’re a SaaS company, but externally, we deliver Marketing-as-a-Service.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Bice of Verge Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some examples from your investment portfolio. What have you invested in? What are the highlights of your portfolio?

As you describe them, what state did you encounter these companies in? What attracted you to them?

Bill Bice: Let’s start with Intellicyt that I just mentioned. It was a pre-revenue, pre-LLC company. My partner found the technology at University of New Mexico and helped match that with an entrepreneur who had experience in this market.