Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Are you selling direct? Are you selling through the channel? How are you going to market?

Manmeet Singh: Since 2013, we have had a direct sale strategy. We have Compuware as a reseller. Our product is available to be downloaded from Hortonworks on Hadoop, which recently went public. People can download and play with the product, but obviously, it will be a direct strategy because Hortonworks doesn’t want to resell our product right now.

Sramana Mitra: So far, you’ve mostly sold direct? >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2012, you had around $1.5 million in revenue and you had a bunch of customers. In 2013, Samsung expressed interest in both becoming a customer and an investor. That’s when you started seeing the traction from the VCs?

Manmeet Singh: Yes. Toba Capital moved faster than anybody else. My old angels have always kept the company alive. We still had a note of about $3 million to $4 million. >>>

Successfully Crowdfunding Design Driven Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Design-driven startups are ideal for attracting funding on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Crowdfunder. However, competition for funds is fierce and only the top percentile receives significant funding. For example for Kickstarter “Design” projects only the top half percentile receive funding in excess of half a million and the average funding is $7,500. Thus, funding on Kickstarter follows the Power Law where the top percentile receives the bulk of the pledges and the funding then dwindles down to nothing. >>>

Startup Accelerator Applying Multisided Crowdsourcing

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Identifying and attracting potential startup firms has so far been a game of chance, with far too much money chasing far too few opportunities. Those most experienced at this game are leading Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms (VC firms). Studies at Harvard University show that entrepreneurs receiving financing from VC firms have only an eighteen percent chance of success. However, a learning curve does take place and if those same entrepreneurs succeed and obtain VC backing for a second startup, they now have a thirty percent success rate. >>>

Design Consultancies — The Perfect Platform for Launching Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen and Martin Willers

The world is experiencing a boom in interest around startups as well as in design and the combination of the two is seen as the perfect cocktail for creating new and innovative offerings. Despite this perfect marriage, startups still seem to be baffled about how and when to engage design. This begets the question “Why don’t design consultancies create startups?” >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve said several times that one of the organizing principles of your portfolio is that you want the business model to be fair for the customer. Can you talk about this a bit? You are coming from where the customer will subscribe into your games and you started monetizing right away. Now the world has moved to free-to-play, you don’t monetize games right away. It has a gestation period and you start monetizing later. How do you determine what is fair? How long does it take to reach the level of monetization that you were earlier monetizing at? What are the economics of the business now?

Scott Hartsman: Let me start out with the highest philosophical point. Here’s how I think of things in terms of fair and how we think about them internally as a whole. There are two ways to think about the psychology of sales in free-to-play games. Number one is when I pay for a thing, I get a thing that I genuinely value and that I’m happy for. >>>

Harvard Business Review Series on the Seed Capital Gap

Crowdfunding Startups: Opportunities and Bottlenecks

There has been a bit of action for a while now in the crowdfunding world, and certain startups have been able to get themselves off the ground using the Kickstarter / Indiegogo style sites. By and large, these types of financings have gone to companies that are building physical products, digital games, etc. Fundings have also happened for some causes, films, books and art projects that are typically not businesses. Equity crowdfunding has been signed into law in the US through the JOBS Act, but it awaits the SECs directives on the precise rules governing the system. In Europe, it is legal and already in practice. Hopefully, other parts of the world will also start seeing the infrastructure develop shortly.

For our domain of focus, the primary concern is financing digital startups: technology and technology-enabled services. Typically, these are difficult to assess, high-risk companies, and amateur investors from the “crowd” are unlikely to be able to perform adequate due diligence to have a sophisticated investment thesis.

However, there is one category of investors who will have an excellent vantage point from which to assess new ventures.
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