1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anshu Sharma (Part 4)

Anshu Sharma: Every niche of a market is part of a bigger niche. Forget about software and enterprise software, because it may be hard for people to understand what I’m saying. Let’s say someone says, “I want to start building cables. I’m going to start manufacturing cable for electricity.” That’s a very small market. It’s a niche.

That’s how telcom in India started. They literally started out by building cables. Then they started building handsets for the Indian government’s MTNL selling phones. As everybody knows, that’s not a cable company. It’s not even a phone device company. The founders may not know exactly how big the market can be, but if you can’t articulate even one or two paths to a bigger market, that’s a limitation of your vision. It’s not really a >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dennis Joyce of Alliance of Angels (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Given what you just said and if you’ll then look back on the deal flow that you have seen, I have a different question which is slightly off-center. Obviously we are at a time in history where there is a huge number of people who are unhappy and struggling and under tremendous stress. Their livelihoods are going away because of a lot of the things we’re doing with technology. Are you seeing deal flow with interesting concepts in addressing some of their pain?

Dennis Joyce: We see interesting products all the time that are addressing social issues. One is an app that helps with drug addiction and >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines of Webb Investment Network (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Some examples in your current portfolio.

Jeremy Schneider: There’s many. For example, PagerDuty is a company that we’re huge fans of and feel very lucky to work with. We met them through YCombinator but what made us really want them is, they had a great team.

Two is that Maynard struggled with this problem throughout his career. Every time he took on a new CIO role, one of the first things he has to do is to set up the alerting and on-call system to make sure that the infrastructure stayed up. When we heard Alex and Andrew pitching PagerDuty, we immediately knew that this was a pain point and something that >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anshu Sharma (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We’ve covered Nutanix extensively. Our community knows Nutanix very well. At what stage did you get involved with Nutanix?

Anshu Sharma: It was the stage at which it was just an idea. I had known and interacted with Dheeraj at Salesforce while he was at his previous company. He and I had done some work at Oracle. When Dheeraj started incubating, I was in the group of people that was the first check in.

From this investment, I learned that if you back a team that understands the market they’re going after, things work out well. Essentially, that set the template for me for every other investment. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dennis Joyce of Alliance of Angels (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did BevyUp do?

Dennis Joyce: It allowed the sales representative from a place like Nordstrom to work with their customers in a shared shopping cart capacity. It was a co-shopping platform.

Sramana Mitra: When it came to you, what did they have?

Dennis Joyce: They had a very simple software platform and a vision for co-shopping.

Sramana Mitra: Did they have customers? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines of Webb Investment Network (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at your last 15 months deal flow, what do you see? What are the highlights of the trends you see in your deal flow?

Jeremy Schneider: One thing that has been exciting for us is that WIN has been around now for about eight years. In 2017, we started to see repeat entrepreneurs come through our network. We were really excited to have the opportunity to back our founders again. That was one exciting trend on a high level.

As for sectors, last year we started to explore new areas as a team and with our network. We started seeing >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anshu Sharma (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Do you lead deals?

Anshu Sharma: In Silicon Valley, even $100,000 doesn’t really make you a lead in any meaningful sense.

Sramana Mitra: Depends on what stage. Maybe we should visit the stage question first and then come back to the size question.

Anshu Sharma: It’s not about leading or not leading. The way I think about it is I love being the first check in. That’s what people typically call lead. The classical angel investing is you put in $25,000 and value the company at a few million dollars and then hope for a quick next round so >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dennis Joyce of Alliance of Angels (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Going back to my question, in terms of stage validation, what is the sweet spot? Are you looking to see customers already in place? Are you looking to see revenue in place before you are willing to write a check?

Dennis Joyce: We’re looking to see as many customers lined up. A founder has to really know their space from a sales perspective. A lot of the best business plans are the ones where the sales and marketing team have lined up customers, have created inroads for their first set of customers, or have validated the product. We’re constantly driving towards more sales.

A lot of times, we see companies that don’t have any customers lined up. That’s a huge risk. You need to be constantly working towards mitigating that risk all the time. I wouldn’t say there’s one aha moment. We’re always looking for the teams that have an understanding of their product, >>>