1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global Ventures (Part 3)

Eric Benhamou: A third trend is the fact that we are now moving, very fast, to the world of mobile commerce where many transactions are being carried out. Apple Pay is going to change the game. Nevertheless, you still have other opportunities for cybercrime. The point is mobile commerce continues to have a very steep ascending trajectory.

Transaction fraud is a big threat for all these mobile commerce companies. We’re very focused on that space. It’s a challenging space because even if you have a really great solution to reduce the rate of fraud in mobile commerce, you have to affect the entire ecosystem for your tools to have an impact. It’s not enough to demonstrate on a small sample. This is something which we think will be addressed by small startup companies as opposed to big players. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jonathan Lewy of Investo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to parse what you are saying. In some cases, you go after Latin American companies where you can add value by introducing them into your Silicon Valley network. That is one of your value propositions to Latin American companies in the pre-seed stage. That’s one sector. You just provided an example of that.

You also invest in pure Silicon Valley companies where you provide Latin American networks in case they want to get into Latin America. That is another differentiated value proposition where you’re offering pre-seed financing and a Latin American network. These are two differentiated strategies in your investment that I have picked up so far. It seems like you also have a third kind of focus which is to find random good companies where you want to be pre-seed investors.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One other area along the lines of what you’re talking about that we are seeing is the notion of connectors. There are so many modular technologies in use right now. Enterprises are using so many different tools and so many cloud services. Connecting all these things together is a nightmare. It seems like there’s a whole connection layer opening up which also needs an infrastructure-level handling.

Eric Benhamou: We totally agree with that. It’s the same, general kind of opportunities. It’s dealing with contemporary, totally distributed, virtualized data centers where dependencies are extraordinarily complex and provisioning orchestration is also very complex. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jonathan Lewy of Investo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on what kinds of businesses you are investing in? Are these B2B or B2C?

Jonathan Lewy: We are agnostic. Initially, we invested in companies that had a global focus where we could help them enter the Latin American market. That was back in 2013. It was a way for us to be able to enter deals that were maybe difficult to enter but we could add value by helping them launch in Latin America. On the sector, we are completely agnostic. We have invested in different kinds of sectors.

Today, I would say we are more focused on bringing huge returns to our investors. It’s not really important if the market is US or Latin America. We’re trying to find the best potential deals to invest in as early as possible and also to bring a lot of value to

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global 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 Eric Benhamou was recorded in November 2014. 

Eric Benhamou, Managing Partner of Benhamou Global Ventures, was the CEO of 3Com, a pioneer in the networking space, and the key competitor to Cisco. He also ran Palm, the first Smartphone maker, that 3Com acquired, then spun out, and took it public. He provides an insightful window into the opportunities in the enterprise cloud infrastructure space, and in Cyber Security, and also explains why he is not necessarily looking for Unicorn companies to invest in. This, I might point out, is a highly unusual perspective in today’s VC universe, so you may want to pay attention to his analysis of the market. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jonathan Lewy of Investo (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 Jonathan Lewy was recorded in November 2017. 

Jonathan Lewy, Managing Partner at Investo, discusses pre-seed investment strategies and the Series A gap.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your seed investing activities. Let’s get to know each other.

Jonathan Lewy: I’m a Managing Partner of Investo. Investo is an early-stage fund that invests mainly in the US and in Latin America. We have made 56 investments. 30% of which in Latin America. We’ve tried investing in other parts of the world but our focus is more US and Latin America. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gus Tai of Trinity Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The whole experience of curated personal shopping is just barely starting to come into the fore. The computer science required to power that is going to deliver a very different kind of experience once that starts to come into existence. As Gus said, is it a large enough segment? Fashion is a gigantic segment. It’s one sector where I believe there’re going to be more venture-funded companies. Any thoughts on that?

Gus Tai: I do believe the concept behind Uuma would work today. When you’re thinking about starting a consumer-oriented company, it’s very important to understand how that company will be strongly differentiated from the other alternatives that customers will have.

One way to have that is to make it authentic to you and make sure that it’s a large enough market. In e-commerce, the >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Nguyen of IT Farm (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The next question I want to ask you is about unicorn mania. You said you have three. You actually experienced being a seed investor in companies that have gone on to raise very large amounts of money at very large valuations. As a seed investor, you could get buried under later-stage liquidation preferences. How do you protect yourself? What are the dynamics that you see in these kinds of deals?

Julien Nguyen: We do a pro rata every time.

Sramana Mitra: But how much can you do? You’re still a very small fund. If a company is raising a $500 million round, it’s not easy for you to do a pro rata. >>>