1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your investment thesis around online education right now?

Jason Stoffer: I don’t really do education either online or offline. The biggest area of opportunity in education is post-college. What you see is an environment where when I graduated college in 1999, it was very easy to get a job. You had a job in a consulting firm or a CPG firm.

Today it’s very different. Not only is it hard to find your first job but skills change so quickly. The area I like is how do you train post-college to gain the skills the workforce demands. It’s really telling that unemployment is such a big problem for college graduates. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch topics a little bit to look at some other categories that you tend to invest in. You like to invest in education it seems – online education. I saw that you’ve invested in Course Hero. We’ve done a big story on Andrew. I love what Course Hero is doing. Huge numbers of college students are hanging out on Course Hero both sharing and using course notes.

What I like about the business is it has a very clear monetization model. It’s not some foo-foo business. I love the fact that Course Hero is essentially a subscription business. A large number of their users are subscribing. Andrew bootstrapped that business for a long time. I think it was already about $10 million before they raised money. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: My observation is the venture capital industry needs to really get a lot more savvy and sophisticated about the discipline of merchandising if it really wants to play in this B2C brand world. Especially in domains like fashion and design it’s all about merchandising and curation.

Jason Stoffer: Look at Mickey Drexler. It’s all about the merchant. It’s about this magical outcome that takes place in combining the art and the science of retailing. That’s what we’re looking for in investments. We have a new investment called Dolls Kill. It’s almost an online analog to what Hot Topic was a couple of decades ago when I was growing up. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (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 Jason Stoffer was recorded in September 2014. 

Jason Stoffer, General Partner at Maveron – a consumer-only venture capital firm that has had a successful track record of investing in e-commerce ventures ranging from eBay, Shutterfly, and Groupon to the more recent Zulily, as well as education ventures – discusses e-commerce opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start off with e-commerce. I know you have invested in other things. We’ll discuss your other investments and your investment thesis in more general terms as well. To begin with, let’s talk about a couple of your e-commerce investments. What is your current thought process around the industry? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Oded Hermoni of Rhodium Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We are in 2017. Lots of stuff have already been built. Nowadays, there aren’t so many wide open opportunities for doing fundamental things the way Salesforce or Facebook did it. The incumbents are incredibly powerful. They have monopolistic power.

We have a lot of capital in the system right now. If you’re managing a chunk of money, you have to think of an investment thesis of where you can really get returns. One of the observations I’ve had is that if everybody is chasing unicorns, it’s not going to work because there aren’t that many unicorns. Unicorns, by definition, 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Dougery of Inventus Capital (Part 5)

John Dougery: I think that the point about SaaS is all about market size, but we have a different view. We have been doing SaaS companies since we started 10 years ago out of India. We’ve always had a thesis that business software companies are going to be very interesting product opportunities. That came out of our own perspective where we don’t have a geographic bias.

We’re going to invest in startups in Silicon Valley. We’re going to invest in startups in India. We do it out of a thesis-based approach and say, “Which one is the best product?” Even business software that is addressing the Indian market ultimately is going to face competition from overseas or they have to go overseas. They have to have a thesis that they can be number one. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Oded Hermoni of Rhodium Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about industry sector? Do you have preferences? Do you have concentrations? Do you have expertise in specific sectors?

Oded Hermoni: We usually invest a lot in media. A couple of months ago, you covered two Israeli companies Outbrain and Tabula. We invested in Outbrain very early on. We also invested in a company called Gizmo, which is a US-based company. One of our latest investments is a company called comedy.com that now has 3.5 billion views per month. Those were our investments in media.

We have some consumer-related companies. We have security companies such HexaTier that was acquired by Huawei. We have >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Dougery of Inventus Capital (Part 4)

John Dougery: We had a thesis around services-based businesses in e-commerce for consumers. Financial technologies are a big segment there. We invested in Policybazaar, which is the leading online insurance marketplace by a factor of 10 over its competition now. It was about a factor of five when we first invested.

It’s getting increasing commissions from the insurance providers for selling. We’re the lead investor in FundsIndia, which is the leading online mutual fund marketplace for consumers in India. Again, it provides price discovery, understanding of these products so you can stay away from the products with a high load or an insurance where you cannot be taken advantage of. >>>