1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rehan Yar Khan of Orios Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you analyze Flipkart in that context? Has Flipkart gone on to build this whole distribution and logistics infrastructure, which is not asset-light at all?

Rehan Yar Khan: Flipkart is not as asset-heavy as building channel stores. It’s not as asset-light as Snapdeal. It does have some backend, but the entire frontend is absent.

Sramana Mitra: The asset-light versus asset-heavy, in your definition, is whether you need physical infrastructure or not in terms of building stores of having store front? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ron Heinz of Signal Peak Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of points to add to what you said is, I started seeing a bit of an inflection point in Utah after Omniture. Omniture was a very visible success out of Utah. Omniture went public. Adobe acquired Omniture. That has been the milestone. The other thing, from a trend point of view is, companies from Utah have done great bootstrapping.

Both Pluralsight and InsideSales were bootstrapped to a very large degree. They did not actually take much early stage capital at all. By the time they took capital, that capital was a lot of capital and not your traditional

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rehan Yar Khan of Orios Venture Partners (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 Rehan Yar Khan was recorded in September 2016. 

Rehan Yar Khan is General Partner at Orios Venture Partners, and an early investor in the Indian startup scene. Rehan’s core focus is on the Indian consumer opportunity, and that is what we focus on in this discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by telling our audience a bit about your fund and your investments in recent years.

Rehan Yar Khan: We are an India-centric venture capital fund. I’ve been an investor for the last 10 years. I set up the fund >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ron Heinz of Signal Peak 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 Ron Heinz was recorded in May 2017. 

Ron Heinz, Founder and Managing Director at Signal Peak Ventures, a venture firm operating mostly in the Rocky Mountain corridor, discusses what’s happening in Utah, as well as Colorado and Arizona. We’ve covered a number of companies from that area including Pluralsight, InsideSales, Steals.com, Ping Identity, and InfusionSoft. Today, there are over a thousand funded startups in those geographies. Bootstrapping runs heavy in the startup culture of the region.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you tell us about Signal Peak Ventures. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think it was in 1997. I was funding a company of my own that I had founded. We did all our product development for very little money in India. It was before the trend where you could be building companies in India. I met with 36 venture capitalists before I could find one to actually do this with me. That was NEA.

It was hell. People were telling me, “We don’t fund companies with product development in India.” A decade later if you were in Silicon Valley and not doing product development in India, you were a fool. These kinds of 

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What stage did you invest in Arkin?

Sandeep Singhal: We came in at the very start. We seeded the company. We expect to see more of this going forward. It’s just very efficient if the go-to market strategy is being developed in the US with team members that are based here and the MVP is built out in India. We’ve seen that in the past with Druva and PubMatic. We believe that we’ll see more of that approach.

Sramana Mitra: Especially in the enterprise context. Companies that are selling to global SMEs are actually marketing and selling from India as well and getting further along before they choose to move to the US in

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The India e-commerce market is an active market, but it still operates on this cash-on-delivery mode. Are there indications that this is going to change and people will feel more comfortable with providing credit cards on the internet? That’s going to accelerate the trends.

Sasha Mirchandani: It has to change. It’s a mindset change more than anything else. It’s hard to scale without credit cards. You can’t have cash-on-delivery going on forever. Credit card is going to chip away at COD over the next couple of years. It’s something that we’re going to live with for longer than I would have liked. It’s inevitable. It has to happen. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 3)

Nathan Lustig: Another company that fits that model is a company called GroupRaise, which went through Startup Chile. They’re originally from Houston. They now have an office with eight people in Houston, about 15 people in Santiago, and about 40 in the Philippines. What they do is they allow anybody to book an event at a restaurant. Anybody knows how to book one to eight people restaurant reservation. You can go to OpenTable or something similar.

What if you want to have a group of 20 or 100? They have 10,000 or so restaurants in the United States where you can book a big group event. The cool part is the restaurant actually competes over your business by donating 5% to 20% of the bill to the group >>>