1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: One thing you haven’t mentioned about this company is the business model and the monetization. What validation did you have that these 500,000 downloads were actually converting into paying customers?

Sandeep Singhal: Good point. They had a $10 charge for deploying their client for curl. It was a command line interface that you could commit into Postman. They were charging for that. More importantly, we spoke to some of the users who were at enterprises.

One of them happened to be our portfolio company and we asked the VP Engineering of our portfolio company how much they >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Which companies would you call out as some of the best companies in the Indian tech industry today and the most likely ones to have successful exits?

Sasha Mirchandani: Let me break that into two answers. I’ll talk about companies that I like in no particular order. I can think of Tracto. We have a company called One MG in our portfolio, which we think is going to do very well. There’s a company called Zomato.

Sramana Mitra: Zomato’s business model is a big problem. That business model is not doing well globally. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 2)

Nathan Lustig: I got a call from one of the founding members of the founding team of Startup Chile who said that there was a family office that was looking to diversify and get into tech. I met up with my now partner Francisco Saenz whose family had done well.

They were the co-founders of one of the biggest mall companies in Latin America. They did a bunch of traditional things like retail and banking. They were ready to get into this next wave of technology that was just getting started in Latin America. They also wanted to give back to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

In 2014, we founded Magma Partners, which was $2 million of our own money that we invested across 32 companies. The >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think there are some question marks that are coming up now that there has been some runway that the venture capital industry in India has had to play in the market. The other question out of that is the length of time it takes to grow a company in India.

The traditional venture model that has succeeded in the west is of a very fast growth – zero to $100 million in five to six years. That is not happening in India. Both the Indian consumption, as you said, and even the global consumption market have not produced that level of growth pace. How do you analyze that? If it takes much longer to build a company, then that starts to be a problem for the venture capital timeline. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Same thing about MVPs. Are you looking for early customers that are international customers that they have built an MVP around?

Sandeep Singhal: Yes. There are two ways to do this. You can work with the Indian arms of global customers. You can work with them in the Indian market but have a clear understanding of how Indian operations are aligned with global operations. The Indian operations are very India-centric. It’s hard to take what you’ve built for the Indian client to the global market.

If you are looking to go down the path of working with an Indian multinational with the idea of using them as a stepping stone to >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma 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 Nathan Lustig was recorded in October 2017. 

Nathan Lustig, Managing Partner of Magma Partners, a Latin-America-focused fund. He talks about their strategy, as well as the dynamics of the LatAm market.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Magma Partners. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What size investment do you make?

Nathan Lustig: We’re a US-Latin American venture capital fund. We got started in 2014. In our first fund, we had $2 million of >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Singhal of Nexus 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 Sandeep Singhal was recorded in July 2016. 

Sandeep Singhal, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, is a key player in the India-US startup corridor. The discussion spans trends in SaaS, Open Source, and the Indian venture capital market in general. If you are working in the technology startup sector with an interest in India, this is a worthwhile discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some kind of basic level setting. The Indian SaaS startup scene has gone 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned the unicorn valuations of these e-commerce companies in India. The valuations are quite outrageous. How do you analyze what’s going on?

Sasha Mirchandani: There’s somebody paying for those companies that have taken them to big valuations. 2016 will be a very interesting year. It will be a year of reckoning. It will be a separation of the men from the boys. The jury is out on what will happen by the end of this year.

With capital now becoming far more difficult to source, I think there’s going to be more consolidation. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens regarding the company that I just mentioned with Amazon also breathing down their necks. All >>>