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

Sramana Mitra: It’s not there. We hear from entrepreneurs from all of those places because we operate with a global footprint. In some ways, India is doing better. Latin America is behind because Latin America hasn’t had the technology outsourcing industry which is where the Indian technology product industry is coming from. That’s where they developed their skills.

Latin America hasn’t had that industry. Now there’s near-shoring. Technology talent is getting groomed in Latin America but it’s a very different market than the heavily technology savvy Indian market. Europe is also not a heavily technology savvy market. It doesn’t have the level of technology-trained

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

Sramana Mitra: What is your perspective of these global companies being started in various different places? India is just one of them. We are seeing companies coming out of Europe and Asia. There is a tendency or practice of them moving headquarters to Silicon Valley or somewhere in the US. What is your feeling about that? Is that something you require your companies to do? What’s your analysis?

Naren Gupta: The last few years, that has worked out well for companies. My belief in the long term is, that is going to be completely unnecessary. I think your headquarters will be in the cloud. Physical headquarters are going to become a thing of the past. Why do we move the headquarters to Silicon Valley? >>>

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

Sramana Mitra: Definitely, we encourage the philosophy of bootstrap first and raise money later. We have nothing against raising money but bootstrapping first is really critical to preserve ownerships. The amount of money that is being raised today, especially in these cloud businesses is crazy. By the time you raised that much money, that valuation is crazy.

Naren Gupta: I think one thing it does for you is it makes you frugal. I really believe that all great entrepreneurs are extremely frugal. It doesn’t mean you don’t spent the money to build your business, but you spend the money only when there is payoff. You only spend that much amount of money that’s necessary to get you a result. I’m a big fan of it. I started a company many many >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Naren Gupta 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. If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. The following interview with Naren Gupts was recorded in October 2014. 

Naren Gupta, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners – a firm with an excellent track record of investing in the Silicon Valley – India corridor, but with a global market point of view – shares his insights, nuggets, and interesting wisdom. He is a veteran investor who is also strikingly polite and humble.

Sramana Mitra: I want to tell you one story before we start the discussion and ask you questions. One of your 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Scott Sandell of NEA (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The counterpoint to that is entrepreneurship is happening at a much larger scale. It has become cool to be entrepreneurs. When we were starting out in the mid-90’s, it wasn’t cool. It was cool to go work for somebody else. If you drop out of MIT or Stanford to start a company, that’s a badge of honor. That’s nothing to apologize for. If you choose to go back, fine. If you don’t choose to go back, no problem.

It has become standard fare in a career choice. As a result, the level of experimentation around the world has exploded, which brings us to our next question. NEA actually had a global agenda for a long time now. Of course, 1Mby1M is a global program. What is your view of entrepreneurship on a global scale? What are you thinking? What is NEA thinking in terms of leveraging that opportunity and working with entrepreneurs around the world? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Scott Sandell of NEA (Part 3)

Scott Sandell: Just to be clear, I have been fortunate enough to have invested in and been a part of a number of unicorn companies. Not all of them were bootstrapped companies. I don’t think of that as an essential ingredient at all. What’s interesting is to think about why bootstrapping is a valuable discipline and why some of the companies have chosen to bootstrap and what it did for them.

I think the first and most fundamental thing is that it establishes an entrepreneur’s commitment to what they’re doing. If you invest your own capital or you take a lower salary, you become much more committed to making that company successful than if you just start off by taking somebody else’s money which, to some people, seems like a casual activity. I don’t mean to make light >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Scott Sandell of NEA (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: For those of you who don’t know the history of WebEx, the company went public and was eventually acquired by Cisco. It was a very successful story. It was one of the first two cloud companies in the history of the business. I want to get to Salesforce, but let me actually first get to Tableau because it’s a more contemporary company.

I’ve written about Tableau quite a lot recently. My understanding of Tableau was by the time they came to NEA for their funding, the company not only had customers and revenues, but it also had done an interesting OEM deal with Hyperion. Tell us a bit about what you saw in Tableau. It seems like an incredibly capital efficient company that generated immense return on investment. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is actually a pre-seed problem. There were 70,000 companies that received some sort of early-stage financing. In the last few years, these numbers have been very high but the number of companies that get venture financing remains at 1,200 or so.

In the middle where there are companies that have crossed over to being credible companies, that set of companies is actually much lower. A lot of companies are getting funding from, for a lack of better word, dumb investors who don’t know what they’re doing and just writing checks and creating a glut in the funnel. But it’s in the middle where you have good companies. >>>