1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Scott Sandell of NEA (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 Scott Sandell was recorded in February 2015.

Scott Sandell, General Partner at NEA, is one of NEA’s star investors. He has been named to the Forbes Midas list every year since 2007, and has been involved with eight Unicorn companies including Salesforce.com, Workday, Webex, Tableau, and others. Scott discusses, specifically, Webex and Tableau in quite a bit of depth. In both companies, the scrappy, capital-efficient management of those businesses were striking!

Among Silicon Valley’s venture firms, NEA holds a special place in my own entrepreneurial journey, being the first VC firm that I >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Of your ventures that have raised venture money, have they raised venture money from these $75 million to $100 million funds, or have they raised money from the bigger funds?

Venktesh Shukla: They typically raise money from bigger funds because these are big spaces. One of them was how do you handle structured and unstructured data. Every company in the world has that problem and there is no solution. With the onset of predominantly mobile access, the old networking problems haven’t gone away. The new ones have piled on top of that.

Using machine learning, how do you isolate the problem when somebody complains that he’s seeing poor responsiveness? That’s a new category of problem. The third one is how do you create a virtual private cloud in minutes. The traditional route of >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You can play this with a very specific domain focus with a specific set of corporate around you. In some cases, these corporates are investing in these little micro-funds that play this game. It is a little side of the industry that is developing. There are these little niches which are not venture-scale niches. They’re not going to be venture-fundable. You can only play these if you work with little bits of seed money and then, pretty much, go straight to acquisition and not go out to raise a venture round.

Venktesh Shukla: Absolutely. It is to critical to understand not only the niche and the technical chops but also the relationship in that target ecosystem. Do you have a member in your team that has that visibility and relationship with the key players in the industry? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll provide a bit of commentary for the audience on some of the things that you mentioned as trends. We’ve also seen this unstructured data problem being solved. For a couple of decades, there have been major companies that have been formulated on this unstructured data problem. Autonomy was one of them that went very big.

Today, one of the trends that we’re seeing is this whole unstructured data problem being solved for specific verticals or specific functional areas and solutions built on top of that unstructured data problem in a cloud-

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (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 Venktesh Shukla was recorded in September 2017.

Venktesh Shukla, founder of TiE Angels and General Partner Monta Vista Capital, discusses some shifts happening in the world of seed investing.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about TiE Angels and how you work with investors and entrepreneurs.

Venktesh Shukla: TiE Angels is a 7-year-old organization that is a collection of individual investors who, in general, tend to focus on B2B companies. The whole idea is that the collective wisdom of the group helps make better decisions, >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With T.M. Ravi of The Hive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned BPO jobs going from US to India and now being replaced by bots. That is eliminating all jobs. Same thing is happening in manufacturing. Manufacturing went from America to China and now it’s getting automated. If we get to self-driving cars, there won’t be Uber drivers. There will be self-driving Uber rides.

At this point, my estimate is in the next 30 to 50 year timeframe, we’re looking at a real possibility of there being very few jobs. What was eye-opening for me is how deep the fears are. I had a little afternoon event on Saturday at my house for Smith College Computer Science group. There were these young women with extremely fantastic resumes. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With T.M. Ravi of The Hive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you take us through a couple of your portfolio companies that are really interesting? What can we learn from them?

T.M. Ravi: In the Internet of Things space, the big shift is the growing commoditization of devices. Much of the value is moving to applications and data. That commoditization is not just happening on the consumer level but also on the industry level.

As economies like China become better and better at manufacturing, companies like GE realize that the $50-million rotating devices like turbines are being produced with pretty good quality in other countries also. There’s the general shift >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of areas of interest for these kinds of seed investments, what degree of relevance do you need with SAP’s current technology? Does it need to be built on HANA? Does it need to be built on something else within the SAP stack? What are the constraints?

Max Wessel: There are no constraints from an underlying technology perspective. Obviously, we would love for everybody in the world to build on HANA and on SAP cloud platform, but we also understand that there are plenty of viable open source components and cloud infrastructure providers that startups want to work with. Instead of requiring that technical definition >>>