1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alastair Mitchell of EQT 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 EQT Ventures was recorded in December 2017.

Alastair Mitchell, Partner at EQT Ventures, talks about the European Startup Funding trends.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What size investment do you make? Help our audience get to know your investment activity.

Alastair Mitchell: EQT Ventures is a relatively new firm that is about 18 months old. We started out of Sweden, the Silicon Valley of Europe. It’s an amazing place with a phenomenal track record of building some global companies. When we started off, we were a $630 million fund. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: LinkedIn was a perfect channel to scale that company.

Amir Banifatemi: LinkedIn was a perfect channel. It had Initial property and strong momentum and growth into a much, much larger ecosystem globally. Another example which we’re still working on is Momentum Machine, a hardware company. It is based in San Francisco and builds robots to create hamburgers. You can order your burger the way you want it down to the right meat, with the right crispness, with more or less tomato or avocado. You can pretty much, on your way, order it on your phone. When you arrive, it is all ready for you and there’s no human intervention. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You kind of need a tribe of people who think the same way. If you want to work on interesting problems, but necessarily unicorn ideas, then you need other people around in the ecosystem who think like that instead of trying to force feed these kinds of ventures into the more traditional venture world, which operates in a very different way.

Between the 70,000 odd seed investments and about 1,200 series A investments, there is a huge series A gap that gets created. Unless you surround yourself with like-minded investors, it will be very difficult to mitigate the Series A gap, right? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Well, I think what you’re seeing around the world is a lot of concept arbitrage; concepts that have been tried in different places are being applied to different markets. 

Then you have big categories like cyber security that have been very active fund draws for a very long time, so there’re a very large number of cyber security companies out there. AI is the new attraction area for investors. So now, there aren’t that many wide open opportunities, so there are several niche opportunities. I’m very much in favor of niche opportunities. You can build very nice businesses for small amounts of capital around these niche opportunities, and I think those are very interesting opportunities. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Amir Banifatemi was recorded in October 2017.

Amir Banifatemi is the Founder and Managing Partner of K5 Ventures, a fund focused on pre-seed, seed, post-seed, and early-stage investments from Southern California. Amir is also a Board Member and former President of Tech Coast Angels, a group of 340 angel investors from Southern California.

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10 Big VCs Discuss Startups They Would Finance in Podcasts

Entrepreneurship does not equal financing. Entrepreneurship = Customers + Revenues + Profits. Financing is optional. Exit is optional. You may be surprised to hear that many VCs agree. Please listen to the following 30-minute podcast interviews with ten investors at large venture capital firms. Learn for yourself if it is time for your venture to raise funding, if your Total Available Market is large enough, and if your revenue shows enough momentum to be of interest to VCs.

Dave Hornik, General Partner, August Capital – Dave, as some of you may know, shocked the industry years ago by being the first VC to start blogging. His peers were aghast! Well, clearly, he saw something before everybody else, and today, many VCs blog, Tweet, and do all sorts of other things to engage in social media, now a dominant force in the industry. He discusses a number of points, of which, I want to particularly draw your attention to his views on the subject of Freemium.

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An Unconventional Set of Financing Paths: SRAX Founder Chris Miglino (Part 1)

If you think venture capital is the only path to funding companies, you are, obviously wrong. Chris talks about a whole other world of OTC.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Chris Miglino: I was born in Statten Island, New York. My parents grew up in the Lower East Side. My mom grew up in >>>

Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise funds at the Techstars demo day or did you raise funds afterwards?

Ryan Farley: Most of it was afterwards. We pieced together a round of a lot of individual angel investors. We didn’t have any VC funds in the million-dollar round. One of the 20 angel investors came from demo day. The rest came from our network or the Tech Stars network. Demo day is a great event, but it’s not like when you do your presentation, investors come running to you. That’s when the work begins; not when it ends.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise at this point? >>>