1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar (Part 1)

Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar, and a long-time player in the Indian startup ecosystem discusses Exit options for Indian startups and other topics.

Sramana Mitra: I know you’ve been in the industry for a very long time and have been following the evolution of the Indian venture capital ecosystem for a long time. Let’s start diving into a bit of your background. Then let’s introduce Iron Pillar.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We are big fans of capital-efficient businesses that are not necessarily chasing unicorns. Partly, the problem I have with this unicorn chasing is flushing these companies with too much capital. Then the exit bar is so high that companies end up in this twilight zone where they’re burning too much cash, can’t raise more money, and can’t find an exit because the valuation requirements are too high to have a profitable exit.

I’m pleased to hear that you are acknowledging that there are other ways of building businesses. Now there is a question though. How much exit capacity exists in the region? If there are 5,000 to 10,000 startups, how do you think this is going to play out?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Sometimes when you’re in a fundraising cycle, you may not be quite ready for the investor to write the check, but you build the relationships and show traction. At some point, it will converge potentially if you know what your target is. Pawel is explaining that the target is $50,000 MRR.

If you start the relationship when you’re at the $10,000 point, you have to inch your way up to $50,000 MRR before the investment is going to happen. Investor relationship management is important. If the market is of interest and the team is of interest, sometimes investors just take a little bit of time to see how you’re performing. That is the notion of investor-entrepreneur fit.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 2)

Pawel Maj: We would like to have about 10 to 15 companies in our portfolio at any given moment. We like to get hands-on since our history comes from the private equity market. For pre-seed or seed, we invest smaller tickets but much in larger number of projects to spread the risk. In our case, we don’t have a large enough team to have a large operation to be able to provide hands-on experience for 50 companies. This is why we prefer to invest at a later stage after the product-market fit.

Sramana Mitra: The reason I’m probing this point is, there are a bunch of things that happen between pre-seed, seed, pre-Series A, and Series A. You have to achieve product-market fit, which means you have to get some customers to say that they’re willing to write a check for this product.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 1)

Pawel Maj, Investment Director, Warsaw Equity Group, discusses post-seed and pre-series A funding in Eastern and Central Europe in the context of his firm’s investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about what’s up in Poland. You are in a semi-warzone. What’s happening with the startup ecosystem?

Pawel Maj: The war is in another country, but we had a huge wave of immigrants coming from Ukraine. We already admitted almost five million immigrants. These are difficult times. It’s great to see the Polish population come together to help the neighbors.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You would invest in somebody who has great talent and great domain knowledge if that person is proposing something in that domain where the problem is identified. Isn’t that a concept stage investment in a very talented person?

Cameron Kramlich: Sure, it would be. Looking at somebody who has a general area they want to work in and has enough neuroplasticity to realize that whatever is on the pitch deck is going to change 15 times. That’s why if it’s just a 10-slide, that’s great. It needs to be more than that. What we’re looking for is people that we can coach and help grow.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll give you a bit of my comment. We see a lot of investors and we see a lot of entrepreneurs and their needs. One thing that I really like about what you’re saying is there’s a tremendous bias in the industry against solo entrepreneurs. The truth is a vast majority of entrepreneurs start solo. Along the way, they build teams and products. Even the founder of ServiceNow started as a solo entrepreneur.

I don’t believe that solo entrepreneurship doesn’t work. Of course, you have to bring in all the skills and resources around you, but you can do it step by step. The fact that you are open to working with solo entrepreneurs and building the team around them is actually a very interesting angle.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You said you invest mostly in enterprise software. Can you elaborate more about what is your enterprise software investment thesis? Let’s talk about your enterprise software strategy.

Cameron Kramlich: Our core strategy has to do with the shape of our team. Our deepest background is in software. Software is quite complicated. You have everything from platform plays to applications. When you look at our team, we have a whole bunch of experts that are part of companies of all sizes. We’ll look at a company that needs a good CMO. We’ll take a public company CMO who’s looking for a new project for a couple of months. We’ll put him in that job. We get a company that needs a CTO or an engineer.