1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shane Neman, Principal at Neman Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: There was little due diligence before people were willing to write checks at that time.

Shane Neman: In retrospect, I wouldn’t have given myself a check. We got almost $2 million. I wasn’t part of the finance portion of things. I was the CTO. We built this company and hired people. We built a platform that was essentially Microsoft 365.

We called it utilizing computing because we didn’t have the word for SaaS. You had to pay a monthly fee just like you would pay a monthly fee for your utility bill. We would get your apps delivered to you through a web portal. We built essentially an AppStore because you could pick which apps you wanted for how many users and pay for them on a monthly basis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shane Neman, Principal at Neman Ventures (Part 1)

Shane Neman is the Founder of EZ Texting, JoonBug.com, and Principal at Neman Ventures. Shane has bootstrapped two companies as a solo entrepreneur, found successful exits for both, and is now an investor. Needless to say, he has no bias against solopreneurs. 

Sramana Mitra: We are going to spend quite a bit of time today with Shane Neman. I met Shane a while ago in his Entrepreneur Journey story. I found a lot of interesting insights and lessons from his journey that I wanted to highlight and showcase for you. That is what we are going to do for a while today then we will see what else we have time for. Welcome to the show, Shane.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures 2021 (Part 6)

Michael Smerklo: I am passionate about encouraging people. The start of my book is called Mr. Monkey. He was the voice in my head that said, “You will never be successful. You won’t do it.” The book is about trying to give aspiring entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs the mental tools to take that first step.

If you read the media they could think, “I don’t have an idea that is as big as Facebook.” That is nonsense. Take the step and begin the journey and to build to your point, build a business with five or no employees. Whatever it is, you can change your life and others. You don’t have to get caught up in the media craze. I love that you are carrying this flag.  

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Michael Smerklo: Don’t let the idea that your idea isn’t big enough prevent you from get going. See where it goes. I am in line with what you said, and I am so passionate about it. Even though my day job is as a venture capitalist, I say to entrepreneurs all the time that if they can avoid working with people like me and get your business going and bootstrap it and own a bigger chunk of it, do that. That is 90% of all the businesses of the world. 

Sramana Mitra: Yes, and VCs look to go $0 to $100 million in revenue in 5 to 7 years. That is hyper-growth. Hypergrowth is not a natural state of business.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There are three trends that I think have accelerated. People are at home and are working at home. Their whole social life has gone out of the window. There is more family time when you have the right conditions and so forth, but people also have a lot more time to think.

One of the phenomena out of this is people have started tinkering with doing a company on the side. They held on to their job, and they started thinking about starting a company on the side. In our program, we have a name for this. It’s called Bootstrapping with a Paycheck. We identified this phenomenon a while back and we started institutionalizing it.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I will tell you one thing that you may want to take note of. On the coast, there is also the kind of venture that you are looking for. They are capital-efficient ventures run by people who don’t want to play the unicorn game of flushing companies with capital. This came to be known as blitz scaling with capital. The philosophy that we espouse is being practiced on the coast as well. 

Michael Smerklo: It is great that you call that out. I had worked in Silicon Valley for 18 years. I was part of an operating team that ran a company there. I know the Valley well. It is a mentality that Next Coast Ventures is more interested in rather than a geographic limitation. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the companies that you have invested in the themes that are accelerating? What has been their journey? Give us a few examples.

Michael Smerklo: One of the examples on the healthcare side is a company called Everlywell in Austin, Texas. We invested in them four years ago. They do direct consumer lab testing. It was helping consumers with the massively frustrating situation of going to see a doctor and then the doctor tells you to get a lab test. You get the lab test, get some purple paper with results that your doctor doesn’t interpret with you, and you are left with a frustrating experience.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

Michael Smerklo is Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures. We have a terrific conversation about a range of issues including solo founders and their ill-treatment by VCs.

Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s session with a conversation with Micheal Smerkio, co-founder and managing partner at Next Coast Ventures. Welcome back to the show.