1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel, Partner at ff Venture Capital 2021 (Part 1)

John Frankel is Partner at ff Venture Capital. We had an extensive discussion about Covid’s impact on the startup ecosystem, the changes we notice, so forth.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s catch up. How has the pandemic year been? What are you doing these days?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Rajeev Madhavan: You have IoT devices like headphones where you do not need to replace the batteries. First, it untethers the device from all the electrical connections that you need. Second, it gives you the ability and the freedom of not being tied to a bunch of battery replacements that you have to go through.

It’s almost like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Once you are done with one end, you have to start from the opposite end. Here, you don’t need to do that. You have a self-charging environment. That is on one side.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

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

Rajeev Madhavan is Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures, a firm focused on seed-stage deep tech investing.

Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s session with a conversation with Rajeeev Madhavan, the founder and general partner of Clear Ventures. I have known him for a long time. He has been here before. You may have listened to his previous session. It has been a while and we want to catch up. Welcome back to the show!

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Eric Benhamou: Up until recently, waste management was done the same way as 30 years ago. You have big trucks collecting garbage from houses and office buildings to take them to recycling facilities. It would be dumped on a treadmill-like structure and you have people sorting out the waste. They send the recyclable waste to be sold as recycled material.

This is begging for disruption. It is a robotics, machine division, control, and analytics problem. Every neighborhood has a waste profile and this waste profile can be used to train AI to recognize objects. Robots can pick these objects efficiently while removing the safety risk from human beings. They can be recycled in ways that produce higher quality materials.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Eric Benhamou: Another example where Salesforce.com does not do a very good job at is mobile engagements. Despite the pandemic, we are still living in a world that is increasingly more mobile. You have to be able to capitalize on mobile engagement opportunities all the time. There are many things that are potentially limiting in Salesforce. That is the space that is available for younger companies who don’t have the architecture baggage of Salesforce. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I encountered Platform.sh a couple of years ago. I haven’t talked to them since, but it’s good to hear that they are thinking in this direction. I’ll look into that closely and see what additional coverage that deserves. Please go ahead and give us another example. 

Eric Benhamou: I have a more recent example. We had an investment that was just announced last week. It’s a young company called Evinced. They focus on an important emerging problem called digital accessibility. Websites have to be digitally accessible to everybody and that includes people with physical impairment.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the first one that you talked about where you are doing transcription, what vertical applications are you going after? 

Daniel Cohen: Most of their revenue comes out of the education industry. These are online courses that need to be transcribed. That market has been growing so fast because of COVID. Everything is happening online. That has been their main market. They are also operating in the legal market, which is a large market as well. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I have another question along those lines. When you are doing AI, typically machine learning and large data sets are involved, what are you seeing in your portfolio or deal flow in how entrepreneurs are accessing that data?

You are talking about taking the technology risks out, but you need data to take the technology risk out in AI companies. What are the best practices that you are observing in your orbit?