1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

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

Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-founder at Sorenson Ventures, talks about trends and his investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your funds. I know you have been working with your fund one and you are in the middle of raising your fund two. Fund one was about $100 million, right?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to highlight from your experience or portfolio before we move to the entrepreneur pitches?

Sasha Mirchandani:  What we’ve learned over the years is that large markets are critical. A lot of times, we go after really good entrepreneurs, but the reality is going after a very large market helps the cause tremendously. I encourage entrepreneurs to think through the markets they’re going after.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights of your portfolio currently? If you have exited some, you can talk about those as well.

Sasha Mirchandani: Before I co-founded Kae capital, we’ve done several investments which were very successful like Myntra. We did a company where I am still a shareholder. I was the first investor in a company called Fractal Analytics which we closed with 200 million apex partners.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 4)

Sasha Mirchandani: We have a company called Wysa, a mental health chatbox based out of Bangalore. The bulk of their opportunities is in the North American market. Post-COVID, we have all seen the value of taking care of people’s mental health. It’s a major problem, but it’s a stigma, which is unfortunate.

Wysa has done a phenomenal job of helping people in duress. As we go, we’re becoming a US business. We’ve got primarily most of these in Northern Europe, the US, and across Asia.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s unpack each of those a little bit. Let’s talk about B2C tech India-facing. Although we talked about the 1.3 billion population and a much larger market, internet consumers are a segment of spenders. They are the high-income educated group that is technologically savvy. Along the way entered Reliance Jio and democratized access in a big way. Have you started seeing a meaningful expansion of the Indian consumer space? 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You talked about the investor trends. Let’s talk about the sectors and the types of industries that have done well. There are several in the wings right now that are going public in the US. Druva is going to go public probably next year. Freshworks is going to go public relatively soon. There are others in the background. Of course, the whole e-commerce world has done well. How do you summarize the sector trends? How do you view the sector trends? What is your current investment thesis by way of sector trends? What did COVID do to the Indian startups?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (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 Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital, was recorded in December 2020.

Sasha Mirchandani is Founder and Managing Director of Kae Capital, an early stage fund focused on India. I’ve known Sasha for over a decade, and we discuss the evolution of the Indian startup industry at length.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens to the rest of the companies that don’t get the follow-on?

Elizabeth Yin: They continue just like everybody else. We help our companies regardless of how much we are investing. The natural question in people’s mind is, “If you don’t follow on, does that mean it’s a bad company?” The answer no.