1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 1)

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

Venktesh Shukla is General Partner at Monta Vista Capital. I have known Venk for more than 20 years, and we discussed both industry trends and his fund strategy.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are your predictions on post-COVID trends? What are you seeing and predicting? What kind of businesses would you like to invest in the post-COVID era? 

Fabrice Grinda: Crises, in general, are extraordinary accelerators of underlying trends. They are also extraordinary generators of productivity growth. If you examine the 20th century, the Great Depression was the time where we had the highest productivity growth in the US.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your strategy is to go for the unicorns, is that right? 

Fabrice Grinda: Yes and no. With all of the companies that we invested in, we want them to have the control to be a billion-dollar company. If you are building a venture startup, you need to be able to sell and get 10x return on investment. With that said, in our case, we have had over 150 exits and we’ve made money in over half of these deals. Our average is 4x. We don’t need you to be a unicorn.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some examples of what you’ve invested in that are representative of your investment thesis. Pick one that you are proud of and one that would tell us more about your company. 

Fabrice Grinda: First of all, we are thesis-driven, so we think through and ask ourselves, “Okay, where is the world heading?” Our answer is in marketplaces and meta trends. We have a specific thesis of three things that are happening right now in marketplaces.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 1)

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

Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs, discusses his firm’s investment thesis around marketplaces.

Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s session with a conversation with Fabrice Grinda, the founder partner at FJ Labs. Let’s get you acquainted with our audience. Tell us a bit about your background as well as FJ Labs. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about areas in which you are looking for companies.

Ashmeet Sidana: There are two recent trends that I have observed and have started talking about. One builds on an old trend that data is the new oil. This is where data is an important commodity that drives businesses like Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There are a lot of SaaS platforms that are entrenched in enterprise workflow and they have a lot of customers. The one that you are talking about is going after customers that are deeply entrenched in Zoom for example.

To what extent is a company like this leveraging that deep penetration of another platform? How close is the partnership with Zoom for example? 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: A few weeks ago, I talked with an old friend of mine who I’ve known for 20 years. His name is Murli Thirumale. He’s done several startups in the storage space. He built Portworx and sold it to Pure Storage. Pure storage is like an old storage company that was a hardware company that is trying to go from hardware to software.

They are trying to climb up the stack and the Portworx acquisition is perfect for their mode of going up the stack. I was telling Murli, “You guys should do Platform-as-a-Service so that you can be considered the center of innovation at that layer.”