1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about companies that are uniquely Indian? What about enterprise software that is facing the global market? India is facing e-commerce and the whole digital commerce world. What about categories or styles of companies that are uniquely Indian? Is that on your radar?

Vishesh Rajaram: If they are on the enterprise side, they will be on our radar. The Indian enterprise market is still early. I think the SMB market and their ability to pay is still early in the Indian market.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The motivation for the infrastructure layer, whether it’s storage, security, or networking, is not very different. Timeline-wise, it’s behind. Let’s play out the argument with me for a second.

For an application layer SaaS company that has achieved $200 million ARR by selling one product, there are a lot of companies in the $100 ARR range with one product. They do not have to move out of that one product and broaden the portfolio to be a successful public company that goes to $1 billion in revenue.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the second company? What sector was it in?

Vishesh Rajaram: I’m not going to name the second one too much. This is a company that was developing tools to enable developing 3D and VR content for e-commerce. They were acquired by a large retail e-commerce group. 

Sramana Mitra: Also in India?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I would say that the platform and the service world right now is under the assumption that most of the infrastructure layers and innovations are already in there.

Domain knowledge for a particular functional layer is where the innovation is happening whether it’s Shopify for eCommerce, Atlassian in the enterprise collaboration space, or Twilio in the communication path space. That’s where this class of companies is operating.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (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 Vishesh Rajaram was recorded in November 2020.

Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner, Speciale Invest, discusses his fund’s investment thesis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you look at teams for something like this? Is it somebody coming out of a domain with deep insights into solving the problem where they haven’t written the product, but they have enough domain knowledge to signal to you and the investors that they know what they are talking about?

Ashmeet Sidana: Since I invest so early, they almost have never written a product. They may have some samples of prototypes, but it’s rare because I am so early. In terms of the selection of the team, they need to have some form of technical insight or domain knowledge to take on a challenge like this. This is in addition to the usual characteristic of a great entrepreneur.

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

Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital, is the founder of a small venture firm that we have a great deal of respect for, and a personal friend. This is a wonderful conversation.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Keith Bank, Founder CEO at KB Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to do another case study?

Keith Bank: Another one is called Hammerhead Technology based in New York City. I made a small angel investment in this individual several years ago. His name is Pete Morgan. He’s an avid cyclist and had an idea that there was a way to create a better bike computer.