1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Roman Kikta, Managing Partner at Mobility Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Roman Kikta: I am based in Dallas, Texas, but we are distributed globally. I have partners in Barcelona, UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo. 

Sramana Mitra: How many partners are bringing in this $200 million of working capital. It sounds like all of them are general partners in your fund. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Roman Kikta, Managing Partner at Mobility Ventures (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 Roman Kikta was recorded in September 2020.

Roman Kikta is Managing Partner and Founder at Mobility Ventures. Roman discusses his firms’ investment thesis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Robert Weber of Great North Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Here in 1M1M, we are huge believers in bootstrapping. We encourage people to bootstrap first and raise money later. It creates a healthier term sheet and trajectory, but it is hard to do in such expensive cost structure situations.

My other question, based on what you have said, is about the structure and the strategy that you are following for your fund. You described a couple of case studies where you exited into full-on rounds of funding. Talk about how you are thinking about early exits and not playing this game of building unicorns. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Robert Weber of Great North Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of questions emerge from what you have said. I’ll ask them in sequence. What is the current dynamics of companies building out of Minnesota?

You talked about Zencoder which started in Minnesota. Did they move to Silicon Valley or did they continue to operate from Wisconsin? 

Robert Weber: Initially, Zencoder maintained their operations here, but they were under some pressure to relocate to the Bay area and they did that. In the case of Field Nation, it had grown quite a bit more than Zencoder ever did.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Robert Weber of Great North Labs (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the situation in the Minneapolis area for the kind of companies that you are looking for? What is the scale of the deal flow? How active are the entrepreneurs?

Robert Weber: I would imagine that Twin Cities is like many cities in the world. They have a corporate mindset. We have the largest amount of Fortune 500 companies per capita in the US.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Robert Weber of Great North Labs (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 Robert Weber was recorded in September 2020.

Robert Weber is Managing Partner at Great North Labs located in Minneapolis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripriya Mahesh at Spero Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We have a series that we do on our blog called Death by Overfunding. We have case studies after case studies of companies that had no business going out of business but went out of business for absolutely the wrong reasons.

One of my saddest case studies is this eBay seller who did phenomenally well. They raised a lot of money and started doing stuff that did not scale and stick. They went out of business and that company was so well put together to begin with. It hardly needed any money. It did fine as a bootstrapped company.  

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripriya Mahesh, Founding Partner at Spero Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to do another one? 

Shripriya Mahesh: One of our most recent investments is a company called Mati. They allow identity verification. Filip is the founder. He has been an immigrant for a long part of his life. He grew up in Europe. When he was a child, he wandered off to the UK and told his parents that he wasn’t coming back because he wanted to study. He moved to the US and came to college here in the US.