1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (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 Anand Rajaraman was recorded in October 2019.

Anand Rajaraman, Founding Partner at rocketship.vc, was an early investor in Facebook. Among other things, we discuss how the quality of startups from India has been improving.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why did they choose to go in that direction? What was the draw for them?

Francisco Jardim: The same thing that drew us. First of all, it’s purpose-driven. It’s a representative part of our economy. At the same time, it’s a sector that is highly exposed and volatile to all these external issues.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the limited partner scenario for AgTech? This $75 million and the rounds before, is there a set of limited partners that are particularly interested in AgTech?

Francisco Jardim: We have two anchors that are very large agriculture multinationals who have been active in the corporate venture sectors. These two guys are our LPs.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about stage. You started off by saying that you like early stage. Define early stage for me. Are we talking seed? Are we talking pre-seed or concept stage?

Francisco Jardim: Now that the AgTech ecosystem in the region is already on its way to maturity, we are given the luxury of becoming much more stage-specific. We do late seed and Series A.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about what those bottlenecks are that can be tackled with IT? When you say AgTech, I take it that you are talking about information technology as it applies to agriculture?

Francisco Jardim: When we say AgTech, we mean the entire agribusiness value chain, which represents approximately 22% to 24% of our GDP. This includes all technologies or improved methodologies to increase yields from planting and soil fertility, all the way to how we deliver food products to end consumers.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP 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 Francisco Jardim was recorded in November 2019.

Francisco Jardim is Founding Partner at SP Ventures, a Brazilian firm focused on AgTech in Latin America. We learned a lot about what’s happening in the sector and the region.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy of Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: One question that arises from this discussion that I would like to explore is, how do you view long sales cycle enterprise deals? It sounds like the kind of technology that you like the most are these deep technologies catering to large enterprise customers where there is typically a long sales cycle.

If you’re doing little deals, you can get into some amount of recurring revenue quickly. You can start showing MRR.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy of Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What sized checks do you write?

Karthee Madasamy: Right now, we write between $1 million and $3 million. We may go up to $4 million. We keep about one-to-one reserve for follow-on. We can lead a round. For larger Series A’s, we follow. 

Sramana Mitra: If it’s a $1 million check, you can do that yourself?