1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripati Acharya of Prime Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’re based in Bangalore?

Shripati Acharya: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Do all the companies need to be in Bangalore?

Shripati Acharya: Most of our companies are in Bangalore. We do have companies in Delhi. There is more effort to do that. We have to make that extra effort.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripati Acharya of Prime Venture Partners (Part 2)

Shripati Acharya: The reason we say we’re the first institutional check is that we are fairly comfortable in ambiguity in the company. This dovetails into your second question, which is what we are looking for.

We are looking for a thesis from the entrepreneur – a conviction of what they’re trying to build, which exhibits 10x insight. By 10x insight, it could be 10x in terms of the value proposition. It could be 10x in terms of how the product is going to get distributed out to the consumers and customers.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripati Acharya of Prime Venture Partners (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 Shripati Acharya was recorded in April 2019.

Shripati Acharya is Managing Partner at Priven Advisors, advising Prime Venture Partners, a firm focused on core technology ventures in India. Unlike most VCs, Prime does do concept-stage investments.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get acquainted. Let’s get our audience introduced to you as well as to Prime.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I was just talking about trends in various kinds of lending businesses. If you look at QuickBooks financing, it’s Intuit’s product. They’re lending to small businesses that use QuickBooks online.

The dataset they’re using to evaluate is QuickBooks data. That’s a proprietary dataset that nobody else has access to. It’s an unfair advantage that Intuit has.

That was my question. What is the dataset that gives you that unfair advantage in that case?

448th Roundtable Recording on June 27, 2019: With Nnamdi Okike, 645 Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures (Part 5)

Sarbvir Singh: We believe that just focusing on size and hungry businesses is not always the right solution. We want to rightsize our fund. There is also the reality of running a fund and there is a cost to it. You have to get both sides right.

There are different solutions that people can arrive at depending on their perspective. We believe in s right-sized fund that is focused on early-stage. Focus on what you know. The other thing is unlike some other early-stage funds, we don’t follow a spray-and-pray kind of approach.

Roundtable Recap: June 27 – Startup Trends Discussion with Nnamdi Okike, 645 Ventures

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Nnamdi Okike, Co-founder and Managing Partner at 645 Ventures. Excellent conversation about trends and his firm’s investment thesis.

Rigava Solar

As for the entrepreneur pitch session, we first had Arun Joshi from Haryana, India, pitch Rigava Solar, a solar systems integration firm.

Serve Community

Then Matt Turner from Alameda, California, pitched Serve Community, a gamified app for volunteering for non profits. Great concept!

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The second question I have is what is your analysis of the trend of small funds like yourself that are doing the early-stage investments exiting into the later rounds. Do you see that happening a lot in the Indian ecosystem right now?

Sarbvir Singh: We look at it in two ways. It is a trend. After the emergence of Reliance, it brought a lot of this access revolution in India. This is the second most important VC. I think it’s a global trend to some extent.