445th Roundtable Recording on May 23, 2019: With Deepen Parikh, Courtside Ventures

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

Roundtable Recap: May 23 – Spotlight on Sports Tech

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Deepen Parikh, Partner at Courtside Ventures, a firm focused on investing in sports related ventures. Fascinating window in a little discussed sector.

Cloudely

At the top of the program, we had Suren Reddy from San Jose, CA, pitch Cloudely, a quote to cash SaaS integration provider with a large number of services clients that is making a push to bootstrap products.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hemant Mohapatra of Lightspeed Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is your current analysis of the big problems in India? In the same vein that your colleagues went and sought out the Oyo team or founder, what are some problems out there that you are looking for solutions to or teams that are solving these problems?

Hemant Mohapatra: There are three things that I, personally, find really exciting. One is FinTech. India is more advanced than most other countries. Maybe China’s the only other talent that comes to mind. These have trended in the last couple of years.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hemant Mohapatra of Lightspeed Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like when a situation like that arises, your global fund or Silicon Valley fund is bringing in the capital to match the round. Anyway, we don’t need to belabor the point. You were going to talk about Udaan.

Hemant Mohapatra: It’s a very India-centric problem. Commerce in India has always been depended a lot on one-on-one relationships and offline chanels. They’ll call somebody up and somebody will say, “I’ll give you this at this rate. I will negotiate. I’ll deliver here. You come there to pick it up.”

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hemant Mohapatra of Lightspeed Ventures (Part 3)

Hemant Mohapatra: We invested $60,000 in Oyo and then worked with the founder and built up a relationship. I saw them through multiple fundraising. They have raised more than a billion dollars now from the likes of SoftBank.

We have stayed together with the founder on not just capturing India’s opportunity but also expanding into China, Japan, UK, and now the US. It’s been a five-year journey.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hemant Mohapatra of Lightspeed Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, it’s a $175 million fund. What stage? Is there a comfort zone in terms of investing?

Hemant Mohapatra: We come in early. We love series A and seed. Those are the two stages that are the most common. Last year, half of our investments were seed. Our check sizes range from $1 million to $3 million for a seed and all the way to $10 million for a very compelling team that has an idea.

441st 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Jose Deustua, UTEC Ventures

Jose Deustua, Managing Director at UTEC Ventures, talks about Peru’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

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444th Roundtable Recording On May 16, 2016: With Hernan Fernandez, Angel Ventures Mexico

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