1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hemant Mohapatra of Lightspeed 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 Hemant Mohapatra was recorded in March 2019.

Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, India, talks about some of the large, open opportunities in the Indian market that are of interest to him.

Sramana Mitra: Today we’re going to start with a conversation with Hemant Mohapatra who’s partner at Lightspeed Ventures India. Let’s start by introducing our audience to the activities of Lightspeed India – the positioning and a bit of your background.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The immediate one is that all the carriers who are dealing with the last mile customers. If there is a real problem, they have still to send technicians in and that’s a very cumbersome model.

We are all at the receiving end of that. It’s very frustrating. If something goes wrong, it’s very expensive for them to manage this incident.

Sumant Mandal: And no one’s ever happy. That’s why cloud is a good enabler for that.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: With so much is happening on the cloud right now, what do you see as the future of the core networking companies like Cisco and Juniper? How do you see them evolving? What are the opportunities and gaps opening up because of this shift?

Sumant Mandal: You can see that in their own strategies as well. They are buying software companies. That could defy logic because they also see that their core business is completely threatened. Big telecom companies still run on big iron. It’s not like that’s going away.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was commenting on your 10 to 11 years, but not just 10 to 11 years. Some companies are going 15 to 20 years and then finding exits like Lynda.com. When she had a unicorn exit, they had been around for almost 20 years.

We have a company in our portfolio that is also something like 15 years old that completely bootstrapped with no financing, and it just sold for $60 million. There’s a lot of that going on at the moment. I’m just trying to understand how you view it from a timeline point of view and from a slightly larger venture fund point of view.

Roundtable Recap: May 16 – Spotlight on Mexico

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Hernan Fernandez, Managing Partner at Angel Ventures Mexico. The firm invests in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia. Excellent discussion on Latin America trends.

Lightwing

As for the entrepreneur pitches, from Bangalore, India, we had Ravitej Yadalam pitch Lightwing, a cloud monitoring and optimization solution for SMEs.

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I understand when you are working with Hive companies feeding into your venture fund. When you’re working with the more general market of people approaching you, what are you looking for in terms of validation when you want to invest in a company?

We’ve heard all kinds of metrics and all kinds of conditions from various VCs who are looking at maybe $1 million ARR. What is your comfort zone?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you have companies in India. Does that mean that you invest globally? What’s the geographical coverage?

Sumant Mandal: We will never say that we won’t do something. But if you look at what we’ve done, 75% of our investments are in North America and about 25% is global. Out of that 25%, most of that is in India. The reason is for what we do, we need local presence. We have a partner in India. We have someone on the ground there to manage our investments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital 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 Sumant Mandal was recorded in March 2019.

Sumant Mandal is Managing Director at March Capital Partners, a firm that invests largely in enterprise-facing businesses with deep technical differentiation. The conversation includes excellent insights into the changing dynamics of the networking space and how companies like Cisco and Juniper are managing their existential threats.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as March Capital and your other early stage investment activities.