1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shalini Prakash of 500 Startups India (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: People are learning to market better. The packaging in India used to be really shabby. People understand that if you’re trying to position a sophisticated product, it needs to have sophisticated packaging.

Frankly, India has such a great tradition of artisans and craftsmanship. There’s no reason why you can’t do phenomenally beautiful packaging to market some of these products. The opportunity is actually really fantastic on that side.

Shalini Prakash: I totally agree. With more and more exposure for everyone in the last 15 to 20 years, finally we’re known for the art of marketing.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shalini Prakash of 500 Startups India (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you don’t invest in the major metro-oriented, the higher end consumer-oriented businesses, or the global enterprise?

Shalini Prakash: Of course, we do. We do everything. Nothing has changed. Most companies that we’re seeing today in the market are mostly focused towards the next 200 or 300 million people. Having said that, we’ve of course invested in the last 12 to 15 months in companies that are completely focused on deep technologies.

443rd Roundtable Recording on May 9, 2019: With Eghosa Omoigui, EchoVC Partners

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With David Lambert of Right Side Capital Management (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You gave a very good and interesting answer to a different question. The question that I was trying to ask you is across the deals that you see, what trends have you seen?

David Lambert: The biggest trend is an extension of a trend that we’ve seen the entire time we’ve been investing. That’s an extension of 30-year trend in the software business.

At the earlier stages of product formation when you’re building your product, it’s gotten cheaper and cheaper every year to build that initial product prototype and to get to that stage where you can go to the market to prove whether you can generate revenue or not.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shalini Prakash of 500 Startups India (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 Shalini Prakash was recorded in March 2019.

Shalini Prakash, Venture Partner at 500 Startups India, talks about the opportunities in the Indian market.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by giving our audience a bit of an orientation of what’s happening at 500 Startups India. How are you positioning the activities of the organization?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With David Lambert of Right Side Capital Management (Part 5)

David Lambert: To talk about pivots a little more, we’ve got data across a thousand different companies that we’ve seen evolve over time. The most important thing at these early stages is cash burn.

What ends up happening is, if we invest in a company that has $10,000 MRR, they go out of the gate burning $40,000 to $50,000 a month. They probably raised a round where they’ve got 10 months of runway. Just a few months in, the company is starting to stress about the cash wall that they’re going to hit.

Roundtable Recap: May 9 – Spotlight on African Startups and Venture Capital

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Eghosa Omoigui, Managing Partner at EchoVC Partners, a firm focused on the African market. It was a fascinating discussion.

The Westland Concept

As for the entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Rui Jorge Romao from Coto, Portugal, pitch The Westland Concept. Rui wants to build a sustainable clothing brand.

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With David Lambert of Right Side Capital Management (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Pivot is a very tricky thing to manage. It’s a very tricky thing to manage from a cap table point of view. If you need to raise more capital to support a pivot, that means that your early investors didn’t really get a lot of valuation. Nonetheless, that happens. It happens very regularly.

Here’s a question that is a slightly more subtle question. I was actually coaching one of our premium members yesterday. This is a B2B SaaS company that has a couple of paying customers and has three POC’s going on right now. Their paying customers are not in the vertical where they think they’re going to build the bulk of their business.