During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Vikas Choudhury, Managing Partner at Pivot Ventures, and President at Reliance Jio. Vikas is one of the earliest Angel investors in India, and invested in early successes like InMobi and Myntra. We discussed the evolution of the Indian startup and venture capital industry.
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As for the entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Eesha Sheikh from Colorado pitching a Digital Health concept.
Sramana Mitra: There’s another company that I encountered. It was an Australian company that also did very well starting in Australia. It was also this mobile temporary workforce management type of thing. Have you seen this company called Deputy?
Mark Selcow: Yes. Deputy has done really well.
Sramana Mitra: Yes. I love these kind of stories of companies that are developing outside of the core circle Silicon Valley ecosystem doing really well. Then they come into Silicon Valley. Sometimes to other parts of the United States and raise money with proven products.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some examples of what you have invested in. In particular, talk about when you encountered the company. At what stage did you invest? What did they have that convinced you that this is a really interesting opportunity that you would like to bet on?
Mark Selcow: Skedulo is a company founded in Brisbane, Australia where the product development team, the founder, and CEO were based. They had just moved to the US to come after the North American market. That’s when we were introduced.
>>>Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Mark Selcow was recorded in March 2019.
Mark Selcow, General Partner at Costanoa Ventures, talks about the firm’s primarily B2B investment thesis and strong penchant for investing in companies that have grown outside the Bay Area.
Sramana Mitra: We had Greg Sands of Costanoa a few months ago. We’re going to continue the conversation today with Mark. Let me just recap a little bit of the vital statistics of the fund that we’re talking about here.
>>>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.
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Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures, talks about some of the ventures his firm has invested in and the philosophy in general.
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Sramana Mitra: In the other two parts of the portfolio where things are coming by referral, is there anything specific that’s interesting that you would like to discuss?
Harald Nieder: What’s interesting there is that there are a lot of different factors between the networks. If you look at our fund investors, that’s actually quite a broad range of people. We like to have entrepreneurs in there. We like to keep that entrepreneurial spirit throughout our whole structure.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down within the geography? How do you go about finding these teams?
Harald Nieder: You have to have a lot of tools available if you have a certain topic that you’re looking after. If you already know what you’re looking after, it’s relatively easy to go out with the databases that are around, with our own database, with our network that we have in that area.
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