433rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Rebecca Kaden, Union Square Ventures

Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at Union Square Ventures, discusses her firm’s capital efficient investment thesis and debates the pros and cons of blitzscaling.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 5)

Nandini Mansinghka: I think what has happened is that even in our portfolio, once in a while we do come across a company that looks like a potential unicorn. And that’s when you finally see a lot of investors coming in. Over a period of time, we haven’t always seen that case.

So the ones that you actually think are potential unicorns are also the ones that run out of money. You say, “Okay, here is money for 18 months.” Then in twelve months, the money runs out. Because you’ve not built a steady revenue or haven’t built a product by then, the next round of money isn’t coming in. If you ask me to choose between scalability and sustainability, I think I’m more on the sustainability side of things. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One point I will double-click on which comes up a lot is that we have a huge overlap in the Indian market. 1Mby1M has a big presence in the Indian market and we’ve been present for a very long time. The whole Indian SaaS category was one that we played a very big role right from the beginning. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned traction. For Mumbai Angels to be interested in a company, what kind of traction do you want to see? It sounds like you don’t do concept financing, do you?

Nandini Mansinghka: We would do concept financing. We will fund anything which is a people company. It’s not an idea stage that we’re looking at for sure. We would require revenue traction in all cases except two. One exception would be highly suspect products. If it’s an IP buildout, we’re okay to say, “We’re funding because we want to walk with you to the IP buildout.” >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (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 Yash Hemaraj was recorded in February 2019.

Yash Hemaraj, Founding Partner at Arka Venture Labs and Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), discusses Arka’s recent partnership with 1Mby1M to accelerate Indian B2B SaaS companies.

Sramana Mitra: Tell our audience about Arka and we’ll take it from there.

Yash Hemaraj: We launched Arka Venture Labs in the summer of 2018. Arka Venture Labs is India’s first B2B focused cross-border accelerator. Our idea is to seed the next wave of enterprise innovation coming from India and to connect them to the global ecosystem. Primarily, we’re forward-looking at B2B-focused companies. >>>

436th Roundtable Recording on March 20, 2019: With Sumant Mandal, March Capital Partners

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about sectors? Of course, India has gone through a lot of different cycles already in terms of sector popularity and experiments. So what are your conclusions and investment thesis around sectors at this point?

Nandini Mansinghka: That’s a very interesting question. We’ve seen a slight shift in the trend over the years. So if you look at our portfolio of 130 companies, we were focusing a lot on tech and tech product companies because the hypothesis was that we need to look at startups in a similar way as the Valley. Over the last three to four years, we’re seeing a distinct change in how they are being looked at. >>>

Roundtable Recap: March 20 – How Large Companies Address Existential Threats

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Sumant Mandal, 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.

V Words!
Then, Tim Lieu from California pitched V Words! a mobile game that he wishes to raise money for. Unfortunately, games don’t get funded unless there is proven traction.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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