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:

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.