187th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Mark Selcow, Costanoa Ventures

Mark Selcow, General Partner at Costanoa Ventures, talks about the firm’s primarily B-to-B investment thesis and strong penchant for investing in companies that have grown up outside the Bay Area.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you get carried away and raise huge amounts of money, you better have a strategy of doing something that is going to get you to the right exit because all these investors also need exits and you need exits. This is a very complex set of strategic moves that you’re going to have to think through. I think raising lots of capital is something that you should be very careful about. Frankly, I have constantly pushed Freshworks on this topic.

If you read my personal coverage of Freshworks through the last decade, you will see that I’m constantly holding them publicly accountable for raising so much money and not hitting profitability. This year they have hit profitability, which is a great milestone. The reason Freshworks is important is because this is the first company out of India to be able to do stuff at scale. >>>

188th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Harald Nieder, Redalpine Venture Partners

Harald Nieder, Partner at Redalpine Venture Partners, an European firm primarily focused on Germany and Switzerland.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the last 30 days, we’ve done story after story analyzing what’s happening on the acquisition side of B2B SaaS. I think one of the things that’s very attractive about Arka is that you’re not chasing unicorns and I’ll let you elaborate on that.

Yash Hemaraj: You’re right on the point that a lot of companies, especially in the B2B side, get acquired for anywhere from $50 million to $100 million according to some statistics published very recently. That’s the opportunity where if you’ve taken in $50 million into your company, there’s no way you can sell the company for $50 million and everybody is happy about it. >>>

189th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Arihant Patni, Ideaspring Capital

Arihant Patni is Managing Director at Ideaspring Capital, a fund focused on enterprise companies born in India and selling to the global market.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In 1Mby1M, we have a rolling admission. Anyone can join at any time. There’s no three-month program. There’s no concept of graduation. We’re building companies. What would you graduate from? We don’t believe in graduation from an accelerator really.

I think these are important points, important differentiators, and important markers to pay attention to. The other thing I would point out here is, I think both Arka and 1Mby1M have a shared philosophy of bootstrapped entrepreneurship. $200,000 is not $200 million. You can’t throw money around. You have to be very capital efficient. You have to spend the money that you have access to very carefully and very conservatively and on the right things. >>>

434th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Rahul Chowdhri, Stellaris Venture Partners

Rahul Chowdhri, Investor at Stellaris Venture Partners, shares some fascinating examples of consumer ventures catering to the next 400 million consumers in India.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In selecting customers to go after, what is the positioning of your company? Are you going after large enterprises? Are you going after mid-market? Are you going after small businesses? Each of them has a slightly different go-to market strategy. The inside sales point that you raise is very interesting.

Freshdesk, now Freshworks, is a company that we watched grow from the very beginning. They were in the program for three years. That company actually didn’t go to the enterprise at all until much later in the game. Now they’re going after enterprise deals by doing very large deals and so forth. But when they started, they acquired customers including closing paying customers all on the phone and internet. It’s fully inside sales driven go-to market strategy and they did it all from India. >>>