1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Krishna Srinivasan of LiveOak Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re pointing out about repeat entrepreneurs versus first-time entrepreneurs is interesting. The vast majority of our community is first-time entrepreneurs. I always say this. If you are a repeat entrepreneur with track record, you can get away with a lot.

You can do a fat startup with somebody writing you a check. There are lots of options, but as a first-time entrepreneur, none of those doors are open for you. You’re going to have to do it the hard way. You have to bootstrap to product/market fit at some level. What about B2B/B2C? Are you doing both? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nihal Mehta of ENIAC 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 Nihal Mehta was recorded in November 2018.

Nihal Mehta, Founding General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, provides a great set of insights into his definition of a full-stack founding team. Either a set of co-founders who cover all the requisite skillsets, or a solo founder who is a full-stack person – both configurations can work. Listen to the discussion for more color on the topic.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get you acquainted with our audience. Tell us about yourself and ENIAC Ventures. Give us a little bit of context. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Krishna Srinivasan of LiveOak Venture Partners (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 Krishna Srinivasan was recorded in November 2018.

Krishna Srinivasan is Founding General Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, a firm focused on investing in Texas. Great conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s first get our audience acquainted with yourself as well as with LiveOak. Tell us about the fund. Tell us a bit about your background. What do you like to invest in? How do you think about your portfolio?

Krishna Srinivasan: I grew up in India. I graduated from one of the IITs. I came to the United States to get a Masters from the

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If I were to synthesize what I heard from you, your relationships are more of the corporates who are either co-investing with you or are becoming early customers of your portfolio companies, and not necessarily with the acquirers. The acquirers are coming as you go along and develop the businesses.

Evangelos Simoudis: When we select corporate partners, it is important to identify companies that are thought leaders in the space and in the industries that we want to work in. We feel that it’s through these thought leaders that we will find the hard and important problems that need to be solved. We don’t invest in companies that try to solve every single problem we hear about.

We hear from our partners about problems where data can play a role. Then we have to apply our own filters. We use our advisory >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did the acquisition come about? I’ll give you a bit of context about where I’m going with this question. It sounds like you and your syndicate partners are open to relatively early acquisitions. You’re not trying to go for this unicorn kinds of companies.

I happen to believe that that’s great because there are many more opportunities out there that are mid-sized opportunities of building very interesting companies solving very interesting problems. They don’t necessarily have multi-billion dollar TAMs to build these unicorn types of ventures. One thing that I’ve heard from a number of 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of check sizes are we talking about?

Evangelos Simoudis: Low hundreds to maybe half a million.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit more about the portfolio companies. Let’s actually talk about the two that you talked about that have exited already. Give us a window into what kind of company they were. What attracted you to them? What stage did they come to you at? I like to do this just to understand how the investors think about their investments. It provides a lot of insight to see what they have invested in and why. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What fund size are we talking? What size of checks are we talking?

Evangelos Simoudis: The second part of the question is more important. We invest in every stage if they have a little bit of revenue. We like to see some proof of revenue, some proof that what the company is developing is being accepted.

Sramana Mitra: What is a little bit of revenue? Are we talking $10,000 MRR? Are we talking $100,000 MRR?

Evangelos Simoudis: The investments that we have made tend to have initial revenue of $200,000 to $1 million. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (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 Evangelos Simoudis was recorded in November 2018.

Evangelos Simoudis, Founder and Managing Director at Synapse Partners, takes us on a deep dive into AI investing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get acquainted. Tell us about the fund’s investing focus and your background. What size investments do you make? What kind of things do you like to dig into?

Evangelos Simoudis: I’m based in Silicon Valley. I’ve been here for about 30 years now. >>>