1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Double-click for us on the stage question. You like to be the first institutional money in. What do you like to see? Let’s say you are doing a Series A deal. What do you like to see in it in terms of metrics and validation? What are the requirements to qualify for your definition of a Series A? Definitions are varying greatly these days.

Tim Guleri: It’s a very good question and a tough one to answer. I’ll try to frame it for you. If you look at our last fund, almost a third were seed investments. These are anything less than $2 million in initial check. It could be a $500,000 check or a $2 million check. What we call seed and what we look for are the very early companies with a team that is doing very interesting work, and if you give them some initial help and guidance, then we can see a way to a very large company. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Patricia Nakache of Trinity Ventures (Part 2)

Patricia Nakache: Now there’s more of this bifurcation in the market of the haves and the have nots. We read it on the paper. We read on TechCrunch a lot about the haves. There’s probably a larger pool of companies that are having a harder time raising money probably because people have a bit of a hangover from the peak two or three years ago where they probably invested too quickly.

Right now, we’re in a period that is relatively healthy for entrepreneurs and for venture capitalists. There’s a lot of capital out there. I would say relative to 19 years ago when I started in the industry, it is far more competitive for venture capitalists to invest in good opportunities. I would say that is requires a lot more specialization than it did in the past where venture capitalists have had to go a lot deeper to build their credibility in >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri of Sierra 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 Tim Guleri was recorded in April 2018.

Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures, discusses at length his firm’s investment thesis, unique relationships with CIOs, and some of the industry trends he sees.

Sramana Mitra: We should start with you introducing yourself as well as Sierra to our audience. What is your investing focus today? How big is the fund? What are the things that you want to position the fund as that our audience should know about? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Patricia Nakache of Trinity 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 Patricia Nakache was recorded in March 2018.

Patricia Nakache, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses the firm’s investment thesis and some issues encountered by women in technology.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Trinity. Tell us about the fund and what you guys have been doing. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Clint Chao of Moment Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In our work, we place a lot of emphasis on TAM and on really trying to get to precise bottom-up TAM analysis. In doing so, one thing that I see constantly is ignoring the segmentation aspect. You can say that this applies to everybody, but that’s not true.

Often, solutions are perfect for a subset of the population that you think it applies to. That’s where it finds high velocity adoption, but if you go outside of that segment, it doesn’t have high velocity expansion. If that is the case, you better be aware of that. Better be aware of what your real TAM is versus overestimating the TAM.

Clint Chao: That aspect should be most clear in the traditional IT market. A lot of these startups initially create a white space opportunity not >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Clint Chao of Moment Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream? How does a seed investor mitigate the Series A gap?

Clint Chao: It’s a great question. It’s clear that your traditional Series A investors have raised the hurdle, if you will, on what qualifies as a viable investment.

Sramana Mitra: Today’s Series A is a Series B or C from 10 years ago.

Clint Chao: We try not to get caught up in the verbiage of what letter it is. The fact of the matter is these companies are being asked to do more >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Clint Chao of Moment Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the fund?

Clint Chao: Our first fund is a small fund. It’s a $10 million fund. We launched that officially in 2015. We did a first close on our second fund late last year. That’s a $50 million fund. Our initial investment in fund one averaged around $250,000. We reserve about half the fund for follow-ons. In the new fund, we’ll increase that up to upwards of a million dollars with a similar reserve strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Do you position as a seed fund, pre-seed, post-seed? Where in the spectrum are you positioning the fund?

Clint Chao: We like to call our fund early stage. We deliberately like having that broad definition. These new definitions are great to help >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Clint Chao of Moment Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We see a ton of companies outside of the Bay Area given what we do and our global nature. The other day, there was a security company from Capetown, South Africa pitching at the roundtable. It’s very encouraging and heartwarming to see how much of the knowledge of what we used to do as this cottage industry in Silicon Valley is spreading all over the world right now.

Clint Chao: The one cautionary tale we give to entrepreneurs if they are based in a different market is just to make sure that you can still recruit easily. That can be addressed in many cases. Many of these companies are based near universities that have talent and are eager to stay in town or stay in the area. We’re optimistic about the continuing trend. >>>