410th Roundtable Recording on August 7, 2018: With Slava Rubin, Indiegogo

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about stage? Are you investing in concept? Are you investing in a little bit of traction? What is comfortable?

Nate Redmond: Many investors have been using stage as a segmentation that is reflective in terms of process both in terms of sourcing and understanding of a business. We are early stage investors. By that, we mean we tend to be the first institutional investors in the company. In many cases, this company will have raised angel or seed money.

In some cases, that will have been called seed round. In some cases, A round. Most importantly, it’s understanding the type of risk that describes where this company is and the type of risk that we really want to own at this stage. We’re not religious about it being called Series A. We are focused >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison (Part 2)

Nate Redmond: Investors including myself sat and looked at the company and didn’t quite understand the size and scope of the opportunity. Being an expert in hospitality didn’t necessarily help you. In fact, it probably created blind spots. The focus for us is really understanding how you can engage a supply base and organize it to really unlock a large portion of latent demand.

Unlocking that latent demand really requires understanding the types of behaviors that people would like to engage in and yet aren’t because they’re otherwise constrained. In the case of Airbnb, one of the most important elements that unlocked that behavior was a sense of trust.

Trust, for us, has become one of these foundational layers and lenses that we look through to really understand how you can build trust. What types of new behaviors emerge and what does that allow you to do in terms of reshaping the business model within that industry? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison (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 Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison was recorded in February 2018.

Nate Redmond, Managing Partner at Alpha Edison, a VC who has put trust-driven ventures at the center of his investment thesis. It’s a very interesting conversation for both entrepreneurs and investors to listen to.

Sramana Mitra: Tell our audience about Alpha Edison and yourself. Let’s introduce you to the audience. The last time we spoke, you were doing something else. You were in the middle of putting this new thing together. >>>

409th Roundtable Recording On August 2, 2018: With Dafina Toncheva, US Venture Partners

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

Roundtable Recap: August 2 – Conversation with a Successful Woman Venture Capitalist

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Dafina Toncheva, Partner at US Venture Partners, an expert in Cyber Security. We discussed a variety of topics including the shifting of Series A metrics to $2M-$3M ARR for SaaS companies.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajul Garg of Leo Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What do you make of unicorn mania? Silicon Valley is going crazy. India tends to be more conservative, but India went crazy too.

Rajul Garg: We all plug into the same mothership. There’s not much that you can do to deviate from that. Smaller funds define a unicorn, in our own heads, as a company which can reach $150 million in value but we really need that kind of scale at least to move the needle for our fund. It’s very hard to enter an opportunity knowing that it will be a nice $20 million profitable business.

Maybe we need funds like that. Early stage venture funds is not the asset class that can cater to small businesses. I do think there’s a real gap. As an angel, I have made investments in those businesses. As a fund, I just don’t see how a fund can invest in those kinds of >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajul Garg of Leo Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Have you seen any analysis or reporting on how many active entrepreneurs there are in the Indian ecosystem right now?

Rajul Garg: I do remember seeing that at some point in time, but I’m not able to recall the report. I was at an Accenture event recently. In 2017, my guess is around a thousand companies raised some sort of investment in India. My guess is only one out of 20 or 30 would get there. My guess would be that it’s in the tens of thousands.

Sramana Mitra: As you know very well, I’m a big proponent of bootstrapping. We do see a lot of companies that are doing very well and getting very far with the bootstrapping strategy and showing a lot of validations before going out >>>