1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The only danger I’m seeing in what you’re saying is there are a lot of artificially-bloated billion-dollar valuation companies out there. Your point is well-taken that showing that you can get to these high valuations and up round is great for your LPs. Some of it right now is also distorted just because there is so much capital there. The NEAs of the world have so much capital. They’re really driving up valuations and overfunding companies.

Andrew Romans: The SEC doesn’t even understand what these deals actually look like. Most people don’t either. People just say, “That company raised money at $70 million valuation.” People are structuring deals in very creative, synthetic ways. >>>

406th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Devdutt Yellurkar, CRV

Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, who discussed his investment principles. It was an excellent discussion!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you say early, can you put a bit more color around that? Are you willing to do concept financing?

Gaurav Jain: The short answer is yes. These days, it has gotten so cheap to build an MVP, especially if you’re building a software product, which is where 80% to 90% of our investments are going to be. To get something out there to show some interest in customers, you don’t need a whole lot of money.

Between Amazon Web Services and all the open source software, all you need is a laptop and access to the internet to build a >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you process unicorn mania?

Andrew Romans: If you look at how many companies achieve a billion-dollar valuation and how many venture financers there are in this region, it’s mathematically not probable that the VC will get into a unicorn.

I think it’s important to develop a financial model and a portfolio construction that gives a large degree of expectation that you will be very profitable without even needing to get to a unicorn valuation. We like to see that any investment a fund makes can achieve a 10x return even with dilution of future rounds if we’re not investing all the way to exit. If you see a company with a $100 >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital (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 Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital was recorded in February 2018. 

Gaurav Jain is Managing Partner at Afore Capital, a firm focused on pre-seed investments. This is an excellent conversation for entrepreneurs looking for insights into pre-seed.

Sramana Mitra: With your specific focus, which is pre-seed, we are are very interested in hearing your perspective because, as you know, that part of the ecosystem is very underserved. People want validated 

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Now which kind of sectors do you have these special relationships? You said you don’t have it with Verizon.

Andrew Romans: I don’t think it’s responsible for me to disclose LPs in an open setting.

Sramana Mitra: You can talk about sectors right?

Andrew Romans: On our website ehen you click on Team, you can see who our venture partners are. Every single one of them is a personal investor in the fund. Things range from consumer electronics including smartphones and laptops, oil & gas companies. >>>

193rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Alexander Ross, Illuminate Financial

Alexander Ross, Founder at Illuminate Financial, talks about his firm’s FinTech investment thesis.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are you into B2B?

Andrew Romans: We’re probably about 70% enterprise and 30% consumer. On enterprise, we’re more likely to go in very early. With consumer, when something comes to us from our network, we look for very strong unit economics where the CAC to LTV ratio is very impressive. We need to see something that’s already working for us to get into a B2C type of opportunity that might just be powerfully leveraging the internet or smartphone.

Most of the stuff that we spend most of our time on is enterprise technology. If you ask a hundred Chinese investors what they invest in, they will give you the same list of buzzwords in pretty much the same order. I am embarrassed when I’m saying the >>>