1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital (Part 4)

Gaurav Jain: We don’t make a list of what’s been going wrong. The list, unfortunately, is too long. Instead, we look for what can go right. If the founder can accomplish these counter-intuitive things, could this be a massive business? Could this be a massive opportunity? Does the founder have the ability to execute on V1 of the product and get some traction, learn, and figure out V2. Neither of us knew what that is. Kyle did a brilliant job at that.

Another company I invested in is something called Firebase, which was two technical founders. It’s actually their fourth startup. The first three had failed. They were building a chat engine. They realized that the backend software to enable the chat was >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I think there is a lot of garbage and a few good ones. What are your pointers for people who are trying to understand good ICO examples? What are ones that you consider are good credible ICO’s?

Andrew Romans: Rahul Sood was the head of Microsoft Ventures. I knew him there. He left Microsoft Ventures to acquire a company they had invested in and merged it with a new company he established called Unikrn. It’s an ambitious name for a startup. They do real money gambling for esports. Madison Square Garden will sell out three to five nights in a row or people paying money to watch other people playing video games.

I recognize that that’s a real thing. People like to gamble on sporting events and people love to gamble on esports. That is legal in >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For a B2B business, getting to hundred customers is not an easy thing to do.

Gaurav Jain: For B2B, if they’re paying you $10 a month, getting 5000 customers is not hard. If you’re charging $10,000, maybe one or two is great.

Sramana Mitra: Quickly, what about geography? Are you US-focused?

Gaurav Jain: We’re based in San Francisco, but our mandate doesn’t prevent us from investing anywhere in the world. I’d say >>>

5 Investor Podcasts Discussing Changes in Startup Financing

The startup financing game has changed. Seed funding used to be the harder round to get. But right now there are 500 to 600 micro-VCs in the market who are funding tons and tons of companies at the seed stage. The numbers are 50,000 to 70,000 seed financing a year, while Series A financing per year is only about 1,500. There is a huge drop off in Series A funding happening. We don’t really have a great answer on how to cross this gap.

Entrepreneurs do need to be able to show certain levels of validation. The Series A investors are looking for a lot of different metrics which are not necessarily being tackled by the ventures who have raised just seed money. It’s become a very tricky environment.

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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!

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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 >>>