1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ira Weiss of Hyde Park Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you the TAM question. We are in January 2018. Lots of stuff have already been built. Nowadays, there aren’t as many wide open opportunities to build these multi-billion dollar companies. It’s not like very corner of the enterprise software market is full of billion-dollar opportunities. There are lots of niche opportunities.

Some of these have lower TAMs. Some of these businesses need to be built for small amounts of capital – $2 million sold for $15 million. In some cases, $250,000 and sold for $5 million to $10 million. What is your perspective on these kinds of opportunities? Is this something you look at? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With William Hsu of Mucker Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you put some quantitative parameters around that $200 million exit? For a good, healthy $200 million exit where everybody makes money, what is the optimum amount of capital invested? What kind of revenue levels do you target?

William Hsu: Depends on the category. For a SaaS or an enterprise software solution, typically, anywhere from $20 million to $40 million will be good enough to get anywhere from $100 million to even $300 million in valuation. If it’s an e-commerce business, it probably has to get to closer to $100 million in revenue. Software businesses are a lot more capital efficient.

If you’re looking for an opportunity that is sub-unicorn in size, try to find businesses without an inventory or any cost of goods. To >>>

Roundtable Recap: June 28 – Fat Startups vs. Lean Startups: A Conversation with Waikit Lau

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest investor and serial entrepreneur Waikit Lau. Waikit has a refreshingly open attitude towards investing in very early stage companies. Wonderful conversation.

Wonderlend Hubs
As for entrepreneur pitches, we started with Ram Ramdas from Mumbai, India, pitched Wonderlend Hubs, a FinTech company that focuses on 15 second loan application evaluation on behalf of financial institutions in India. Very good execution thus far, and an excellent company with great promise.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ira Weiss of Hyde Park Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It’s the same model as Gartner? The software companies are paying a subscription fee to G2 Crowd to be included in this review process.

Ira Weiss: It is free for the software companies. Some of the companies do choose to pay if they want to pay if they want to have an enhanced presence on the site. I actually encourage people who have early-stage software companies to use the site and have your customers go to the site. There’s no better way to sell software than to have your customers sing your praises. That was the reason G2 Crowd was started. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With William Hsu of Mucker Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Our philosophy in One Million by One Million is entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues, and profits. Financing and exit are optional. We make sure that customers are willing to pay for whatever it is that you’re selling. Whatever it is that you’re doing, that is the fundamental belief system of our program.

William Hsu: It’s the fundamental belief of any capitalist system.

Sramana Mitra: It should be. In Silicon Valley, it is not. Silicon Valley operates on venture welfare.

William Hsu: The funny thing is if you’re able to prove product-market fit and you’re raising money simply for distribution, we >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ira Weiss of Hyde Park 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 Ira Weiss of Hyde Park Venture Partners was recorded in January 2018. 

Ira Weiss, General Partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners based in Chicago, talks about venture activity in the Midwest.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Hyde Park. What is your investment focus? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you like to make? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With William Hsu of Mucker Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you take us through a couple of case studies. Let’s say Trunk Club and Task Rabbit. At what stage did they come to you? Did they have to pivot out of their original hypothesis? How did that evolution flow from your side?

William Hsu: It’s probably more helpful to talk about companies that are newer. Task Rabbit and Trunk Club are seven to eight years old now. A lot of the newer methodologies weren’t really employed back then. There’s a company called Honey. It has over a hundred employees now and is doing tens of millions of dollars in monthly revenue. It’s doing really well. It took them about a year and a half to two years to really find their footing. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: India is getting back into the more fundamentals-driven model which I thought was always going to be the case. There was just a period where people got sidetracked. I think India is going to be more like Europe going forward. It’s only here in Silicon Valley that we see some appetite for funding a lot of red ink.

Hussein Kanji: The biggest challenge on the European side is people only focus on the economics and making the businesses very sustainable. Sometimes that comes with a trade-off for growth. It gets harder to turn into a big business. You become a very good business but a small business. There’s a bit of both. You need to have a very solid business but you also know when to step on the gas sometimes. People here don’t do the stepping on the gas nearly as much as they would in other places where the money encourages that. >>>