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 

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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.

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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 >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the fund?

Andrew Romans: We’re investing out of a $50 million fund that has a hard cap of a hundred. We’re already actively making investments. For your audience, we’re actively looking for deal flow. If the company has not raised at least a million dollars of outside non-founder funding capital, we prefer not to hear from them.

We like to see companies that have raised at least $1 million from someone who’s not on the founding team. If founders invest, that’s great but we want to see outside investors who put in a million. We do like to see companies that are up to $100,000 MRR >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture 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 Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital was recorded in January 2018. 

Andrew Romans is General Partner of Rubicon Venture Capital. Our discussion includes an interesting segment on ICOs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get acquainted. What is you investment focus? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you like to make? Let’s start understanding the fund.

Andrew Romans: Rubicon Venture Capital has two main offices in Silicon Valley and New York City. We also have 18 venture >>>

406th Roundtable Recording On July 12, 2018: With Devdutt Yellurkar, CRV

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan of Clear Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That point that you made about seed capital being abundant and seed funding being abundant, and Series A becoming an issue is huge. The numbers are 50,000 to 70,000 seed financing a year, and Series A is only about 1,500. There is a huge drop off that is happening. We don’t really have a great answer on how to cross that gap.

You need to show certain levels of validation. The Series A guys are looking for a lot of different metrics which are not necessarily being tackled by the companies who have raised just seed money. It’s been a very tricky environment. As you pointed out, there are 500 to 600 micro-VCs in the market right now who are funding tons and tons of companies at the seed stage. >>>