1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Semyon Dukach of One Way Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask the question in the context of non-Indian and non-Israeli founders. We also talk to a lot of European investors. One of the things I’m hearing is, there’s a real optimism right now in France. Paris is the story of 2017 as one of the investors based in London quoted recently to me.

What are you seeing? Where are the big pockets of immigrant founders that you are encountering? Cultures have biases. India benefits from the fact that there there’s a very big pool of IT services and offshore companies that have been based in India. There’s a very large trained workforce out of India. A large portion of that is here as well. The bridge has developed over a 20 to 30 year period. >>>

402nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Kelly Perdew, Moonshots Capital

Kelly Perdew is Co-founder and Managing General Partner at Moonshots Capital, a firm that has a unique investment thesis of supporting military veterans. Very interesting insights.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Semyon Dukach of One Way Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What else can you tell us? Besides founder-related traits, what else can you tell us about that’s interesting about your fund?

Semyon Dukach: It’s a unique fund in that we are specifically targeting immigrants. The value add that’s differentiated is, we’re building a network between these people who have a shared identity. We’re encouraging our immigrant founders to expand their notion of who they are and get away from this binary choice of their ethnic background or their new country.

Instead, give them the power to consider themselves immigrants in general. For instance, a Bulgarian founder in Boston can feel some kinship with an Indian founder in Boston and join the Indian mafia to the extent that it exists. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Semyon Dukach of One Way Ventures (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 Semyon Dukach, One Way Ventures was recorded in January 2018. 

Semyon Dukach is the Managing Partner at One Way Ventures, a firm that is 100% focused on immigrant entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you. Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make? What kind of investments do you make?

Semyon Dukach: We’re a seed fund based in Boston. We focus on backing great immigrant entrepreneurs. These are founders that have gone through a personal immigration experience and one that was formative to who they are. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you parse unicorn mania?

Mackey Craven: By unicorn mania, do you mean the number of companies that have billion-dollar plus valuations that are still private?

Sramana Mitra: A lot of things. There’s unicorn mania in that there’s so much capital. There is a rush to fund these later stage companies and overfund these later stage companies. Last year, we did an extensive coverage of a phenomenon. It’s a unicorn mania negative phenomenon called Death by Overfunding. These were very good companies. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel of ff Venture Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Unicorn mania started to rationalize a little bit in 2016. This year, it has stabilized. But there is still a huge amount of late stage capital out there. Traditional VCs have raised very large funds. As a seed investor, you could get buried under later stage liquidation preferences if valuations run up like that. How do you protect yourself?

John Frankel: When valuations run up, you’re fine. It’s when valuations stall or run back that you have issues.

Sramana Mitra: Both happen. Once valuation runs up, it stalls because fundamentals don’t deliver to valuation. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another dynamic, which is a lot of these seed stage investors who are working in the very early stages are exiting into those kinds of mega rounds that come in Series B and C. That is a very healthy trend because I think these two segments are different. It could take a long time to traverse the full spectrum from friends and family all the way to something that is actually scaling at a significant pace. You can’t have small funds taking positions all the way through.

I also have some mixed feelings about this over investment in the seed and post-seed stages. In many of these cases, these companies don’t have either the velocity or the TAM to be venture-funded companies, but the entrepreneurs are setting themselves up with expectations that they’re going to be venture-funded companies. 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel of ff Venture Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you a few trend questions. How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream? How does a seed investor mitigate the Series A gap? The number of seed investments that are happening have gone up but the Series A number has stayed steady. How do you parse this trend?

John Frankel: There’re a lot of data points out there. It’s easy to string them together into a story. The thing to understand is once a venture capitalist invests, probably two-thirds of their portfolio goes nowhere. One third gets written off. One third, they get their capital back. The last third is where the returns are. >>>