1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There is one point that I want to double-click down on and listen to what you’re seeing in your deal flow. Most of the VCs operating in India have come to the conclusion that if it’s to do with deep tech, they have to go after the global market. The Indian B2B market is very slow-moving. Is that reflected in your deal flow?

Brij Bhasin: Absolutely. While our portfolio companies are selling into Indian customers, our realization is that the sales cycles in India are much longer. There is a fair bit of customer education that you have to do to explain the concept and bring the product in. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your current portfolio. You said you’ve made 10 investments. Tell us a bit about what you’ve invested in. In particular, let’s focus on a company or two that are scaling well. Has anything crossed the $5 million annual revenue mark?

Brij Bhasin: Let me give you a few examples of companies that have started scaling in a significant way. We’ve invested in a company called LetsTransport. It’s a last mile logistics marketplace for small trucks. In India, the cities are quite congested. You have these smaller sized trucks that are used for local deliveries.

We have a curated managed marketplace for corporates and companies of various nature to essentially avail the logistics services >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright 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 Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners was recorded in January 2018. 

Brij Bhasin, Principal and India Investment Lead at Rebright Partners, which is a Japanese Venture Capital firm, discusses their India strategy. The conversation encompasses broader trends in the Indian startup market.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What sized investment do you make? Let’s familiarize our audience with you activities. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bruce Cleveland of Wildcat Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Last question on trends, what do you make of unicorn mania? How do you parse it? How do you strategize given that it is a factor in the market right now?

Bruce Cleveland: One of the reasons why we like to do early-stage investing is there’s a lot of capital that has been locked into a lot of what we would call the established firms. They have a lot of capital to put to work. Once something is working, then what happens is you have a bunch of firms that rush in to put money in.

Once they’re in, what they want to do is try to put more dollars to work in that particular deal even if it’s not going to end up being a 10x multiple. A 2x multiple can still be quite effective to generate substantial returns if you’re putting $50 million or $100 >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bruce Cleveland of Wildcat Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Our customer validation methodology is completely about customer immersion and getting as much feedback even before you write a line of code. What about geography? Are you investing only in Silicon Valley?

Bruce Cleveland: Our partners come from different parts of the country. That makes it interesting. Bryan Stolle comes from Texas. He actually sits on the Board of University of Texas. He represents our southwestern investing. Katherine Barr is a consumer investor, and she comes from Canada. We have a number of Canadian investments.

Bill Ericson and I have a number of San Francisco-based investments, but also we cover the Pacific Northwest. Bill spends a lot of >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bruce Cleveland of Wildcat Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Our community’s work is with the very early stages. When you say you’re willing to do seed, can you elaborate? What’s happened in the seed ecosystem is that there are 500 to 600 micro VCs that have come into the business in the last five years or so.

That seed ecosystem has fragmented into pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-Series A, small Series A, and then the $4 million to $6 million traditional Series A. Where in that continuum do you like to peg yourself when you say you want to invest in seed?

Bruce Cleveland: It’s not around the size of the seed but the rationale for the seed. We like to get to know companies and the >>>

404th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Investor Waikit Lau

Waikit Lau, investor and serial entrepreneur, has a refreshingly open attitude towards investing in very early stage companies. Wonderful conversation.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bruce Cleveland of Wildcat 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 Bruce Cleveland of Wildcat Venture Partners was recorded in January 2018. 

Bruce Cleveland, Founding Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners, is one of the early employees at Oracle, as well as a co-founder of Siebel Systems. He is working on a book on The Traction Gap framework that his firm uses in its venture capital practice.

Sramana Mitra: For those of you who may have been around in the early 2000’s, one of the most successful

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