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. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With William Hsu of Mucker 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 William Hsu of Mucker Capital was recorded in January 2018. 

William Hsu is the Co-founder and Partner at Mucker Capital, a Los Angeles-based fund that invests largely outside Silicon Valley and follows a more fundamentals oriented approach.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about the fund. How big is the fund? Tell us about your own background. Let’s get to know each other and let’s introduce your to our audience. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think the Indian startup ecosystem is much larger than Europe right now.

Hussein Kanji: It is, but when you look at the global unicorns and where they’re coming from, about 50% of them are from the US, about 30% are from China, 4% from India, 1% from Israel, and 15% from Europe. There’s a more thriving community in India of entrepreneurship, but in terms of value creation, I think Europe punches way above its weight. >>>

194th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Biplab Adhya and Venu Pemmaraju, Wipro Ventures

Biplab Adhya and Venu Pemmaraju, Co-Heads of Wipro Ventures.

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8 Investors Discuss Pre-Seed, Post-Seed, and Series A Financing via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

What is the difference between pre-seed, post-seed and pre-Series A? This is not so simple anymore to understand. For entrepreneurs who are seeking financing for the first time, it’s not easy to understand where they fit in.

There is a lot of competition to get into some of the deals for Series A (and Series B). If you look at the numbers, there are 50,000 to 70,000 seed stage investments a year versus 1,200 to 1,500 Series A investments. Clearly there is a lot of companies in that pool that are not getting to Series A. Only a percentage of those are really the hot companies. The hot companies, by definition, are few and far between, which is why there is such a competition. There are a lot of companies in the middle.

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