1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Aniruddha Malpani of Malpani Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To net it out, you are agnostic to B2B or B2C. You are really interested in learning about something new. That’s your primary motivator.

Aniruddha Malpani: I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I’m good at what I do. This is what I call the T-shaped model of living a life. I have a lot of vertical expertise in my particular domain. I would now like to go across other fields. The only way I can learn in these other fields is by investing in other startups.

Sramana Mitra: You’re a very curious man. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Aniruddha Malpani of Malpani 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 Aniruddha Malpani of Malpani Ventures was recorded in September 2017. 

Aniruddha Malpani, Director and Founder of Malpani Ventures, is an active angel investor in the Indian circuit. He discusses what he looks for in companies he wants to invest in.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Malpani Ventures. What is the focus of your firm? How big is the fund and what sized investments are you making? >>>

Roundtable Recap: June 7 – Investor in Three SaaS Unicorns

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Ravi Mohan, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, a firm that has invested in three SaaS Unicorns. Ravi discussed these investments: Apptio, Anaplan, and Zuora.

You will find our entrepreneur Journeys coverage on Anaplan and Apptio here.

Social Chains
As for entrepreneur pitches, we started with Srini Katta from San Francisco, California, pitching Social Chains, a social media platform a la Facebook and LinkedIn but with a token-based authentication twist. Quite interesting!

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There were a few things you said I want to highlight for our audience. They’re very much in tune with the philosophy that we practice in our program, which is Bootstrap first, and then raise capital. Without capital, MuleSoft validated and they got an immense amount of traction. That definitely is something that we heavily promote.

The other thing is this whole global phenomenon that’s happening around the world. One of the reasons we started One Million by One Million is to bring Silicon Valley’s tribal knowledge to the world and foster this

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You talked about MuleSoft. Let’s take a couple of your companies and drill down and understand your thinking behind why you invested in those opportunities. Obviously today, these are big successes. When you invested, that was not so clear. You must have made a certain analysis of those businesses. What was that thought process and how has that evolved over time? What can we learn from that?

Ann Winblad: There are three things to learn. First is, how did we find this company in the beginning or how did the company find us. Every entrepreneur wants to know that. Because we’re focused on the enterprise, we keep very strong relationships with all of the analysts that cover the enterprise. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad (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 Ann Winblad, Winblad was recorded in December 2014. 

Ann Winblad, Co-founder of Hummer Winblad, is one of the most successful women VCs in our industry, and as I mentioned in my introduction, I have never heard her whining about bias against women. One of the most encouraging things she discussed today is how her firm is sourcing interesting ventures from all over the world, not just Silicon Valley. Mulesoft, one of their hot portfolio companies, had its CEO based in Malta, originally! >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Asheem Chandna of Greylock Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We actually do a lot of work with bootstrapped entrepreneurs partly because our mission is to help as many entrepreneurs be successful as possible. I can tell you the vast majority of these entrepreneurs should not be raising money. They just don’t have the TAM to do a VC-funded company.

The truth is, there are lots of niches where you can build a $5 million to $10 million company, but you cannot build a $100 million to $200 million company. That’s fine. It’s just that you shouldn’t waste your time chasing VCs in those situations. On the dilution point, the thing that is very concerning is there is a lot of hanky panky in term sheets in the venture world. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Asheem Chandna of Greylock Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There are a few issues with what you said. At a 30,000 foot level, what you said is true. When you start peeling the onion and poking in the guts of that statement, there are lots of issues. One is, if you are looking for somebody to write you a check based on which you’re going to develop a concept, people are looking for serial entrepreneurs. They’re looking to see a track record. First time entrepreneurs’ lives are very difficult in that sense.

Asheem Chandna: I would say yes and no. Certainly repeat entrepreneurs have the credibility and you will quickly get meetings. If somebody has a success behind them and email a bunch of VCs, they’re likely to get a meeting very quickly. The majority of the work we do is we fund first-time entrepreneurs. >>>