1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos of Illuminate Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s flip that question around. Now that you have been in this business for a while and you have an investment thesis, what are you looking for? Can you pinpoint where do you want to invest in? What kind of industry trends and segments of the B2B space are of particular interest to you?

Cindy Padnos: We tend to invest in companies that are leveraging all of the data that is being collected today. They take these vast amounts of data but the vast amount of data are collected in our SaaS business applications. They mind that data. They do incredible things with it.

Those are companies we’re typically looking for. They are leveraging machine learning and other AI-related techniques to build >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It is also an evolution. This was not the case some time back. Startups had a very hard time attracting talent. That has changed. It’s become sexy and cool to work for startups in India. That’s a very good development.

Ashish Gupta: You’re absolutely right. Sexy is the word. In fact, I recently wrote an article giving some assurance to the people who are not in startups. Unlike the Valley where somebody who’s not working in startups is looked upon as a gargoyle, one doesn’t need to start worrying about that phenomenon. You don’t necessarily want people to become entrepreneurs just because it’s sexy. It exacts too high a price from everybody concerned.

Sramana Mitra: What is your current investment thesis? We got a little assessment of what’s happening today. 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana of Engineering Capital (Part 2)

Ashmeet Sidana: The important thing to keep in mind is that building a startup is an evolution that occurs from the concept of an idea all the way to when they have revenue. At some point, they leave that company, which can be a journey of 5 to 15 years. Financing events are simply events along that journey. They are the side effects of that journey. There’s a seed financing round. Perhaps there’s a Series A and B. Even an IPO is just a financing event. All the great entrepreneurs continue to run their companies well after even the IPO.

Sramana Mitra: The other side of this coin is this whole explosion in capital in the late stage financing on very unreasonable terms and on very unreasonable fundamentals. I personally believe that that trend is going to slow down next year just because a lot of these companies that have loaded valuations and weak fundamentals are going to implode in the public market. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos of Illuminate 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 Cindy Padnos, Illuminate Ventures was recorded in September 2017. 

Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures, discusses a topic that we’ve been highlighting recently: the need for multiple seed rounds as a way to bridge the Series A gap.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Illuminate Ventures. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Springing off your comment about huge amounts of money coming into India, it’s all relative. Even when you started in about 2006, there was too much money and too few deals. At that time, the product entrepreneurship ecosystem was still very nascent. There weren’t really a lot of fundable deals.

That is not the case anymore. There are a lot more fundable deals. As you said, the entrepreneurs are more sophisticated. There are more global plays starting to happen. It’s true about Silicon Valley too.

Ashish Gupta: About $3 billion got deployed in venture funds over seven years which is a fairly small amount of money, given the opportunity set. Let’s go back to 2006 for a moment and then I’ll address what is happening right now. 2006 was the third coming of the venture industry in India. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana of Engineering 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 Ashmeet Sidana, Engineering Capital was recorded in December 2015. 

Ashmeet Sidana, Founder of Engineering Capital, a seed-stage venture fund focusing on infrastructure technology, had a lot of insights to offer, and delivered one particular piece of wisdom that is close to my heart. He says, “Funding is like candy. Don’t eat too much candy. Whole wheat bread and proteins are customers and revenues. That’s what you should focus on.” Brilliant analogy, don’t you think?

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The other thing that I’ve seen in my career in various instances is, people get software and they don’t usually use it or they don’t have the staff who can take advantage of the capabilities of the software. You deliver the Ferrari and are driving it like a Toyota. In a lot of those cases, the SaaS-enabled BPO often can deliver a lot more value because the people who are driving the software are driving like it should be driven.

Brian Jacobs: I should say that the shelf-ware phenomenon is going away in the cloud world. You can stop the subscription if you’re not getting value. The SaaS companies are all very attuned to the understanding that if their customers are not getting value, they will leave. Every company we know has this customer success function which is, all around, making sure that the customer is really using the product. Your main point is an excellent one. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta of Helion 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 Ashish Gupta, Helion Ventures was recorded in May 2015. 

Ashish Gupta, Co-Founder of Helion Ventures, one of the key players in India’s venture capital eco-system. If the topic interests you, this discussion is extremely crisp and insightful.

Sramana Mitra: Ashish and I met when Ashish had done Junglee, which Amazon acquired. I met him when he was about to set off for India to start Helion Ventures. We connected a

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