1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Laurel Touby of Supernode Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What have you invested in? Give us an example or two and tell us why you chose to invest in those.

Laurel Touby: We are about to close the first close of our fund. We’re now looking at investment for that fund. In my angel investing, you can see some indicators of some  companies that I invested in personally that have been doing really well. One of them is a company called AppBoy which is in marketing tech. I did it five years ago. It wasn’t quite as crowded as it is today.

It has changed its name to Braze. It’s basically software to help marketers reach out to their community via the app. It’s managing your community of users better through your app. It’s analytics. It started out as doing one or two things. Another one is >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel of ff Venture Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s look at 2017. This is our last roundtable. We are about to close the year off. You have, I imagine, seen thousands of deals this year. What are the trends in your deal flow?

John Frankel: We’ve been leaning heavily into AI, cyber security, robotics, FinTech. We’re seeing a ton of opportunities in those spaces. The reality is, AI isn’t a space. It’s a toolset. You’re going to see AI embedded in almost everything over time just the way mobile or SaaS is when you look at enterprise. With regard to other trends, there’s a lot of noise, excitement, and manic behavior around Blockchain and ICOs. We’re looking at it and studying it. It’s not necessarily an area that we think institutional capital should be playing today. >>>

6 Investor Podcasts and Linking Bootstrapping to Financing

I’m a huge proponent of bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Having worked within the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem for all these years, I’ve observed with interest the development of different ecosystems in different parts of the world. Bootstrapping happens to be one of the really important ways that startup ecosystems come up. You get a few startups that become successful in a bootstrapped manner and then the investments start.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mackey Craven of OpenView 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 Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners was recorded in January 2018. 

Mackey Craven, Partner at OpenView Venture Partners, discusses what Series A VCs are looking for in the realm of software investments. We talk at length about the Series A gap from the perspective of a fund that focuses on Series A and beyond.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. Let’s get to know OpenView. How big is the fund? What sized investments do you like to make? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Laurel Touby of Supernode 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 Laurel Touby of Supernode Ventures was recorded in January 2018. 

Laurel Touby, Managing Partner at Supernode Ventures, and a former entrepreneur and avid angel investor, has now launched her new institutional pre-seed fund.

Sramana Mitra: I’m surprised our paths haven’t crossed until now. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel of ff Venture 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 John Frankel of ff Venture Capital was recorded in December 2017. 

John Frankel, Partner at ff Venture Capital, discusses the firm’s investment thesis as well as key trends in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make?

John Frankel: We’re a New York-based seed stage fund. We look to invest in companies when they’re just getting going. We >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Daniel of Accel Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s flip to the consumer side where the mobile penetration has been tremendous. Everybody believes that India is going the the next big e-commerce market. Even Amazon believes that. It has been a slower adoption.

There is friction around buying online. People do cash on delivery. They don’t like to pay by credit card online which has caused the market to evolve much more slowly. It’s a low trust society. What is your forecast about when it is likely to flip? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Aniruddha Malpani of Malpani Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you parse the unicorn mania that’s going on in the industry now? If you do get a hot company that goes through multiple rounds of financing, you could get buried under later-stage liquidation preferences. How do you protect yourself and how do you think about this scenario?

Aniruddha Malpani: We’ve not reached that stage yet. It’s still early days for us. I think the reality is that most of these companies are never going to become unicorns. That’s a good problem to have. Our focus is making sure that we have pro-rata rights. Initially, we will continue growing with these companies as they continue to grow.

Our hope is that as we engage with entrepreneurs, they will not ditch us when they start talking to the bigger boys. Again, I have

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