1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Daniel of Accel Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down into some of these trends areas. Since you started talking about Freshdesk, we know that case study very well. Freshdesk is cloud-based customer support for small businesses.

If you look at that style of company out of India, what are some of the companies in your portfolio that have achieved that level of traction? Let’s say $5 million plus in annual revenue. What would be some of the examples? What specifically are the business problems that they are tackling?

Anand Daniel: Before we talk about other companies, if you look at Freshdesk itself, you can think of it as a platform. Then >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Aniruddha Malpani of Malpani Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in the entrepreneurs who are coming to you for funding? What kinds of entrepreneurs are coming? What resonates with you?

Aniruddha Malpani: As I said, the social impact piece resonates with me because I actually think these companies will be far more profitable, partly because of the financial capital we’re providing. They also have human capital. The employees these companies attract are very different from the average employee who works for a for-profit institute.

Then there’s that social capital angle, which means customers are far more wiling to pay a premium for some of these products. >>>

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

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Anand Daniel of Accel Partners was recorded in May 2016. 

Anand Daniel, Partner with Accel Partners, discusses Accel India’s investment strategy at length.

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure you have an extensive analysis of the Indian market at this point. It would be great for our audience to have some view into how you are thinking about your investment focus today. What stage? What sector? What are your geographical constrainst? How are you thinking about the global opportunity versus the India-facing opportunity? >>>

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. >>>