1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Greg Sands of Costanoa Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a question in what you’re seeing. I’m completely with you and I’ve written extensively on this topic. The opportunity in AI is in applied AI. The unfair advantage is in the hands of people who have really deep domain knowledge in a particular domain where you apply the stack and solve a business problem. You mentioned agriculture, for instance.

If you look at that particular company, where is that domain knowledge coming from? What is the genesis and anecdotal founding of that company? How did this expertise come together – the combination of reasonably good understanding of the AI stack and the domain knowledge?

Greg Sands: One of the things that we all experience are people who have the technical knowledge and start out saying, “How do >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dave Hornik of August Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me turn the question around. If somebody came to you with an idea, give us some insight into your process of how you analyze and frame the idea. We can do this for some of your investments that have turned out really well but when they came to you, that was not at all obvious. What was the thinking hat that you put on to analyze and assess those?

Dave Hornik: The first piece of that is always, “Is this a person with whom I’d like to work? Is this a group of people who I think are thinking differently and deeply and are truly engaged in what they’re building?” There’s a range of opportunities. I’ve now been working with an entrepreneur for 14 years by the name of René Lacerte. He’s a great guy. I met him when he was funding his first business. He’d just left Intuit. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Greg Sands of Costanoa 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 Greg Sands, Costanoa Ventures was recorded in December 2017. 

Greg Sands, Founder and Managing Director at Costanoa Ventures shares his investment focus.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What size investments are you making?

Greg Sands: Costanoa Ventures invests in the entire stack of business-facing software. These are companies that change the way the world does business. We’re investing out of a $175 million third fund. There are two modes. We do seed investments, which most typically are half a million to a million and a half. Then Series A investments that range from $2 million to $6 million. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dave Hornik of August 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 Dave Hornik, August Capital was recorded in December 2014. 

Dave Hornik, General Partner, August Capital, as some of you may know, shocked the industry years ago by being the first VC to start blogging. His peers were aghast! Well, clearly, he saw something before everybody else, and today, many VCs blog, Tweet, and do all sorts of other things to engage in social media, now a dominant force in the industry. He discusses a number of points, of which, I want to particularly draw your attention to his views on the subject of Freemium.

Sramana Mitra: I have this memory of almost 10 years ago when you were blogging. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Guy Resheff of Grove Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you see unicorn mania in Israel? As a seed investor, you could get buried under later-stage liquidation preferences. How do you protect yourself?

Guy Resheff: One thing that I would say that’s markedly different is that, in absolute terms, the number of unicorns generated in Israel is significantly smaller. That has driven some type of thinking within the Israel venture community that strives to achieve more limited goals. There’s a lot of talk about Israeli companies being sold at prices that are too low. Multiples have not been lower, but the exit price is lower.

Sramana Mitra: You’re not really playing the unicorn mania game to that extent which is a good thing. >>>

Roundtable Recap: May 3 – Spotlight on EdTech

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Jennifer Carolan, Co-founder and General Partner at Reach Capital, a venture firm with 100% focus on EdTech. The conversation was an excellent exploration of the state of the union in EdTech investments.

Vpharmacist
As for entrepreneur pitches, we spoke with Tamilvendan Rajaraman from Chennai, India, pitching Vpharmacist, an online pharmacy that is bootstrapped and executing very well, competing in a crowded market.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heidi Roizen of DFJ (Part 4)

Heidi Roizen: The point is to understand the terms and understand how they impact not only your return but the motivations of everyone else around the table. When you set up a situation where someone is going to make three times their money no matter what and they’re going to be the first money out, and then another person who’s only going to make money if you sell the company for $200 million, you are talking about two people who have dramatically different ideas about what you should do strategically.

That, to me, is a very divisive thing. I’ve been a VC now for 16 years, but I was an entrepreneur for 14 years before that. I raised two rounds of venture. I’ve lived this. Even though I understand why VCs negotiate for these terms, when you do these things and >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Guy Resheff of Grove Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the last six months of your deal flow, could you synthesize some of the most interesting trends that you have observed?

Guy Resheff: A common one is artificial intelligence. It’s everywhere.

Sramana Mitra: SaaS for large markets is kind of over. Everything in SaaS right now is niche.

Guy Resheff: If what you mean is that the basic infrastructure has been laid, that’s true in many ways. The caveat that I would say about that is, it really depends on the types of problem that you’re trying to solve. In our case, we are in Hardware-as-a-Service >>>