1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Guy Resheff of Grove Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A follow-on question that comes to my mind is that if you are looking for most of the core R&D to be done before you come in, what is the assumption about how the prospective company funds that R&D phase? Is it coming out of university research? Is it coming out of government agency research? Where is your deal flow coming from?

Guy Resheff: It’s a wide variety of sources. Just to make it clear, we don’t expect a vast majority of R&D to be completed. We usually enter at a point where there is a tremendous amount of additional development to be done. It’s really just the fundamental basic research that we should be able to validate. We have an extensive network of entrepreneurs that we communicate with. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Guy Resheff of Grove 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 Guy Resheff, Grove Ventures was recorded in December 2017. He is no longer with the firm. 

Guy Resheff, Partner at Grove Ventures, focuses the spotlight on Israel.

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

Guy Resheff: Grove Ventures is an early stage VC focusing on deep technology companies. Anytime you see a very tough technical problem involving deep science, that’s what we are all about. Our fund size is $110 million. We invest in seed and A >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hernan Kazah of Kaszek Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are there companies that have crossed $100 million in revenue?

Hernan Kazah: Certainly. We have a few in our portfolio. I was mentioning Netshoes. That’s over a billion dollars in revenue. There are a few companies that have gone over $100 million. Many have gone over $20 million.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see ahead? You described in a fair bit of detail in the last decade in terms of local-focused companies making it big in Latin America. Is that the trend that you see in the next five to ten years as well?

Hernan Kazah: There are two aspects. The big overriding theme is that one. Then you can go one level deeper and look into the >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heidi Roizen of DFJ (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 Heidi Roizen, DFJ was recorded in March 2016. 

Heidi Roizen, Operating Partner at DFJ, discusses her important article, “How to Build a Unicorn From Scratch – and Walk Away with Nothing,” and imparts crucial lessons to entrepreneurs on how to look at terms in a venture financing situation.

Sramana Mitra: We have been living in world of unicorn mania. We have tried to put some perspective on this issue. There are good sides to the unicorn mania. There are bad sides to the unicorn mania. Let’s start with one

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jake Seid of Stone Bridge Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m surprised that you haven’t talked about selling when these very high level of investments start coming into a company. Sometimes it’s not just companies that are not just doing well. Sometimes if a company is a hot company, the trend has been to raise huge amounts of money.

There are risks raising that kind of money because valuations can get way ahead of themselves. Then in the follow-on round, you start running into down rounds and liquidation preferences. That’s where the seed investors get screwed. One of the ways a lot of seed investors protect themselves is when that kind of dynamic sets in, they sell and do not remain. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hernan Kazah of Kaszek Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you look at the last decade or so, besides MercadoLibre, what are other notable success stories from the Latin American market as far as startups are concerned.

Hernan Kazah: There’s one company called Globant.

Sramana Mitra: We covered Globant quite extensively actually.

Hernan Kazah: There are two companies in Brazil. One is Status which is kind of an ERP, which was created from mergers of several small companies in Brazil. There’s a company called Lynx that helps businesses connect for B2B offerings. That company >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jake Seid of Stone Bridge Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your point about the fund sizes being larger and mitigating the later stage pro rata opportunity is well taken. I’m going to elaborate on my question. There is a lot of competition to get into some of the deals for Series A and Series B.

If you look at the numbers, there are 50,000 to 70,000 seed stage investments a year versus 1,200 to 1,500 Series A investments. Clearly there’re a lot of companies in that pool that are not getting to Series A. Only a percentage of those are really these hot companies. The hot companies, by definition, are few and far between, which is why there is such a competition. All that is anomalies. There’re a lot of companies in the middle. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hernan Kazah of Kaszek 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 Hernan Kazah of Kaszek Ventures was recorded in November 2016. 

Hernan Kazah, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Kaszek Ventures, is one of the earliest VC firms to start investing in the Latin American market. Hernan is also a Co-founder of MercadoLibre, Latin America’s e-commerce leader. This discussion features a comprehensive overview of the trends in the Latin American startup scene.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about your activities since we last interacted. You were still at MercadoLibre but I know you switched to VC for a while. Tell us what have you been up to since then. >>>