1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jake Seid of Stone Bridge Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? What’s your preference?

Jake Seid: Proactively, I’m focused on Silicon Valley and outside of Silicon Valley opportunistically.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your current portfolio. What are the highlights? What have you invested in? How do you decide what you have chosen to invest in?

Jake Seid: We look at great teams, big markets, and differentiated technologies. Taking that at a >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jake Seid of Stone Bridge 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 Jake Seid of Stone Bridge Ventures was recorded in November 2017. 

Jake Seid, Managing Director, Stone Bridge Ventures, talks about trends, AngelList Syndicates, ICOs and more.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Stone Bridge Ventures. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What size investments do you like to make?

Jake Seid: This is a vehicle that I formed after my time as President of Ten-X. When I moved to the advisory board, I saw a >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jon Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: People are scrambling. There are a lot of people in the industry who are also scrambling to put in little bits of money. By the time you get to raising Series A, you’ve raised six rounds of financing already.

Jon Staenberg: I love to refer to the millennial problem. Pivoting, sometimes, is a completely appropriate response, but you have limited amount of money. You haven’t raised enough money. You pivot twice. Guess what? What do you have? I do get those calls. People say to me, “Is this fundable now?” You should have asked that question two pivots ago.

Sramana Mitra: That’s what we do here in the program. We focus on fundamentals and focus on customers and

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jon Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You said earlier that you’re interested in Bitcoin. Can you talk a bit more about how you’re analyzing the Bitcoin situation? Bitcoin is not a capital-efficient area to invest in. It’s going to be expensive more often than not. How are you parsing the Bitcoin opportunity?

Jon Staenberg: Let me step back for one second on that question. When we started doing this 30 years ago, technology was in a serial rollout. I remember the PC era. We talked about client-server. We talked about the network. Today, we have an absolute hurricane of new technologies being hurled at the world. So there’s no longer one thing to focus on. There are 10 things like Bitcoin.

I have to say I’m just at the beginning of my study of Bitcoin. I can’t sit here and tell you how I’m going to invest in it. I’m sticking >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jon Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Have you selected where you want to play in this continuum?

Jon Staenberg: I haven’t. Maybe it’s a bad strategy on my part to say I’m more opportunistic, but I don’t have a fund right now. I’m investing on my own or I’m investing with syndicates. I have a group of people I work with as well. I back people first. People always ask that question. Is it market or people? I’m backing people.

I’ll give you two investments I’ve done recently. One was a company called Tomorrow.me. Surprisingly, there is a large audience that doesn’t have a will yet. This was the first round of funding. There are some great people around the table but the team had >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jon Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. The following interview with Jon Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners was recorded in November 2017. 

Jon Staenberg, Managing Partner at Staenberg Venture Partners, has been a Seed Investor in over 300 ventures over the last 30 years. Jon draws from his long background and discusses some of what interests him to invest in a startup. He also reflects on the question People or Market: Which takes priority?

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about the focus of your investments and let’s introduce you to our audience.

Jon Staenberg: I’m a little disappointed that it took 374 shows to get me on, but I’m glad to be here. I’m kidding, of course! Congratulations to you for doing this. It’s nice to be interviewed. I’m an old dinosaur at this point, having done this for some 30 >>>

8 Investors Discuss Velocity and Financing within the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Almost all investors are looking for startups with velocity, ventures that increasingly solve real pains in repeatable ways. If you can achieve velocity, then investors will chase you, because they know it’s not so easy to find companies that hit their stride velocity-wise. Be mindful that the best way for your startup to get to velocity may be by bootstrapping. Entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues, and profits. Financing and exit are optional. There are many examples of companies that would have succeeded as bootstrapped companies, but went out of business because they went after financing. To learn about the various levels of velocity investors are looking for in the startups they finance, please read the following interviews with a wide variety of VCs and seed investors.

Mark Achler, Managing Director, MATH Venture Partners, discusses their investment strategy and the industry trends.

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203rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Curtis Feeny, Silicon Valley Data Capital

Curtis Feeny, Managing Director at Silicon Valley Data Capital, talks about his firm’s investment thesis around Big Data and Machine Learning.

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