1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos of Illuminate 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 Cindy Padnos, Illuminate Ventures was recorded in September 2017. 

Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures, discusses a topic that we’ve been highlighting recently: the need for multiple seed rounds as a way to bridge the Series A gap.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Illuminate Ventures. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Springing off your comment about huge amounts of money coming into India, it’s all relative. Even when you started in about 2006, there was too much money and too few deals. At that time, the product entrepreneurship ecosystem was still very nascent. There weren’t really a lot of fundable deals.

That is not the case anymore. There are a lot more fundable deals. As you said, the entrepreneurs are more sophisticated. There are more global plays starting to happen. It’s true about Silicon Valley too.

Ashish Gupta: About $3 billion got deployed in venture funds over seven years which is a fairly small amount of money, given the opportunity set. Let’s go back to 2006 for a moment and then I’ll address what is happening right now. 2006 was the third coming of the venture industry in India. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana of Engineering 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 Ashmeet Sidana, Engineering Capital was recorded in December 2015. 

Ashmeet Sidana, Founder of Engineering Capital, a seed-stage venture fund focusing on infrastructure technology, had a lot of insights to offer, and delivered one particular piece of wisdom that is close to my heart. He says, “Funding is like candy. Don’t eat too much candy. Whole wheat bread and proteins are customers and revenues. That’s what you should focus on.” Brilliant analogy, don’t you think?

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The other thing that I’ve seen in my career in various instances is, people get software and they don’t usually use it or they don’t have the staff who can take advantage of the capabilities of the software. You deliver the Ferrari and are driving it like a Toyota. In a lot of those cases, the SaaS-enabled BPO often can deliver a lot more value because the people who are driving the software are driving like it should be driven.

Brian Jacobs: I should say that the shelf-ware phenomenon is going away in the cloud world. You can stop the subscription if you’re not getting value. The SaaS companies are all very attuned to the understanding that if their customers are not getting value, they will leave. Every company we know has this customer success function which is, all around, making sure that the customer is really using the product. Your main point is an excellent one. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta of Helion 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 Ashish Gupta, Helion Ventures was recorded in May 2015. 

Ashish Gupta, Co-Founder of Helion Ventures, one of the key players in India’s venture capital eco-system. If the topic interests you, this discussion is extremely crisp and insightful.

Sramana Mitra: Ashish and I met when Ashish had done Junglee, which Amazon acquired. I met him when he was about to set off for India to start Helion Ventures. We connected a

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Entrepreneurs start up somewhere and they get intoxicated with this funding thing. If they are hitting their stride and everybody is chasing them and offering them money, it goes to their head. They want to keep raising money. If you get to a situation like that, it’s perfectly okay to sell out for a small fund.

Charlie O’Donnell: I also think there’s a little bit of a difference in terms of what goes on in geographies. One of the things I noticed is that in the Valley, the goal is to be at the top of the heap of the startup world. It’s focused on a single industry – tech.

If you sell your company for $500 million, you’re clearly not at the top. It seems like everybody is focused on that climb. New York >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What stage do you recommend people to make that shift in your orbit? Are we talking about getting to a million and then moving to Silicon Valley? We see all kinds of permutations and combinations of this behavior. I’m curious what your thoughts are on this.

Brian Jacobs: Rather than a revenue number, I think more in terms of product-market fit. If you’ve got a product that is clearly meeting the needs of your customers and you believe that it’s time to put your foot on the gas and grow your sales and marketing capabilities, then that’s a good time to do it. We see some companies which, for instance, are offering their products on a freemium basis. They are getting no revenue from those customers, but you can start to see if the product is meeting the customer’s needs. That’s more important to us than a specific revenue number. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In some cases, the newsroom analogy is probably not the right analogy. Think about a toothbrush brand. That’s now news-oriented. If you think about how to do content marketing for those kinds of brands, it’s a very difficult problem.

Ashu Garg: In the newsroom analogy, I’m using the word very loosely. It’s the idea that you have to have a focused team thinking about content creation in the context of what users want. Take a toothpaste brand. Talking about your toothpaste, the color and the flavor is probably not that interesting for the audience.

Maybe stories about how the brand is engaging with changing the lives of poor people in third world countries would be interesting. I >>>