1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Nguyen of IT Farm (Part 3)

Julien Nguyen: Alzheimer’s certainly is a huge problem. It’s very important for everybody. It’s even more important because drug development to go against Alzheimers has hit a huge wall. All the major drugs have failed so far. One of the key reasons they have failed is they don’t know exactly how the patients are doing while they are taking the drug. They don’t know the progression of the disease. With Darmiyan, they would know if the brain has progressed or stabilized. You can do that before you have any symptom.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. I’m going to ask you some trend questions on what’s happening in the industry and how you process those. How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream? How does a seed investor or an entrepreneur mitigate the Series A gap? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gus Tai of Trinity 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 Gus Tai was recorded in September 2014. 

Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses their investment thesis around e-commerce over the years – from BlueNile in 1999, to Zulily, Dot, and Bo, and Callisto Media more recently, and what he anticipates for the future.

Sramana Mitra: An outrageous e-commerce business that Gus and the firm invested in is a company called Blue Nile way back in 1999.

Gus Tai: Yes, we made the initial investment in 1999. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Nguyen of IT Farm (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’ve seen a bunch of unicorns come out of that part of the ecosystem. There’s Veeva and athenahealth on the payment side.

Julien Nguyen: That is just the beginning. There are deeper problems that can be solved. The number two part is using technology to increase the efficacy of current practices. For example, precision medicine is one of them. How do you pick the right cocktail of drugs for a cancer patient depending on their RNA?

This is not about inventing new drugs and finding new molecules. You’re just applying the ones we already have in a better way. Then you see a new area, which is the blue sky thing on aging, which everybody talks about. We feel that the first two areas are really >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Achler of MATH Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m reflecting on what you said in answer to my question. Blockchain is expensive stuff to build. How do you mitigate the need for doing things in a capital-efficient manner and doing Blockchain deals?

Mark Achler: We haven’t done one.

Sramana Mitra: You agree that Blockchain is capital-intensive.

Mark Achler: We are conservative Midwest VCs. I like to build real businesses with real revenue and with real customers. It’s early days for Blockchain. We’re paying close attention. We’re getting as educated as we possibly can. I’m concerned about it. That said, there seem to me some applications of Blockchain that make a lot of sense. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Nguyen of IT Farm (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 Julien Nguyen was recorded in October 2017. 

Julien Nguyen is General Partner at IT Farm, a seed-stage fund focused on Digital Health. We explore trends in the industry, as well as what IT Farm’s sixth fund likes to invest in.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about IT Farm. What is the focus of the firm? How big is your fund? What sized investments do you make?

Julien Nguyen: IT Farm is a seed level VC firm. We started in Tokyo and we have an office in Palo Alto. Most, if not all, of our >>>

393rd Roundtable Recording On April 5, 2018: With Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: April 5 – Please Do NOT Go Into Ultra-crowded Market Segments

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures. Tim discussed at length his firm’s investment thesis, unique relationships with CIOs, and some of the industry trends he sees.

Seven Technologies
As for the entrepreneur pitches, Rajesh Prabhu from Bangalore, India, pitched Seven Technologies, a bootstrapped services company that wants to get into developing a CRM product. Neither Tim nor I saw the merit of the strategy, considering that CRM is an incredibly crowded space.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Achler of MATH Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We started observing the social media trend in the 2003 to 2004 timeframe. In 2007 of course, iPhone came about. The Big Data trend really picked up in the late 2000’s as well. We zeroed in on AI in just about a couple of years ago. There’s a lot of machine learning and AI.

Of course, the cyber security thread is running all the way through and will continue to run. Especially with IoT, the vulnerabilities have magnified. There is no escape from a lot of cyber security threats.

Mark Achler: We’re also seeing a lot in Blockchain. There’s an awful lot of conversation right now in all the various aspects of Blockchain. We’re working hard to get our arms around that as well. >>>