1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Achler of MATH Venture Partners (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 Mark Achler was recorded in October 2017. 

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

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

Mark Achler: We’re based in Chicago. We’re a $28 million fund. We’re just launching our second fund as well which will be twice the size. In our first fund, we made investments of $500,000 to a million dollars. Typically, we’re early stage investors. We do some Series A and seed investing. >>>

206th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines, Webb Investment Network

Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines, both Directors at the Webb Investment Network, discuss their firm’s investment thesis.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ho Nam of Altos 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 Ho Nam was recorded in April 2016. 

Ho Nam, Managing Director at Altos Ventures, makes a clear distinction between capital efficient company building and the “grow at costs in all sorts of unsustainable ways” philosophy. These are two distinctly different ways of building businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we start by you introducing Altos Ventures and your core philosophy about investing? Obviously, it’s somewhat different from other VCs out there. I would like our audience to learn how you look at the venture landscape and how you and your colleagues at Altos have come up with a differentiated positioning for the firm. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: One last question, which is another trend. I would say it’s less visible. We are in 2017. Lots of stuff have already been built. Especially if you’re B2B investors, there aren’t that many wide open opportunities out there nowadays. Building another Salesforce.com is not that easy.

There are many niche opportunities. Some of these businesses need to be built for very small amounts of capital – $1 million to $2 million and sold for $10 million to $15 million. In some case, built for $250,000 to $500,000 and sold for $5 million to $10 million.

I’m encountering a class of investors who are actually looking at these. These are smaller TAMs. They are not 

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Concur is one of the best examples of replacing paper. That has built a very valuable company. It went public on its own. It made the shift from being a license software company to a cloud company as a public company which is very difficult to do. It did very well as a public company and now recently got acquired by SAP for $8.5 billion.

Jason Lemkin: You might look at Concur and say, “How can I possibly compete?” What’s Concur doing now? $800 million run rate. There’s plenty of room at the bottom that you and I can get together and we can build a $100 million business and SAP wouldn’t even notice. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: VC firms are raising huge amounts of capital. The management fees are so big. They don’t really need to deliver any returns. They are just sitting and becoming fat with fat management fees.

Nitin Pachisia: To your earlier question about the trend in the VC industry, you have to decide as a VC whether you want to optimize for fees or optimize for carry. As a smaller fund, we’re optimizing for carry. If we do our jobs well, the carry is what’s going to generate the bigger returns for us.

As the funds that started off as miro-VCs and are now two $50 million funds, they’re optimized for fees. Whatever their thinking is, to generate carry, they have to return $250 million. If you don’t exit for $2.5 billion, my 10% is not going to be able to return the fund. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: SaaS continues to be bigger because there is a lot more software adoption happening all over the world. Last week, we had a session that was focused on what’s happening on the Indian cloud market, which is a very active market right now.

There’s a company called Greytip that has built up quite a bit of scale. It’s a bootstrapped company. It has taken them many years. It’s a 15-year story. They do the equivalent of PayCycle. The per user fee for Greytip is $.30. It’s a completely different ball game in terms of pricing model and what is a profitable customer acquisition strategy. Everything is bigger. The number of customers all around the world is bigger. The number of competitors all around the world is bigger. >>>

391st 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Ben Mathias, Vertex Ventures

Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures, India, discusses the trends and dynamics of the Indian startup eco-system, including exits. India needs exits at this point, even if they’re relatively small exits.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS