1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you have to make 500 micro-VC funds productive, there needs to be some of these segmentation and clear definition. Otherwise, nobody will find anybody. It’s going to be constantly hit or miss, or it’s going to be very inefficient. The information flow needs to get much more efficient.

To your point that there are exceptions, when people have really great teams – teams that have track record or teams that come out of specific scenarios with very compelling insights into problem areas – would be an exception. What is your read of unicorn mania? As a seed investor, you could get buried under later-stage liquidation preferences. How do you protect yourself? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Am I hearing that when you look back on EchoSign, you feel that you sold too early?

Jason Lemkin: I think it was a lucrative and fair financial transaction. What I didn’t realize until I got into Adobe is that the team would accelerate after that. I didn’t realize that the team was just getting good and that the team was coming into its own.

When you have a great team, once they cross that initial scale, no matter what the world throws up against you, you cannot be killed. Adobe is great, but it didn’t have anything to do with the brand. It all had to do with the team and a little more capital. I couldn’t see it before. No matter what anybody else does, it doesn’t matter once you’re at $10 million, growing at 100% or more. >>>

392nd Roundtable Recording On March 29, 2018: With Patricia Nakache, Trinity Ventures

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

Roundtable Recap: March 29 – Hairy Issues for Women in Technology

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Patricia Nakache, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discuss the firm’s investment thesis. The discussion included issues about women in technology.

Lucid Vascular
As for the entrepreneur pitch, Prashant Chopra from Foster City, CA, pitched Lucid Vascular, a medical imaging technology using Augmented Reality that I found fascinating.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about the vehicle? Are you doing equity investments or convertible notes?

Nitin Pachisia: It’s a mix. We like to do more equity and less convertibles but we work with the founders on whatever is the best solution for them is. Our preference is to do equity and we encourage founders, even for their subsequent rounds, to do price rounds versus layering up notes over notes.

Sramana Mitra: How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream? How does a pre-seed or a seed investor mitigate the Series A gap? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Lemkin of Storm 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 Jason Lemkin was recorded in October 2014. 

Jason Lemkin, prior to becoming a VC, was the CEO of EchoSign, a digital signature SaaS vendor that Adobe acquired some years back. This was an excellent discussion and offers very concrete pointers to where you might look for white spaces in the cloud computing space to do new ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a small window into how you look back your journey as an entrepreneur. Let’s start with EchoSign now that you have so much experience behind you and you’ve had a chance to consider the cloud landscape from a VC’s point of view. >>>

209th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Anshu Sharma, Angel Investor

Anshu Sharma is an active angel investor who invests in Silicon Valley and India. Anshu has deep experience in the enterprise software space, and a thoughtful, sophisticated perspective. He is one of the early investors in Nutanix, which currently has a market cap of over $8.5 billion in the public market.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your portfolio. What have you invested in? What’s interesting? Take a few highlights of your portfolio and walk us through what they are, why you’ve invested in them, and what is the thought process.

Nitin Pachisia: We’ve made 18 investments in two and a half years, which is reflective of our pace of about 8 to 10 investments per year. I believe we’re seeing about 1,500 companies a year but we like to maintain that pace to be able to dedicate enough time to every company we invest in.

In terms of the some of the examples of portfolio companies, we have a company in the driverless trucking space called Starsky >>>