208th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Ashwini Anburajan, 22X Fund

Ashwini Anburajan, Founding Partner of 22X Fund, a tokenized fund that is investing across 30 portfolio companies. It’s a very interesting experiment and you will enjoy listening to some cutting edge FinTech thought leadership.

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207th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Dennis Joyce, Alliance of Angels

Dennis Joyce, Investor and Member of Alliance of Angels, talks about the largest Angel group in the Pacific Northwest.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled 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 Nitin Pachisia was recorded in October 2017. 

Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures, discusses pre-seed and seed investing.

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

Nitin Pachisia: We’re a very young pre-seed fund. We started about three and a half years ago. For our initial investments, we invest exclusively at pre-seed stage, which is effectively pre-product in most cases. We focus on immigrant founded companies. >>>

12 Investors Discuss Unicorn Mania via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Right now there is a lot of capital in the startup investment system. Investors managing a good amount of money have to think of an investment thesis where they can really get returns. One of the observations I’ve had is that if everybody is chasing Unicorns, it’s not going to work, because there aren’t that many Unicorns. Unicorns, by definition, should be rare. Right now, we have a lot of pseudo-unicorns because a lot of artificially-bloated companies have come into the market. In the private market, there are tons of artificially bloated pseudo-unicorns. This aggressive goal of trying to invest in Unicorns is not going to end very well. There’s going to be a lot of casualties in the process.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your investment thesis around online education right now?

Jason Stoffer: I don’t really do education either online or offline. The biggest area of opportunity in education is post-college. What you see is an environment where when I graduated college in 1999, it was very easy to get a job. You had a job in a consulting firm or a CPG firm.

Today it’s very different. Not only is it hard to find your first job but skills change so quickly. The area I like is how do you train post-college to gain the skills the workforce demands. It’s really telling that unemployment is such a big problem for college graduates. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch topics a little bit to look at some other categories that you tend to invest in. You like to invest in education it seems – online education. I saw that you’ve invested in Course Hero. We’ve done a big story on Andrew. I love what Course Hero is doing. Huge numbers of college students are hanging out on Course Hero both sharing and using course notes.

What I like about the business is it has a very clear monetization model. It’s not some foo-foo business. I love the fact that Course Hero is essentially a subscription business. A large number of their users are subscribing. Andrew bootstrapped that business for a long time. I think it was already about $10 million before they raised money. >>>

391st Roundtable Recording On March 22, 2018: With Ben Mathias, Vertex Ventures

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: My observation is the venture capital industry needs to really get a lot more savvy and sophisticated about the discipline of merchandising if it really wants to play in this B2C brand world. Especially in domains like fashion and design it’s all about merchandising and curation.

Jason Stoffer: Look at Mickey Drexler. It’s all about the merchant. It’s about this magical outcome that takes place in combining the art and the science of retailing. That’s what we’re looking for in investments. We have a new investment called Dolls Kill. It’s almost an online analog to what Hot Topic was a couple of decades ago when I was growing up. >>>