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. >>>

Roundtable Recap: March 22 – Indian Startup Eco-system Needs Exits

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures, India. The discussion spanned trends and dynamics of the Indian startup eco-system, including exits. India needs exits at this point, even if they’re relatively small exits. We’ve seen some deals happen in the market with Nutanix buying Minjar, and Qualys buying a couple of small ones.

First Responders Live
As for the entrepreneur pitches, James Corbett from Vorhees, NJ, pitched First Responders Live, a video-based communication platform for local police. Very interesting idea.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (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 Stoffer was recorded in September 2014. 

Jason Stoffer, General Partner at Maveron – a consumer-only venture capital firm that has had a successful track record of investing in e-commerce ventures ranging from eBay, Shutterfly, and Groupon to the more recent Zulily, as well as education ventures – discusses e-commerce opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start off with e-commerce. I know you have invested in other things. We’ll discuss your other investments and your investment thesis in more general terms as well. To begin with, let’s talk about a couple of your e-commerce investments. What is your current thought process around the industry? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Oded Hermoni of Rhodium Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We are in 2017. Lots of stuff have already been built. Nowadays, there aren’t so many wide open opportunities for doing fundamental things the way Salesforce or Facebook did it. The incumbents are incredibly powerful. They have monopolistic power.

We have a lot of capital in the system right now. If you’re managing a chunk of money, you have to think of an investment thesis of where you 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, 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Dougery of Inventus Capital (Part 5)

John Dougery: I think that the point about SaaS is all about market size, but we have a different view. We have been doing SaaS companies since we started 10 years ago out of India. We’ve always had a thesis that business software companies are going to be very interesting product opportunities. That came out of our own perspective where we don’t have a geographic bias.

We’re going to invest in startups in Silicon Valley. We’re going to invest in startups in India. We do it out of a thesis-based approach and say, “Which one is the best product?” Even business software that is addressing the Indian market ultimately is going to face competition from overseas or they have to go overseas. They have to have a thesis that they can be number one. >>>

4 Investors Discuss Early Stage Startup Investing in Podcasts

In the current early stage investment universe, we have had a lot of change. It used to be simply seed and Series A. Now it’s pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-Series A. It’s a very wide spectrum even within early stage investment. To give entrepreneurs the advantage of understanding these changes, I have asked several seed investors to share in specifics how they define early stage and in what part of the continuum they play. Have a listen to these recent 30-minute podcast interviews to learn where your startup might fall within the ever-changing early stage investment world.

Christina Brodbeck, Founding Partner at Rivet Ventures, talks about the firm’s investment thesis of funding companies that target the female demographic in its purchase decision cycle. Very interesting and under-served market.

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390th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Yanai Oron, Vertex Ventures

Yanai Oron, General Partner at Vertex Ventures, took us through his firm’s investment focus on deep technology ventures in Israel. The discussion includes an excellent window into how VC firms have different arithmetic depending on their size and structure.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Oded Hermoni of Rhodium Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about industry sector? Do you have preferences? Do you have concentrations? Do you have expertise in specific sectors?

Oded Hermoni: We usually invest a lot in media. A couple of months ago, you covered two Israeli companies Outbrain and Tabula. We invested in Outbrain very early on. We also invested in a company called Gizmo, which is a US-based company. One of our latest investments is a company called comedy.com that now has 3.5 billion views per month. Those were our investments in media.

We have some consumer-related companies. We have security companies such HexaTier that was acquired by Huawei. We have >>>