1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ron Heinz of Signal Peak Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of points to add to what you said is, I started seeing a bit of an inflection point in Utah after Omniture. Omniture was a very visible success out of Utah. Omniture went public. Adobe acquired Omniture. That has been the milestone. The other thing, from a trend point of view is, companies from Utah have done great bootstrapping.

Both Pluralsight and InsideSales were bootstrapped to a very large degree. They did not actually take much early stage capital at all. By the time they took capital, that capital was a lot of capital and not your traditional

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Roundtable Recap: March 14 – Learn to Bootstrap Effectively to Navigate Early Chicken and Egg Stage

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Yanai Oron, General Partner at Vertex Ventures, who 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.

Subba-Cultcha.com
As for the entrepreneur pitches, Mark Jennings from London, UK, pitched Subba-Cultcha.com, a Tripadvisor style music review and rating platform spanning live and recorded music. Very interesting idea, that needs to be bootstrapped to fundability, a chicken and egg situation that every entrepreneur has to navigate.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rehan Yar Khan of Orios 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 Rehan Yar Khan was recorded in September 2016. 

Rehan Yar Khan is General Partner at Orios Venture Partners, and an early investor in the Indian startup scene. Rehan’s core focus is on the Indian consumer opportunity, and that is what we focus on in this discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by telling our audience a bit about your fund and your investments in recent years.

Rehan Yar Khan: We are an India-centric venture capital fund. I’ve been an investor for the last 10 years. I set up the fund >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ron Heinz of Signal Peak 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 Ron Heinz was recorded in May 2017. 

Ron Heinz, Founder and Managing Director at Signal Peak Ventures, a venture firm operating mostly in the Rocky Mountain corridor, discusses what’s happening in Utah, as well as Colorado and Arizona. We’ve covered a number of companies from that area including Pluralsight, InsideSales, Steals.com, Ping Identity, and InfusionSoft. Today, there are over a thousand funded startups in those geographies. Bootstrapping runs heavy in the startup culture of the region.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you tell us about Signal Peak Ventures. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think it was in 1997. I was funding a company of my own that I had founded. We did all our product development for very little money in India. It was before the trend where you could be building companies in India. I met with 36 venture capitalists before I could find one to actually do this with me. That was NEA.

It was hell. People were telling me, “We don’t fund companies with product development in India.” A decade later if you were in Silicon Valley and not doing product development in India, you were a fool. These kinds of 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What stage did you invest in Arkin?

Sandeep Singhal: We came in at the very start. We seeded the company. We expect to see more of this going forward. It’s just very efficient if the go-to market strategy is being developed in the US with team members that are based here and the MVP is built out in India. We’ve seen that in the past with Druva and PubMatic. We believe that we’ll see more of that approach.

Sramana Mitra: Especially in the enterprise context. Companies that are selling to global SMEs are actually marketing and selling from India as well and getting further along before they choose to move to the US in

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6 Investors Discuss their Portfolios via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Entrepreneurs can learn a lot about investors from their process of evaluating the funding-worthiness of startups. Within the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum, I have asked investors to talk a bit about their own investment portfolios. What have you invested in and why? When did the entrepreneur come to you? At what stage and with what metrics? What convinced you to invest? In the following interviews, each investor shares the kinds of businesses in their portfolios and explains why they were drawn to those companies.

Susan Mason, General Partner at Aligned Ventures, talks about the dysfunctions of the broader venture capital model, and what her firm is doing to address those. Excellent conversation.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The India e-commerce market is an active market, but it still operates on this cash-on-delivery mode. Are there indications that this is going to change and people will feel more comfortable with providing credit cards on the internet? That’s going to accelerate the trends.

Sasha Mirchandani: It has to change. It’s a mindset change more than anything else. It’s hard to scale without credit cards. You can’t have cash-on-delivery going on forever. Credit card is going to chip away at COD over the next couple of years. It’s something that we’re going to live with for longer than I would have liked. It’s inevitable. It has to happen. >>>