1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Mason of Aligned 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 Susan Mason was recorded in October 2015. 

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.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to you and the model that you have come up with. The current mainstream venture capital industry, in my opinion, is spinning out of control. Let’s talk about your observations about what’s happening in the industry today and how you are doing something different to counter that. >>>

214th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Amos Ben-Meir, Sand Hill Angels

Amos Ben-Meir, Investor & Board Director at Sand Hill Angels, is a veteran angel investor. You will hear lots of details on working with a prominent angel group, as well as other types of syndicates.

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Roundtable Recap: March 1 – One Size Does Not Fit All

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Gary Little, Co-founder at Canvas Ventures. We discussed the various types of venture capital and the evolution of the industry into a rather segmented current eco-system. For an entrepreneur trying to raise money, all this is extremely complicated, but essential to understand, or else, you would be trying to fit a round peg in a square hole.

Passmarked.com
As for the entrepreneur pitch, Mark McChiery from Cape Town, South Africa, pitched Passmarked.com, a web site audit service that tackles security, content, and other important aspects of running a web presence. I found the venture promising and was thrilled to see such a venture emerge from South Africa.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Stewart Alsop of Alsop Louie Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The point I’m going to make to your point is that I don’t think unreasonable entrepreneurs means stupid entrepreneurs. I think I’m a pretty unreasonable entrepreneur. What we are doing with One Million by One Million is a pretty unreasonable concept, but I’m not stupid.

Stewart Alsop: I don’t know if you’ve heard me talk about it before. I have a few things that I’ve been plugging for almost 30 years, >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Stewart Alsop of Alsop Louie Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about what you see as the early stage investment game. It has become very tricky. How does a small fund or even angel investors compete with the mega funds that put in $100 million in Series D with 3x liquidation preference. How do you prevent being washed out?

Stewart Alsop: It is a tricky business. It requires understanding of how to run a venture fund. You have to be very careful that you don’t get ahead of yourself in terms of investing. We can look at a company and go, “That’s cool.” That business is going to take $50 million to $100 million to really build out and we won’t really know until the later stages of that $50 million to $100 million whether this team will turn it into a successful company. >>>

6 Investors Discuss Startup Financing via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

From listening to VCs and Seed Investors over the past few years, we have learned that the options for startup financing continue to expand. However, it is important to remember that not all ventures can be financed and not all ventures should be financed. To learn if your startup might be of interest to VCs, Angels, or Seed Investors, please read this selection of interviews with a wide-range of investors.

Naren Gupta, Co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners – a firm with an excellent track record of investing in the Silicon Valley – India corridor, but with a global market point of view – shares his insights, nuggets, and interesting wisdom. He is a veteran investor who is also strikingly polite and humble.

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387th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Nate Redmond, Alpha Edison

Nate Redmond, Managing Partner at Alpha Edison, a VC who has put trust-driven ventures at the center of his investment thesis. It’s a very interesting conversation for both entrepreneurs and investors to listen to.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Stewart Alsop of Alsop Louie Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the domain of self-driving cars, are there things that you have identified as opportunities where startups can play and perhaps venture-scale opportunities within that realm?

Stewart Alsop: We’re the lead investor of Twitch, which was purchased by Amazon about a year and a half ago. I’ve written checks to two of the founders who then started new companies. One of them started a company called Cruise Automation. Cruise Automation went down its path as a venture-backed startup developing autonomous driving capabilities originally as an add-on to existing cars.

I brought them in because I thought that what they were doing is pretty interesting. My partner thought I was crazy for >>>