1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Scott Sandell of NEA (Part 3)

Scott Sandell: Just to be clear, I have been fortunate enough to have invested in and been a part of a number of unicorn companies. Not all of them were bootstrapped companies. I don’t think of that as an essential ingredient at all. What’s interesting is to think about why bootstrapping is a valuable discipline and why some of the companies have chosen to bootstrap and what it did for them.

I think the first and most fundamental thing is that it establishes an entrepreneur’s commitment to what they’re doing. If you invest your own capital or you take a lower salary, you become much more committed to making that company successful than if you just start off by taking somebody else’s money which, to some people, seems like a casual activity. I don’t mean to make light >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Scott Sandell of NEA (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: For those of you who don’t know the history of WebEx, the company went public and was eventually acquired by Cisco. It was a very successful story. It was one of the first two cloud companies in the history of the business. I want to get to Salesforce, but let me actually first get to Tableau because it’s a more contemporary company.

I’ve written about Tableau quite a lot recently. My understanding of Tableau was by the time they came to NEA for their funding, the company not only had customers and revenues, but it also had done an interesting OEM deal with Hyperion. Tell us a bit about what you saw in Tableau. It seems like an incredibly capital efficient company that generated immense return on investment. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is actually a pre-seed problem. There were 70,000 companies that received some sort of early-stage financing. In the last few years, these numbers have been very high but the number of companies that get venture financing remains at 1,200 or so.

In the middle where there are companies that have crossed over to being credible companies, that set of companies is actually much lower. A lot of companies are getting funding from, for a lack of better word, dumb investors who don’t know what they’re doing and just writing checks and creating a glut in the funnel. But it’s in the middle where you have good companies. >>>

7 Seed Investor Podcasts Discuss What They Look For In Startups

There is currently a lot of capital in seed investing, with somewhere between 500 and 700 micro VCs extremely active in what we call the pre-Series A ecosystem. Some are really small funds of $10-$15 million dollar funds, some are $30-$50 million dollar funds, some are $70-$100 million dollar funds, and in some cases they do small Series A investing. This is quite a recent phenomena that has emerged over the past few years, perhaps even just within the past 18 months. Huge numbers of people have raised small funds. As a result, a lot of seed deals are getting funded. Recently, over the past month, I’ve spoken with the following group of seed investors about this trend, as well as the types of startups that seed investors are looking for. Have a listen to our conversations, shared below as 30-minute podcast interviews, to learn if seed investors might be interested in financing your startup.

Daniel Cohen, General Partner, Viola Ventures, discusses the Israeli startup market and his firm’s focus within that segment.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Scott Sandell of NEA (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 Scott Sandell was recorded in February 2015.

Scott Sandell, General Partner at NEA, is one of NEA’s star investors. He has been named to the Forbes Midas list every year since 2007, and has been involved with eight Unicorn companies including Salesforce.com, Workday, Webex, Tableau, and others. Scott discusses, specifically, Webex and Tableau in quite a bit of depth. In both companies, the scrappy, capital-efficient management of those businesses were striking!

Among Silicon Valley’s venture firms, NEA holds a special place in my own entrepreneurial journey, being the first VC firm that I >>>

386th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Daniel Cohen, Viola Ventures

Daniel Cohen, General Partner, Viola Ventures, discusses the Israeli startup market and his firm’s focus within that segment.

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385th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Nitin Rai, Elevate Capital

Nitin Rai, Managing Director at Elevate Capital, made a compelling case for investing in niche businesses with the upfront goal of scoring early exits. Excellent discussion!

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Of your ventures that have raised venture money, have they raised venture money from these $75 million to $100 million funds, or have they raised money from the bigger funds?

Venktesh Shukla: They typically raise money from bigger funds because these are big spaces. One of them was how do you handle structured and unstructured data. Every company in the world has that problem and there is no solution. With the onset of predominantly mobile access, the old networking problems haven’t gone away. The new ones have piled on top of that.

Using machine learning, how do you isolate the problem when somebody complains that he’s seeing poor responsiveness? That’s a new category of problem. The third one is how do you create a virtual private cloud in minutes. The traditional route of >>>