220th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Greg Borchardt, Caerus Ventures

Greg Borchardt is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Caerus Ventures, a firm that has a focus on connected hardware. It’s an interesting and differentiated investment thesis that is worth listening to, especially for IoT entrepreneurs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With T.M. Ravi of The Hive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you take us through a couple of your portfolio companies that are really interesting? What can we learn from them?

T.M. Ravi: In the Internet of Things space, the big shift is the growing commoditization of devices. Much of the value is moving to applications and data. That commoditization is not just happening on the consumer level but also on the industry level.

As economies like China become better and better at manufacturing, companies like GE realize that the $50-million rotating devices like turbines are being produced with pretty good quality in other countries also. There’s the general shift >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With T.M. Ravi of The Hive (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 T.M. Ravi was recorded in September 2016.

T.M. Ravi is Managing Director and Co-founder of The Hive, a venture studio. The discussion touches upon a couple of key issues: the prevalent incubator/accelerator model of 3-month classes, we agreed, is bogus; and Future of Work: Utopia or Dystopia?

Sramana Mitra: To set context, please introduce Hive to our audience. What kinds of companies do you incubate? What is the thesis around which you’re building this program? >>>

Roundtable Recap: February 8 – Niche is Beautiful Says Veteran Seed Investor Nitin Rai

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Nitin Rai, Managing Director at Elevate Capital. Nitin made a compelling case for investing in niche businesses with the upfront goal of scoring early exits. Excellent discussion!

PM First
As for the entrepreneur pitch, Phillip Cornell from Washington, DC, pitched PM First, an extraordinarily creative idea of turning economy seats into luxury cabins in airlines. Quite fascinating!

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shomit Ghose of Onset Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Elon Musk has talked a lot more along the lines of what you’re talking about – the unintended consequences of AI or even AI running amok in an evil way. I dealt with more of the economic question. Machine learning is really at the absolute beginning. We’re probably talking about a 50-year cycle but machine learning being machine learning has an incredibly-fast capacity to become very powerful.

In the next 50 years, I’m positive that we’re going to see machine learning penetrating every aspect of the human endeavor. If that really starts to take over professions or shrink professions in huge numbers, then 

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shomit Ghose of Onset Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you think are the opportunities of building really interesting ventures right now? What’s your investment thesis?

Shomit Ghose: We can talk a long time about this. Hardware, software, and bandwidth are all commoditized. You can’t make money by selling any of those. For the past past 10 years, our investment thesis is all about the data. We continue to focus in areas that are based on extracting the semantics of the data and particularly in using data for business.

The future that lies before us is really vast. The companies that are most interesting to us are companies that are focused on Big >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shomit Ghose of Onset Ventures (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

We are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Shomit Ghose was recorded in December 2014.

Shomit Ghose, Partner at Onset Ventures, is also a veteran startup executive with multiple IPOs under his belt. He highlights the fact that 70,000 ventures received angel funding in 2014, but the number of companies receiving venture funding remains constant year over year at about 1,000 per year. Focusing on building value is of paramount importance, so that you can validate and prove your value proposition. >>>

3 Seed Investors Discuss European Startup Trends In Podcasts

In The Next European Renaissance,  I explored how Europe’s enthusiasm for culture combined with the enabling technology of today creates a good platform for generating new and important ideas. Then I shared advice and inspiration from a group of successful European entrepreneurs in 8 Founder Podcasts Discuss Building Startups in Europe. Now, for entrepreneurs interested in financing their startups, especially those based in Europe, I’m sharing the perspectives of three seed investors currently active in Europe. In these 30-minute podcast interviews, we thoroughly discuss the size of their investments, preferences, and the European startup trends they see in their dealflow.

Alastair Mitchell, Partner at EQT Ventures, talks about the European startup funding trends.

Hussain Kanji, Partner at Hoxton Ventures, is based in London and the primary focus is on European ventures.

Cem Sertoglu is Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital, based in Turkey. Cem brings the spotlight on Turkey and the Eastern and Central European startup eco-systems.