384th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Gaurav Jain, Afore Capital

Gaurav Jain is Managing Partner at Afore Capital, a firm focused on pre-seed investments. This is an excellent conversation for entrepreneurs looking for insights into pre-seed.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Victoria Pettibone of Astia Angels (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In some cases if you can exit your company without needing a Series A, that is not a bad way to mitigate the Series A gap.

Victoria Pettibone: Yes. Your angels are going to be happy for the most part. Even though it’s a short turnaround time, they will not have been diluted.

Sramana Mitra: So far, we’ve been talking about companies that operate in a more capital efficient mode. The other side of the coin is this unicorn mania, where there’s so much capital flowing into companies. >>>

221st 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Andrew Romans, Rubicon Venture Capital

Andrew Romans is General Partner of Rubicon Venture Capital. Our discussion includes an interesting segment on ICOs.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Victoria Pettibone of Astia Angels (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what you have invested in in your current portfolio. Maybe even exits. You talked about a couple of exits this year. One of them was an IT company.

Victoria Pettibone: The two exits are both public. One was Ciel Medical which exited to Vyaire Medical. The other was Cloudamize, which exited to a Blackstone portfolio company. Both were very good exits. They are not disclosing numbers on either of them, but our investors were happy. Both of those exits happened within two years of our investors investing in them.

Sramana Mitra: They didn’t have venture money in the company. They were pure angel-funded companies that straight away exited? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Victoria Pettibone of Astia Angels (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s discuss stage. The early stage investment has become quite complex. It used to be seed and Series A. Now it’s pre-seed, seed, post-seed, and pre-Series A.

Victoria Pettibone: It’s true. There are no rules anymore. Like everything we do, we invest at every stage. However, most of the investments end up at late seed or Series A – certainly past the friends and family round. We do convertible notes. It could be that first round before the first equity raise.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics are you looking for? Are you looking for revenues? Are you looking for customer validation but not necessarily revenue? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Victoria Pettibone of Astia Angels (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 Victoria Pettibone was recorded in October 2017. Victoria Pettibone, Managing Director of Astia Angels, a group focused on funding women entrepreneurs. She discusses what they like to invest in, as well as the trends she sees in the deal flow and the portfolio.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Astia Angels. What are you doing? What is the focus of the group? What size investments are you making?

Victoria Pettibone: Astia is an organization >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anirudh Suri of India Internet Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about unicorn mania? I know India went completely crazy with unicorn mania for a while. Are you seeing a slowdown in unicorn mania? As a seed investor, how do you prevent yourselves from getting buried under later-stage liquidation preferences? What practices are you deploying to prevent such unappetizing outcomes?

Anirudh Suri: Unicorn mania has calmed down a little bit. It was not focused on fundamentals. Thankfully, it has slowed down. Our focus has always been on fundamentals. It’s very tough sometimes to stay focused on fundamentals.

Sramana Mitra: When the market goes crazy, fundamentals go out the window. That’s when it becomes

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Roundtable Recap: February 1 – A View into Pre-Seed Funding with Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Gaurav Jain, Managing Partner at Afore Capital, a firm focused on pre-seed investments. It’s an excellent conversation for entrepreneurs looking for insights into pre-seed.

Bodhi Academy
As for the entrepreneur pitch, Vadiraj Katti from San Jose, California, Bodhi Academy, a concept focused on improving financial literacy in India. We worked on Vadi’s positioning strategy.

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