380th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Laurel Touby, Supernode Ventures

Laurel Touby, Managing Partner at Supernode Ventures, and a former entrepreneur and avid angel investor, has now launched her new institutional pre-seed fund.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alastair Mitchell of EQT 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 EQT Ventures was recorded in December 2017.

Alastair Mitchell, Partner at EQT Ventures, talks about the European Startup Funding trends.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What size investment do you make? Help our audience get to know your investment activity.

Alastair Mitchell: EQT Ventures is a relatively new firm that is about 18 months old. We started out of Sweden, the Silicon Valley of Europe. It’s an amazing place with a phenomenal track record of building some global companies. When we started off, we were a $630 million fund. >>>

380th Roundtable Recording On January 4, 2018: With Laurel Touby, Supernode Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Investors Discuss E-Commerce Startup Trends in Podcasts

Entrepreneurs working on e-commerce startups face unique challenges today. You can learn more about the trends investors specializing in e-commerce startup financing are seeing by listening to the following 30-minute podcast interviews. These VCs and seed investors also discuss the key indicators they look for in the startups they invest in.

Daniel Gulati, Principal and Head of Seed Investment Practice at Comcast Ventures, discusses e-commerce startup trends and what can and cannot be venture financed at this stage, and why.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: LinkedIn was a perfect channel to scale that company.

Amir Banifatemi: LinkedIn was a perfect channel. It had Initial property and strong momentum and growth into a much, much larger ecosystem globally. Another example which we’re still working on is Momentum Machine, a hardware company. It is based in San Francisco and builds robots to create hamburgers. You can order your burger the way you want it down to the right meat, with the right crispness, with more or less tomato or avocado. You can pretty much, on your way, order it on your phone. When you arrive, it is all ready for you and there’s no human intervention. >>>

Roundtable Recap: January 4 – What Pre-Seed Investors are Looking for with Laurel Touby, Supernode Ventures

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Laurel Touby, Managing Partner, Supernode Ventures, a former entrepreneur and avid angel investor who has now launched her new institutional pre-seed fund.

Go Qwyk
As for the pitches, first, Don Rector from Los Gatos, CA, pitched Go Qwyk, an app for tour bus operators to manage their tour groups. The company has three pilots in the works.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You kind of need a tribe of people who think the same way. If you want to work on interesting problems, but necessarily unicorn ideas, then you need other people around in the ecosystem who think like that instead of trying to force feed these kinds of ventures into the more traditional venture world, which operates in a very different way.

Between the 70,000 odd seed investments and about 1,200 series A investments, there is a huge series A gap that gets created. Unless you surround yourself with like-minded investors, it will be very difficult to mitigate the Series A gap, right? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Well, I think what you’re seeing around the world is a lot of concept arbitrage; concepts that have been tried in different places are being applied to different markets. 

Then you have big categories like cyber security that have been very active fund draws for a very long time, so there’re a very large number of cyber security companies out there. AI is the new attraction area for investors. So now, there aren’t that many wide open opportunities, so there are several niche opportunities. I’m very much in favor of niche opportunities. You can build very nice businesses for small amounts of capital around these niche opportunities, and I think those are very interesting opportunities. >>>