1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Krishnakumar Natarajan, Co-Founder of Mela Ventures (Part 1)

Krishnakumar Natarajan, Co-founder of Mela Ventures and former CEO of Mindtree, discusses the Indian Venture ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: I’m looking forward to catching up with you. We haven’t talked in a while, but we have followed each other’s work for a long time. Catch me up on Mela Ventures.

574th Roundtable Recording with Bill Baumel, Ohio Innovation Fund

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What check size do you write?

Zain Jaffer: Overall, $750,000. We started with a $300,000 and followed on with $450,000. Sometimes we can do million dollars plus between seed and follow-on.

Sramana Mitra: This is a wonderful case study. What else are you excited about?

Zain Jaffer: I’ll give you another case study. This is an anti-case study. Sometimes VCs don’t know what they’re doing. They come up with all of these criteria. When the rubber meets the road, everything goes out the window. This is an investment I made before I set up my VC fund.

574th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Bill Baumel, Ohio Innovation Fund

Bill Baumel, Managing Director at Ohio Innovation Fund, is one of the pioneers of the Ohio startup ecosystem.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: As you are looking at this space, what is the scope and scale of the number of startups operating in North America?

Zain Jaffer: I saw 500 startups last year. That’s just what I tracked in my CRM. The number is mind-boggling. With any industry, only a few will make it. I don’t know what the actual number is, but PropTech is becoming a big segment. It’s a niche segment that’s an intersection of FinTech and marketplaces.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the PropTech part of your work. You said you’re doing pre-seed and seed in that sector?

Zain Jaffer: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the geographical boundary of this?

Zain Jaffer: We try to stay focused on the US market. We are also open and have done many companies that plan to expand to the US. They may also be based anywhere in the world but they just happen to have US customers. Ideally, the US is the top focus though.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital (Part 1)

Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital, discusses trends in PropTech.

Sramana Mitra: Our focus today is primarily on the investing that you had recently started. If you want to set some context about your entrepreneurial background, that would be great.

Zain Jaffer: As soon as I discovered computers, I started to mess around, code, and design things. I’ve always been at it trying to build things. Sometimes, it worked out. Most of the time, it doesn’t. I have had a lot of attempts. All you need is to be lucky once. It can change your life completely. I had a big exit. It was $718 million back in 2019 when I started an advertising tech company.

Roundtable Recap: May 5 – Spotlight on the Ohio Startup Ecosystem

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Bill Baumel, Managing Director at Ohio Innovation Fund, one of the pioneers of the Ohio startup ecosystem.

CaterBite

As for entrepreneur pitch, we had Boddu Venkat Sujith from Visakhapatnam, India, pitch CaterBite, a concept arbitrage on EZCater, a Unicorn.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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