1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Sometimes when you’re in a fundraising cycle, you may not be quite ready for the investor to write the check, but you build the relationships and show traction. At some point, it will converge potentially if you know what your target is. Pawel is explaining that the target is $50,000 MRR.

If you start the relationship when you’re at the $10,000 point, you have to inch your way up to $50,000 MRR before the investment is going to happen. Investor relationship management is important. If the market is of interest and the team is of interest, sometimes investors just take a little bit of time to see how you’re performing. That is the notion of investor-entrepreneur fit.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 2)

Pawel Maj: We would like to have about 10 to 15 companies in our portfolio at any given moment. We like to get hands-on since our history comes from the private equity market. For pre-seed or seed, we invest smaller tickets but much in larger number of projects to spread the risk. In our case, we don’t have a large enough team to have a large operation to be able to provide hands-on experience for 50 companies. This is why we prefer to invest at a later stage after the product-market fit.

Sramana Mitra: The reason I’m probing this point is, there are a bunch of things that happen between pre-seed, seed, pre-Series A, and Series A. You have to achieve product-market fit, which means you have to get some customers to say that they’re willing to write a check for this product.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 1)

Pawel Maj, Investment Director, Warsaw Equity Group, discusses post-seed and pre-series A funding in Eastern and Central Europe in the context of his firm’s investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about what’s up in Poland. You are in a semi-warzone. What’s happening with the startup ecosystem?

Pawel Maj: The war is in another country, but we had a huge wave of immigrants coming from Ukraine. We already admitted almost five million immigrants. These are difficult times. It’s great to see the Polish population come together to help the neighbors.

586th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Tae Hea Nahm, Storm Ventures

Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-founder at Storm Ventures, emphasizes and articulates his firm’s specific interest in investing in vertical cloud startups.

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586th Roundtable Recording with Tae Hea Nahm, Storm Ventures

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

585th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Mohanjit Jolly, Iron Pillar

Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar, and a long-time player in the Indian startup ecosystem discusses Exit options for Indian startups and other topics.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You would invest in somebody who has great talent and great domain knowledge if that person is proposing something in that domain where the problem is identified. Isn’t that a concept stage investment in a very talented person?

Cameron Kramlich: Sure, it would be. Looking at somebody who has a general area they want to work in and has enough neuroplasticity to realize that whatever is on the pitch deck is going to change 15 times. That’s why if it’s just a 10-slide, that’s great. It needs to be more than that. What we’re looking for is people that we can coach and help grow.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cameron Kramlich, General Partner of Angelneers (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll give you a bit of my comment. We see a lot of investors and we see a lot of entrepreneurs and their needs. One thing that I really like about what you’re saying is there’s a tremendous bias in the industry against solo entrepreneurs. The truth is a vast majority of entrepreneurs start solo. Along the way, they build teams and products. Even the founder of ServiceNow started as a solo entrepreneur.

I don’t believe that solo entrepreneurship doesn’t work. Of course, you have to bring in all the skills and resources around you, but you can do it step by step. The fact that you are open to working with solo entrepreneurs and building the team around them is actually a very interesting angle.