1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It’s wonderful to exchange notes. There are a couple of things you’ve said that I want to underscore. One is the importance of failure. The Indian ecosystem didn’t accept failures for a long time. It’s a cultural change where it’s okay to fail. You’re not penalized.

A very long time ago when I was a young entrepreneur, I talked to a lot of investors all the time. They would say, “We love entrepreneurs who have failed once and are doing it again.” This is deeply underappreciated.

Somebody who has tried it once and failed has already done a lot of learning on somebody else’s dime. It’s a prized commodity for investors.

Somebody who has tried it once and failed has already done a lot of learning on somebody else’s dime. It’s a prized commodity for investors.

Sramana Mitra

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take those two sectors – SaaS and the fintech sectors. In SaaS, the metric is MRR. Do you have a particular metric that you measure by when you’re doing your SaaS investments?

Dr. Aniruddha Malpani: No, numbers can be easily gamed, and they are often not necessarily representative. As long as the entrepreneur has a plausible story and he can convince us, we’re more than happy to look at these investments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One of the observations I have about the global startup ecosystem is this position of looking for paying customers is not at all unusual. I would say the vast majority of investors are looking for paying customers at this point. It has become so much easier to bootstrap companies. There’s a lot of methodology and knowledge about how to bootstrap a company.

The point that you’re making of wanting to see validated companies that already have product-market fit and customers does not come to anybody as a surprise at this stage of the game.

557th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Eva Yazhari, Beyond Capital Ventures

Eva Yazhari, General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures, discusses Impact Investing in Africa and India.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 1)

Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures, is an active angel investor in Indian startups for the past decade. Wonderful conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s catch up a bit on what has been going on in our collective universe and how you see the world based on all these years of observing the ecosystem. How do you see the Indian startup ecosystem evolving?

Roundtable Recap: January 27 – Non-Unicorn Chasing Investment Philosophy

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Christopher Mirabile, Senior Managing Director at Launchpad Venture Group. We had an awesome conversation about a non-Unicorn chasing investment philosophy. If the topic interests you, please check out my Udemy course Alternatives to Unicorn Chasing VCs with Sramana Mitra.

Das Infomedia

1Mby1M Premium member Dhaval Patel from Ahmedabad, India, pitched Das Infomedia. We discussed positioning for a new product.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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11 Udemy Courses On How To Raise Seed Funding in the US Midwest

While the broader trends are similar throughout the United States, I find Midwestern investors to be very pragmatic. They’re usually more interested in capital-efficient startups and more accepting of early exits at modest multiples.

Roundtable Recap: January 20 – Discussion on Funding Bootstrapping with Services Ventures with BV Jagdeesh

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest BV Jagadeesh, Managing Partner at KAAJ Ventures, and a super accomplished serial entrepreneur.

Dataplant

Nilay Khadepau from Mumbai, India, pitched Dataplant a company focused on giving consumers better control over their data.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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