Roundtable Recap: December 9 – Discussion on EdTech Exit Strategy

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Seong Kim, Corporate Strategy & Development for Chegg Inc., to discuss exit strategy within EdTech.

Relai

As for entrepreneur pitches, we had 1Mby1M Premium member Claudia Giannoni from London, UK, pitching Relai, a real estate marketplace leveraging the SaaS-enabled marketplace trend that we like a lot.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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555th Roundtable Recording with Seksom Suriyapa, Upfront Ventures

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

Roundtable Recap: December 2 – More on Exit Strategy

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures, and formerly head of Corp Dev at Twitter, SuccessFactors, McAfee and Akamai. Seksom discussed exit strategy from the buy-side perspective at length.

OneNDF

As for entrepreneur pitches, up first we had 1Mby1M Premium member Nitin Khandelwal from New Delhi, India, pitching OneNDF. It was more a working session on his financial and fund-raising strategy.

ExtraSlice

Next, we had Binu Reghunathan from Bellevue, Washington, pitch ExtraSlice, a commercial real-estate marketplace that is taking advantage of the work-from-home trend and the desire for flexibility in office space.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Sardana, Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: On the small fund team, one thing that we’ve heard is that they are exiting in the Series C and Series D round. Is that part of your game plan?

Sandeep Sardana: It’s not off the table. We haven’t done it, but it’s not off the table. It depends on your portfolio construction. If your portfolio is generating DPI early enough, you don’t necessarily need to start exiting. If you are able to get to it sufficiently without having to take positions off early, we’ll do that.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Sardana, Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Two-sided marketplaces tend to be capital-intensive but you have found an entrepreneur who has managed to do a capital-efficient two-sided marketplace scale. What is the secret of that?

Sandeep Sardana: The entrepreneur is a do-it-all entrepreneur. He’s a top-level CTO himself. He has a great business mind. He built a small and very effective team in Bangalore. We leveraged our network. He also knew that speed matters. He has done it before.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Sardana, Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you what we do at 1Mby1M. We do bottom-up TAM analysis, which means we have to get the business model and pricing model hypothesis. When you’re starting out and raising money, that financial hypothesis is really important to get right. We emphasize a few specific elements. One is the business model. Two is the pricing model. Three is the bottom-up TAM analysis. Does that cover what you’re looking for in financial storytelling?

Sandeep Sardana: I couldn’t have said it any better.

How to Teach Technology Entrepreneurship Using the 1Mby1M Methodology and Case Studies: How Investors Think

Considering how omnipresent the topic of fundraising is in the entrepreneurship media, it is entirely reasonable to dedicate a quarter or a semester to teaching how investors think.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hamiz Awan, Founder and Partner at Plutus21 Capital (Part 1)

Hamiz Awan, Founder and Partner at Plutus21 Capital, discusses Blockchain infrastructure and platforms.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce you to our audience. Tell us a bit about our background as well as about Plutus21 Capital.