1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures, discusses the impact of Covid on the fund’s portfolio, as well as the trends she sees. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by welcoming back Cindy Padnos to our show. She is the founder and director of Illuminate Ventures and one of the active female investors in the Silicon Valley Movement. We have a lot more female investors, but she is one of the earlier ones. We had her here before and she has been doing a lot of work in this area for a long time.

Roundtable Recap: April 29 – What to Expect in Investor Due Diligence

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Alok Nandan, Founding General Partner, First Rays Venture Partners. Alok discussed the firm’s investment thesis which is very well defined and focused.

Tariy.at

As for our entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Andres Sigcha from Phoenix, Arizona, pitching Tariy.ai, a B-to-B venture.

YapPolitics

Next, we had Aidan Stephen from Los Angeles, California, pitching YapPolitics, a B-to-C venture.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Best of Bootstrapping: Discussing European Startup Funding with Alastair Mitchell, EQT Ventures

If you have been bootstrapping and think you are ready for investors, you need to learn how investors think. First, please study our free Bootstrapping course and Investor Introductions page. Then start looking for entrepreneur – investor fit. Today I introduce you to Alastair Mitchell.

Alastair Mitchell, Partner at EQT Ventures, discussed European Startup Funding trends when we spoke in 2018. You can listen to the podcast interview here.

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.

We are pretty big. We invest in Series A through C, but at fairly early stages. Most of our investment is centered in Europe. About 30% of it is in the US. Our two main offices are in Stockholm and London.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures 2021 (Part 6)

Tim Guleri: Second, we are a hungry partnership. We have a large network of friends in the ecosystem boomerang entrepreneurs to us. We have a young team of investors that are active in the ecosystem by market. For instance, we have a person that is dedicated to the Midwest region to reach out to B2B entrepreneurs.

We have somebody covering Canada and Israel, for example. The way those guys work is, they will partner with the local venture firms and make sure that they know us and we know them. There is a bit of a ground game involved.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Tim Guleri: Point number one is that it would be hard. It takes too much capital. The second is data. For AI to succeed in any domain whether you are building a horizontal platform or bespoke AI for a particular application set, you have a lot of data to train these models.

Data tends to collect in these massive PaaS platforms. If you have a view that data is necessary at scale to train an AI that you are putting into the market, it again brings you back to the big three or four. I know the folks at C3 really well.

Best of Bootstrapping: A View into Pre-Seed Funding with Gaurav Jain, Afore Capital

If you have been bootstrapping and think you are ready for investors, you need to learn how investors think. First, please study our free Bootstrapping course and Investor Introductions page. Then start looking for entrepreneur – investor fit. Today I introduce you to Gaurav Jain.

Gaurav Jain is Managing Partner at Afore Capital, a firm focused on pre-seed investments. This is an excellent conversation for entrepreneurs looking for insights into pre-seed. You can listen to the podcast interview here and the entire roundtable program here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was thinking about some of the work that we are doing right now around PaaS which is also a distribution innovation. One of the reasons why Salesforce has been successful as it has been is because it managed to do SaaS products but they also did this PaaS strategy early on.

They got traction on that and built traction on top of their platforms like Veeva and Velocity. I am curious to hear what you are seeing in your orbit of other companies pursuing this strategy.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few case studies. You have developed a very informed perspective on this. Walk us through a couple of examples of what they came to you with and what you saw. What was the business model or distribution model that made them successful?

Tim Guleri: The easiest example to give you that your audience will also understand are companies that have an open source genesis. I invested in a company called Sourcefire, which was my second investment in Sierra. This company was based in Washington DC in the security space.