1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 6)

Rajeev Madhavan: If you look at that space, Andy Bechtolsheim was a big investor. He would invest his money to help get rid of the issues that he sees in that space. That applies even today, except that now you have a lot of investors in Silicon Valley, so your ability to get that small level of funding is much higher. It may not be VCs like us. We may occasionally do that because we want to build entrepreneurs in general.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel, Partner at ff Venture Capital 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The deal size at which you had to meet in person has vastly changed. You can do large deals and raise investments without meeting in person. That is a massive shift and a massive removal of friction in scalability, fluidity, and velocity in any company’s growth trajectory. 

John Frankel: Totally. It is amazing that you can do that. I do hope that in a few months, meeting in person is something that we feel very comfortable doing. You are right. There has been a huge proof point around working remotely and getting things done efficiently.

Best of Bootstrapping: Discussing Unicorn Investments with Ravi Mohan of Shasta 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 Ravi Mohan.

Ravi Mohan is Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, a firm that has invested in three SaaS Unicorns. Ravi discusses these investments: Apptio, Anaplan, and Zuora. You can listen to the podcast interview here and the entire roundtable program here:

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Rajeev Madhavan: It’s no longer enough to provide a set of solutions. You have to provide the entire platform as a solution. Salesforce was the first one to apply this. I was one of the first customers when I was at Magma deploying Salesforce. We had the same VC as Salesforce so I had no choice but to use it.

I was one of the first customers at Magma. We ended up realizing that we could build our system around it. Back in 2001 to 2002, we built our entire company’s operations on Salesforce.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel, Partner at ff Venture Capital 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The AI sector of the industry, which is not actually a sector but a horizontal technology that is being applied to all kinds of sectors, has exploded even with the downturn. The amount of money that has gone into AI startups globally is huge. It doesn’t seem to have missed any beat in this process. 

John Frankel: To us, AI is a bit like how we would think of mobile ten years ago or the internet 20 years ago. There used to be internet companies and now there are just companies. Companies used to be mobile companies and now they are just companies.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the kind of things that you have invested in AI? What is your investment thesis on AI?

Rajeev Madhavan: In AI, we have a company called Reflection which has been doing e-commerce. Today, when you shop on many of the websites, you and I would get the same webpage. You may get a small carousel where it would say people who bought this may have bought this other stuff. That is the level of automation.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel, Partner at ff Venture Capital 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What has been the experience at your fund in your existing portfolio companies as well as new investments?

John Frankel: We were very concerned in March and April that our companies would be hit hard. Some were hit hard, however, since we predominantly invest in secular rather cyclical businesses our companies held up incredibly well.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There are a couple of questions that come into my mind as I am listening to you. First in the battery company, how did you do technology validation in making this investment? What did the company come to you with? What was the decision to assume that this team can build this technology? What is that decision predicated upon?

Rajeev Madhavan: In this particular case, this is David Su and Masoud Zargari who were the founding engineers of a company called Atheros which everybody knows as the company that invented Wi-Fi. They were the first company that created the first Wi-Fi chips sold out of Teresa Meng’s lab.