John Frankel is Partner at ff Venture Capital. We had an extensive discussion about Covid’s impact on the startup ecosystem, the changes we notice, so forth.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s catch up. How has the pandemic year been? What are you doing these days?
>>>Rajeev Madhavan: You have IoT devices like headphones where you do not need to replace the batteries. First, it untethers the device from all the electrical connections that you need. Second, it gives you the ability and the freedom of not being tied to a bunch of battery replacements that you have to go through.
It’s almost like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Once you are done with one end, you have to start from the opposite end. Here, you don’t need to do that. You have a self-charging environment. That is on one side.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.
Rajeev Madhavan is Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures, a firm focused on seed-stage deep tech investing.
Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s session with a conversation with Rajeeev Madhavan, the founder and general partner of Clear Ventures. I have known him for a long time. He has been here before. You may have listened to his previous session. It has been a while and we want to catch up. Welcome back to the show!
>>>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 Warren Weiss.
Warren Weiss, General Partner at Foundation Capital, has a long track record in the Silicon Valley venture capital industry. When we spoke in 2015, he shared areas that he and Foundation are excited about as opportunities for building future Unicorns. You can listen to the podcast interview here and the entire roundtable program here:
Sumant Mandal, Co-founder and Managing Partner at March Capital, emphasizes the impact of Covid on virtual companies and remote teams and discusses his investment thesis.
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Eric Benhamou: Up until recently, waste management was done the same way as 30 years ago. You have big trucks collecting garbage from houses and office buildings to take them to recycling facilities. It would be dumped on a treadmill-like structure and you have people sorting out the waste. They send the recyclable waste to be sold as recycled material.
This is begging for disruption. It is a robotics, machine division, control, and analytics problem. Every neighborhood has a waste profile and this waste profile can be used to train AI to recognize objects. Robots can pick these objects efficiently while removing the safety risk from human beings. They can be recycled in ways that produce higher quality materials.
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
Eric Benhamou: Another example where Salesforce.com does not do a very good job at is mobile engagements. Despite the pandemic, we are still living in a world that is increasingly more mobile. You have to be able to capitalize on mobile engagement opportunities all the time. There are many things that are potentially limiting in Salesforce. That is the space that is available for younger companies who don’t have the architecture baggage of Salesforce.
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