518th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Daniel Cohen, Viola Ventures

Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures, discusses AI, PaaS and Deeptech investments.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: My next question is something that we touched upon a little bit when we spoke some time ago. In the fund strategy, one of the things we’re seeing is that there is a class of funds that is still focused on finding unicorns.

They are looking for the very large billion-dollar opportunities, but there are thousands of micro-VCs out there right now that are working in the mode where they will do the early stage and early exit at a sub-$50 million range. Some of them are doing it in two to three years and then selling their stakes into the latter rounds.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look back on the 30 companies that you invested in, which ones are concept-stage ventures that you have invested in without anything already built?

Venktesh Shukla: Practically every one of them. 

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. That’s actually unique. I’m going to give you some feedback on what’s happening in the venture world. There’s a lot of money available for companies that are doing some level of validation work and ideally generating some level of traction.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I am very intellectually curious. I feel very humbled with how little I know about all these segments that we are working with. At the same time, there are methodology elements that we have come up with in doing this for such a long time that apply to a lot of different scenarios.

Let’s say you’re doing B2B selling to small businesses, there’s a playbook for that. If you’re selling to enterprises, there’s a playbook for that. If you’re doing B2C transactions, there’s a playbook for that.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Venktesh Shukla is General Partner at Monta Vista Capital. I have known Venk for more than 20 years, and we discussed both industry trends and his fund strategy.

518th Roundtable Recording on February 4, 2021: With Daniel Cohen, Viola Ventures

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are your predictions on post-COVID trends? What are you seeing and predicting? What kind of businesses would you like to invest in the post-COVID era? 

Fabrice Grinda: Crises, in general, are extraordinary accelerators of underlying trends. They are also extraordinary generators of productivity growth. If you examine the 20th century, the Great Depression was the time where we had the highest productivity growth in the US.

Roundtable Recap: February 4 – AI, PaaS and Deeptech Investments

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures. The conversation was largely around AI, PaaS and Deeptech investments.

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1Mby1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on:

Thursday, February 11, 2021, 8 a.m. PST, Register Here.

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