Semyon Dukach is Managing Partner at One Way Ventures, a VC fund focused on immigrant founders.
Sramana Mitra: We are going to have a conversation with Semyon Dukach, the Managing Partner at One Way Ventures. Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to One Way Ventures.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Solutions looking for problems are much harder to get through to scale. I think it’s much better to start by solving a problem and then working out how you are going to market first before building something.
That is what we practice here at 1M1M – the need to understand what market you are going after and how you are going to position. It sounds like you are from Finland originally?
>>>Sramana Mitra: A lot of entrepreneurs look for product-market fit. We also want investor-entrepreneur fit. It needs to happen for a deal to happen. The reason that I’m asking you all these questions about stage, geography, and styles of companies is that they are relevant to getting an investor-entrepreneur fit.
There is also this unfair advantage. If you can, as an entrepreneur, connect with an investor who also has an unfair advantage in the domain that you are working on, that is a multiplier.
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?
Roman Kikta: I am based in Dallas, Texas, but we are distributed globally. I have partners in Barcelona, UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo.
Sramana Mitra: How many partners are bringing in this $200 million of working capital. It sounds like all of them are general partners in your fund.
>>>Sasha Mirchandani is Founder and Managing Director, Kae Capital, an early stage fund focused on India. I’ve known Sasha for over a decade, and we discuss the evolution of the Indian startup industry at length.
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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Roman Kikta was recorded in September 2020.
Roman Kikta is Managing Partner and Founder at Mobility Ventures. Roman discusses his firms’ investment thesis.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Here in 1M1M, we are huge believers in bootstrapping. We encourage people to bootstrap first and raise money later. It creates a healthier term sheet and trajectory, but it is hard to do in such expensive cost structure situations.
My other question, based on what you have said, is about the structure and the strategy that you are following for your fund. You described a couple of case studies where you exited into full-on rounds of funding. Talk about how you are thinking about early exits and not playing this game of building unicorns.
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