Featured Videos

523rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures

Tim Guleri is Managing Director at Sierra Ventures. We have a terrific discussion on Business Model Innovation and Distribution Innovation that Tim believes trumps technology innovation. We go through some excellent examples. Do give this a listen!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | RSS

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 1)

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

Daniel Cohen, General partner at Viola Ventures, discusses AI, PaaS, and deep tech investments.

Sramana Mitra: We have known each other for ten years. We have observed the industry for a very long time. We often have guests with whom we’ve had long relationships.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you back these seed-stage companies, what are you looking for? It’s not inexpensive to build like this, so are you writing checks on a concept based on the background and domain expertise of the entrepreneurs? 

Ken Elefant: Most of our investments in Sorenson Ventures are pre-revenue. It could just be an entrepreneur with two or three folks with them. We are carte blanched to invest up to $5 million in ARR, so sometimes our investments have a little bit more. We are typically lead or co-lead in all of our investments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: On your point on needing smart engineers to do things, it has always been my observation that there are only a finite number of those people. We need abstractions and we need ways to enable and equip people who are not these really smart engineers.

This is one of the reasons why I find PaaS to be an interesting trend. It enables a large body of developers to develop stuff and things on top of stacks that they don’t necessarily need to build. You don’t need to be that savvy to be able to build a product and build a solution to problems. 

524th Roundtable Recording on March 25, 2021: With Cindy Padnos, Illuminate Ventures

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

Roundtable Recap: March 25 – Spotlight on Art Market Disruption Ideas

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures. Cindy discussed the impact of Covid on the fund’s portfolio, as well as trends she sees.

ArtandFound.co

As for our entrepreneur pitch, we had Aditya Mehta from Mumbia, India, pitch Art&Found, a digital art marketplace based on NFTs.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you are investing in such companies that are supplemental to other ecosystems like the Zendesk ecosystem and others, are they getting substantial support from those ecosystems?

In the case of Salesforce, they have a marketplace in AppExchange and Zendesk has been trying to support the ecosystem as well. What is the experience of company building for such a company that has other players that already have a significant presence in the market?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, the company can access each enterprise on their different levels of vulnerability and then present that as an opening part of the sales cycle.

Ken Elefant: They have invented this space called Attack Servers Management. They could go into an enterprise and quickly bring up an analysis that shows the vulnerabilities.