Roundtable Recap: June 25 – Spotlight on Funding for Online Education Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV Ventures, a fund focused on Online Education ventures. This is a very good discussion on patterns of success and failure in the sector, and what investors are gravitating towards.

Teenager Startups

As for entrepreneur pitches, this week we had Sulay Shah from Toronto, Canada, pitching an online education platform for teenage entrepreneurs.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tony Olivito of Comeback Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about geography. You talked about this bus tour being the catalyst to founding this firm. Talk about what is your philosophy on location.

Tony Olivito: For us, it’s the Midwest. We started the firm because we saw an opportunity due to lack of capital in the Midwest, specifically in areas outside of big cities. There’s a lot of capital in Chicago.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tony Olivito of Comeback Capital (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Tony Olivito was recorded in May 2020.

Tony Olivito, Partner at Comeback Capital, discusses his firm’s Midwest-focused investment thesis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Joshua Posamentier of Congruent Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Going a bit to your first example of investing in this robotics technology, one thing that I’m monitoring is we are probably going towards an accelerated pace of robotics adoption in factories.

We’ve just gone through a tremendous shock where factory workers can’t get to work. That creates tremendous supply chain disruption, so the people who own those factories are going to accelerate their moves to as much automation as possible and removing that risk of people not being able to come to work.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Joshua Posamentier of Congruent Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We’ve looked at a bit of what you’ve done and how you operate. We’ve got a flavor. In one of your examples, you said you’ve invested in a problem that you were already familiar with. You found a great technology out of CalTech that addresses that problem.

One could posit that you were already looking for a company that addresses that problem. Are there other such problems that you have identified that you would like to find an entrepreneur solving it. Please pick the ones that are in the IT and IT-enabled services domain.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Joshua Posamentier of Congruent Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another one.

Joshua Posamentier: We have a company called Energetic Insurance which is a pure-play InsurTech company. They make an insurance product backed by a top 5 global reinsurance company to do credit enhancement for customers that want to get solar and other energy products and have no credit of their own. So small businesses frequently just don’t have any credit.

489th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Vincent Diallo, Interlace Ventures

Vincent Diallo is Managing Partner at Interlace Ventures, a fund focused on retail tech.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Joshua Posamentier of Congruent Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Joshua Posamentier was recorded in April 2020.

Joshua Posamentier is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Congruent Ventures, a firm focused on sustainability-oriented technology ventures.