1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 1)

Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures, discusses his firm’s AI investment thesis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There is a Series A gap. There are investors that are doing pre-Series A, but it’s a smaller pool. The Series A investors want to see a lot in place before they’re willing to write a check. How do you see this? This is not specific to your firm. I’m asking you generally as an industry observer. How do you see this resolving?

Some of the trends we are seeing is that some of the pre-seed and seed companies are exiting into companies that have raised a lot of money without trying to raise as much money themselves. They have to find some path either through exit, funding, or becoming profitable.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about this company that you invested in from the Freshworks ecosystem. Is it built on the Freshworks stack?

Bhaskar Ghosh: The founders are second-time founders. Their first company, Rocketlane, was acquired by Freshworks. I just want to call something out. We are huge fans of the entrepreneur ecosystem coming out of Freshworks and Zoho, which have revolutionized the B2B SaaS ecosystem of India.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the pre-seed and seed first. Are you investing in concepts? Are you looking for a certain amount of proof point? What is the sweet spot?

Bhaskar Ghosh: If you look at founders, products, and market, we focus heavily on the founder and on the market size. We are not looking for product-market fit. We are not even looking for a product. We tend to gel closely with highly technical entrepreneurs. There is bimodal DNA there. We do back first-time entrepreneurs coming out of schools. We have a very strong campus program at Yale, Caltech, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. We tend to back founders out of these campuses fairly heavily.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 1)

Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC, discusses his firm’s investment thesis, and we have an interesting discussion about the definition of a “good” entrepreneur.

Roundtable Recap: August 18 – A Discussion on Vertical Cloud

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-founder at Storm Ventures, who emphasized and articulated his firm’s specific interest in investing in vertical cloud startups.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Sardana, Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures (Part 1)

Sandeep Sardana is Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures. We had a terrific discussion on how we each look for a startup story through financial metrics.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself to our audience. Tell us a bit about your journey. What path brings you here?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan, Founder General Partner at First Rays Venture Partners (Part 1)

Alok Nandan, Founding General Partner, First Rays Venture Partners, discusses the firm’s investment thesis which is very well-defined and focused.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start today’s session with a conversation with Alok Nandan, Founder and General Partner of First Rays Venture Partners.

Alok Nandan: Great to be back. Thanks for having me.