1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eva Ho of Fika Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream with all these larger funds wanting to invest in much larger Series A deals, how does a seed investor or entrepreneur mitigate the Series A gap? There’s clearly a Series A gap. 50,000 to 70,000 seed-stage investments and only 1,200 to 1,500 Series A’s. How do you view that phenomenon?

Eva Ho: This is a real challenge. It’s a great question. I don’t have all the answers to this. We’re watching the market dynamics change on a month-to-month and year-to-year basis. When we started Susa five years ago, the seed market was quite different. We were able to get into deals easier. Back then, we weren’t writing large checks. We were writing checks for about $250,000. We could get >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eva Ho of Fika Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the 1,500 deals that you’ve seen this year, is this a trend that there are a lot of archaic industries getting heavy infusion in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and you’re seeing entrepreneurs emerge in those categories.

Eva Ho: Absolutely. When we were working on Factual in 2007, we were pitching big data and APIs to the larger Fortune 500. A lot of them were scratching their heads and not really seeing its importance. We’re early in trying to deliver the message of systemizing your data, having data as a core component in determining product opportunities, and basically affecting every function that you have. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eva Ho of Fika 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 Fika Ventures was recorded in December 2017. Eva Ho, General Partner at Fika Ventures, discusses their investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about the focus of the fund. How big is it? What are you focusing on? What size investments are you making?

Eva Ho: We launched Fika Ventures in February 2017. I came from another fund that I co-founded. This is my second fund. It’s a $40 million fund. It’s based in Los Angeles. We make investments in California and also other >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vinny Lingham of NewTown Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about strategic? What role do you see Naspers playing? Naspers has played a big role in exits in India. What is their position in Africa?

Vinny Lingham: Naspers is a really good investment house. They’re really good at later stage and not early stage.

Sramana Mitra: They’re good at exits. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vinny Lingham of NewTown Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Have you invested in any of these ICO-based or token-based ventures?

Vinny Lingham: Yes, I’m going to do another one called Augmentors. It’s a gaming product. They have a really good token called Databits, which they’ve spun out. It’s basically an augmented reality game. It’s pretty fascinating.

Sramana Mitra: What is your estimate of the capital requirements of token-based ventures like that? I’ve been talking to a few people who are looking at that. One of the issues for that, as early stage investors, is this 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vinny Lingham of NewTown Partners (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 Vinny Lingham was recorded in November 2017.

Vinny Lingham, Co-founder and CEO, Civic.com, and Managing Partner of Newtown Partners, discusses his investment thesis in B-to-C seed ventures. We also discuss the role ICOs are playing in filling the gaps in certain seed-stage ventures.

Sramana Mitra: So you’ve hadn’t an interesting entrepreneur journey. Tell us about Gyft. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss of Foundation Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve been on all sides of the table for a long time. When an entrepreneur is trying to figure out whom to work with and let’s say they have the luxury. A lot of entrepreneurs do not have the luxury of choice. But once they’ve been able to figure a few things out, they actually do have some luxury of choice. At the end of the day, there is too much money chasing too few really great deals. That is the structure of the industry. What is your advice to entrepreneurs on how to select whom to work with?

Warren Weiss: The best time to raise money is when you don’t need money. The traditional way to get to a venture is to get >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mohit Gulati of ITI Growth Ventures (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That’s not a common practice in the US by the way. That is a practice that is more unique to India. Because of the proliferation of micro-VCs , people are starting to think. The other side of the equation of this unicorn mania is that the larger funds are doing very large series C’s and series D’s.

Now the concept of seed-stage, preeseed funds exiting into series C or series D is happening more or at least, coming to the surface. In India, it’s been happening for a while. >>>