1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant of Sorenson Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you parse the Series A gap that has come about in the market? There’re a lot of early stage, pre Series A investments. In fact, there’s a tremendous segmentation that has started to take place in the pre-series A space right now. There is the friends and family round, but then there are funds that are focused on pre-series A such as pre-seeds, seed, post-seed, pre-series A . 

There are micro VCs that  are picking certain areas of the pre-series A phase, but then the number of companies that actually get funded in Series A remains relatively constant in the 1,200 to 1,500 range, whereas in the pre-series A, there are 70,000 investments a year. How do you analyze that? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mohit Gulati of ITI Growth Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Yes. Let’s double click on that. Talk about the B2B industry sector. What in B2B is your interest area? There is the  global facing B2B SaaS and then there’s the Indian-facing B2B SaaS. There is mid-market B2B. Where, in all those permutations and combinations, is your sweet spot? What is your preference?

Mohit Gulati: One of the sweetest spots that we have looked at is global B2B SaaS. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant of Sorenson Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So one of the things that you said, which I found somewhat distinct is that you’re looking for smaller markets and not these markets that most VCs tend to go for. We’re in 2017 and lots of stuff have already been built.

Nowadays, there are not many wide-open opportunities out there, but there are many, many niche opportunities. Some of these businesses need to be built for a small amount of capital. Maybe $1 million to $2 million and sold for $10 million to $15 million. Maybe even smaller. I imagine you’re not interested in these types of investments. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mohit Gulati of ITI Growth 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 Mohit Gulati was recorded in December 2017. 

Mohit Gulati, Founder and CIO of Altius Ventures, which recently changed their name to ITI Growth Ventures, discusses the Indian startup eco-system.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us your about investing focus. How big is the fund? What size investments are you making? Let’s get you introduced to our audience. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant of Sorenson Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography?

Ken Elefant: We’re focused on the United States since we are doing so much in security. We do spend a lot of time in Israel as well. In the past, I have done investments in India, China, Japan, both Western and Eastern Europe. There’s no problem with that. I’ve been involved with companies around the world.

I would say that we do have a proclivity of investing in the United States and in Israel. I’m based in Palo Alto and Sorenson Ventures is based in Palo Alto. Sorenson Capital is based in Salt Lake City. They have really good networks and deal flow from >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant of Sorenson 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 Ken Elefant was recorded in December 2017. 

Ken Elefant, Managing Director at Sorenson Capital, discusses at length the investment thesis of his firm.

Sramana Mitra: So tell us about Sorenson capital. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What size investments do you make? Let’s get to know the footprint of Sorenson Capital.

Ken Elefant: As you probably know, Sorenson Capital was founded in 2002. We have a little bit over a billion dollars under >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: LinkedIn was a perfect channel to scale that company.

Amir Banifatemi: LinkedIn was a perfect channel. It had Initial property and strong momentum and growth into a much, much larger ecosystem globally. Another example which we’re still working on is Momentum Machine, a hardware company. It is based in San Francisco and builds robots to create hamburgers. You can order your burger the way you want it down to the right meat, with the right crispness, with more or less tomato or avocado. You can pretty much, on your way, order it on your phone. When you arrive, it is all ready for you and there’s no human intervention. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amir Banifatemi of K5 Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You kind of need a tribe of people who think the same way. If you want to work on interesting problems, but necessarily unicorn ideas, then you need other people around in the ecosystem who think like that instead of trying to force feed these kinds of ventures into the more traditional venture world, which operates in a very different way.

Between the 70,000 odd seed investments and about 1,200 series A investments, there is a huge series A gap that gets created. Unless you surround yourself with like-minded investors, it will be very difficult to mitigate the Series A gap, right? >>>