1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gary Little of Canvas Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I will make a few comments to put it in perspective. We have all kinds of entrepreneurs here. People working on a smaller TAM opportunity have plenty of conviction. If you’re the market leader in a space that is a niche, you can have plenty of conviction and build a great business. You need to do it more capital efficiently and not raise huge amounts of money and hence, if you want to raise money, you need to work with funds that are smaller funds.

The truth is, the venture market is flooded with micro-VCs. There are about 700 micro-VCs. I constantly talk to investors who have raised $15 million to $75 million funds. If you’re trying to do a capital-efficient venture where >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Christina Brodbeck of Rivet Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is a slightly different line of questioning. You explicitly mentioned that you are looking for companies that are looking to sell to the female demographics or purchase cycles that are influenced by the female demographics, however, your fund invests in both male and female founders. Can you comment on whether you believe there is a significant bias against female entrepreneurs in the industry?

Christina Brodbeck: I don’t know if it’s an intentional bias, but I do think the result is that it often is more difficult for female founders to raise money. The number of women investing partners is somewhere between 4% and 8%, which is pretty low. Oftentimes, >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amos Ben-Meir at Sand Hill Angels (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you’re looking at enterprise deals, what are you comfortable with in terms of validation level? Are you looking for paying customers? Product ready but with no customers? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gary Little of Canvas Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What do you think of unicorn mania? Are you chasing unicorns? What’s your analysis of the desire for unicorns?

Gary Little: We don’t chase unicorns. You start with things that look like mules and we try to grow them to a unicorn. When we select companies, we try to find companies that have the opportunity to be billion-dollar companies. We don’t chase companies that are already at the multi-hundred million valuation.

Sramana Mitra: The real question in that is what kind of TAM is interesting for you? Given where we are in the history of the startup industry, there are billion-dollar opportunities, but there are also many opportunities that are >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Christina Brodbeck of Rivet Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: My observation having talked to lots of investors at this point on this topic is that the answers tend to vary significantly. There’s a class of investors who are only interested in billion-dollar plus TAMs. Then there’s a body of investors coming together now who are doing smaller funds like yourself who are very pragmatic and understand that most of the exits happen in the $50 million to $60 million point.

To make good money off a $50 million exit, you have to do it capital efficiently and make sure that there is a ceiling to how much money you raise to be able to make sure that everybody has a healthy exit in that scenario. That’s a different class of investors. It’s interesting how every venture market is also segmenting big time. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Amos Ben-Meir at Sand Hill Angels (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about your other syndicate group? Does it have the same kind of structure?

Amos Ben-Meir: OurCrowd is actually a venture firm. It was formed around 2013 by an experienced venture capitalist by the name of Jonathan Medved. They basically raised a fund of their own. They vet deals like a normal venture firm would. They built this investor platform where they take part of the allocation they get in a deal and make it available to their credit and investor network.

Their credit and investor network is global. There’re probably around 20,000 people. 50% of their investments are in Israeli >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gary Little of Canvas Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography?

Gary Little: We just have three partners now. Our target is never to have more than five partners. Since we’re early, our main task when we get that technical team is to help them recruit their Head of Sales, Head of Marketing. At some point, maybe Head of Product and Head of Engineering. The last investment I made, we recruited a CEO, CRO, CMO, CFO, VP of Product Marketing. That’s the job on the first year – building up the management team so it can scale to $10 million and beyond.

To do all that hiring, it doesn’t make sense for us to make investments overseas. Our primary focus is in Silicon Valley where we can >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Christina Brodbeck of Rivet Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Give us a flavor of what these companies are and how that aligns with your investment thesis. Help us understand your thought process in what about those companies have compelled you to invest.

Christina Brodbeck: I can go through four companies in our portfolio that we invested in. I’ll give you a little background on them and why we decided to invest. One of them is called Dote. It’s a shopping mall on your phone. Pretty much, every store that you would see at a physical shopping mall, you can shop in this mobile app.

What I really like about them and, partially, why we decided to invest is that the founders are very solid. They used to work at a gaming company. They really know how to increase user engagement. That was one of the reasons we invested in them. Another >>>