1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alan Chiu at XSeed (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 Alan Chiu of XSeed was recorded in February 2018.

Alan Chiu is Partner at XSeed, a seed-focused venture fund based in Silicon Valley. Alan talks about the level of risk his firm is willing to take and under what circumstances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to XSeed. Tell us about the firm.
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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rami Elkhatib of Acero 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 Rami Elkhatib of Acero Capital was recorded in February 2018. 

Rami Elkhatib, General Partner at Acero Capital, talks about his investments in companies that require a longer development cycle. As you know, 1Mby1M often uses Bootstrapping with Services as a core methodology to scale companies to fundability. Rami actually loves to invest in such businesses, read on.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as the fund. What is your focus? What kind of things >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Comment on unicorn mania for me. We went a little bit crazy with this concept of unicorns. There’s just this very unfortunate twist that the industry has taken. How do you parse unicorn mania?

Nate Redmond: Unicorn status, if you will, became a marker of success that obviously is artificial in many ways.

Sramana Mitra: And flawed.

Nate Redmond: It’s flawed. It’s certainly evident of developing one measure of value which is reflective of an investor or a group of investors’ willingness to buy shares at a price. It doesn’t necessarily translate into long-term economic value. It can, but the correlation is lower than you would otherwise think and expect. The failure rate of unicorns is much higher than people realize. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about some of the highlights of your portfolio. What have you invested in that you’re excited about?

Nate Redmond: We have been fortunate to watch the early development of our portfolio. We have this company called House Canary. We have a belief and a thesis that residential real estate, as an asset class, is larger than equities in the United States. Despite its size and fragmentation, the level of opacity is fundamentally different than what you’d see in the equity or credit markets.

As transparency around pricing of underlying security, of how to trade, and how to transact has come to those markets, you see a very significant increase in velocity of transactions. When you look at residential real estate, the behaviors that people have exhibited around how >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about stage? Are you investing in concept? Are you investing in a little bit of traction? What is comfortable?

Nate Redmond: Many investors have been using stage as a segmentation that is reflective in terms of process both in terms of sourcing and understanding of a business. We are early stage investors. By that, we mean we tend to be the first institutional investors in the company. In many cases, this company will have raised angel or seed money.

In some cases, that will have been called seed round. In some cases, A round. Most importantly, it’s understanding the type of risk that describes where this company is and the type of risk that we really want to own at this stage. We’re not religious about it being called Series A. We are focused >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison (Part 2)

Nate Redmond: Investors including myself sat and looked at the company and didn’t quite understand the size and scope of the opportunity. Being an expert in hospitality didn’t necessarily help you. In fact, it probably created blind spots. The focus for us is really understanding how you can engage a supply base and organize it to really unlock a large portion of latent demand.

Unlocking that latent demand really requires understanding the types of behaviors that people would like to engage in and yet aren’t because they’re otherwise constrained. In the case of Airbnb, one of the most important elements that unlocked that behavior was a sense of trust.

Trust, for us, has become one of these foundational layers and lenses that we look through to really understand how you can build trust. What types of new behaviors emerge and what does that allow you to do in terms of reshaping the business model within that industry? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison (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 Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison was recorded in February 2018.

Nate Redmond, Managing Partner at Alpha Edison, a VC who has put trust-driven ventures at the center of his investment thesis. It’s a very interesting conversation for both entrepreneurs and investors to listen to.

Sramana Mitra: Tell our audience about Alpha Edison and yourself. Let’s introduce you to the audience. The last time we spoke, you were doing something else. You were in the middle of putting this new thing together. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajul Garg of Leo Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What do you make of unicorn mania? Silicon Valley is going crazy. India tends to be more conservative, but India went crazy too.

Rajul Garg: We all plug into the same mothership. There’s not much that you can do to deviate from that. Smaller funds define a unicorn, in our own heads, as a company which can reach $150 million in value but we really need that kind of scale at least to move the needle for our fund. It’s very hard to enter an opportunity knowing that it will be a nice $20 million profitable business.

Maybe we need funds like that. Early stage venture funds is not the asset class that can cater to small businesses. I do think there’s a real gap. As an angel, I have made investments in those businesses. As a fund, I just don’t see how a fund can invest in those kinds of >>>