1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ira Weiss of Hyde Park Venture 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 Ira Weiss of Hyde Park Venture Partners was recorded in January 2018. 

Ira Weiss, General Partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners based in Chicago, talks about venture activity in the Midwest.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Hyde Park. What is your investment focus? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you like to make? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With William Hsu of Mucker Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you take us through a couple of case studies. Let’s say Trunk Club and Task Rabbit. At what stage did they come to you? Did they have to pivot out of their original hypothesis? How did that evolution flow from your side?

William Hsu: It’s probably more helpful to talk about companies that are newer. Task Rabbit and Trunk Club are seven to eight years old now. A lot of the newer methodologies weren’t really employed back then. There’s a company called Honey. It has over a hundred employees now and is doing tens of millions of dollars in monthly revenue. It’s doing really well. It took them about a year and a half to two years to really find their footing. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: India is getting back into the more fundamentals-driven model which I thought was always going to be the case. There was just a period where people got sidetracked. I think India is going to be more like Europe going forward. It’s only here in Silicon Valley that we see some appetite for funding a lot of red ink.

Hussein Kanji: The biggest challenge on the European side is people only focus on the economics and making the businesses very sustainable. Sometimes that comes with a trade-off for growth. It gets harder to turn into a big business. You become a very good business but a small business. There’s a bit of both. You need to have a very solid business but you also know when to step on the gas sometimes. People here don’t do the stepping on the gas nearly as much as they would in other places where the money encourages that. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With William Hsu of Mucker 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 William Hsu of Mucker Capital was recorded in January 2018. 

William Hsu is the Co-founder and Partner at Mucker Capital, a Los Angeles-based fund that invests largely outside Silicon Valley and follows a more fundamentals oriented approach.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about the fund. How big is the fund? Tell us about your own background. Let’s get to know each other and let’s introduce your to our audience. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think the Indian startup ecosystem is much larger than Europe right now.

Hussein Kanji: It is, but when you look at the global unicorns and where they’re coming from, about 50% of them are from the US, about 30% are from China, 4% from India, 1% from Israel, and 15% from Europe. There’s a more thriving community in India of entrepreneurship, but in terms of value creation, I think Europe punches way above its weight. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We have a lot of adoption over the years in India. We’ve been very active in the Indian ecosystem. A lot of the early work in India was concept arbitrage from American ideas. That’s still true. There’s a lot of that going on.

There are new ideas coming out that leverage some of the uniqueness of the Indian market as well. I imagine that the same thing is happening in Europe now. That same kind of high-velocity concept arbitrate is happening in Europe as well.

Hussein Kanji: There’s an infamous company called Rocket Internet, which is originally German. Their entire investment thesis >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned a travel company out of Vienna. Vienna isn’t exactly the hotbed of startups in Europe. What is the genesis of this company and how did this come about?

Hussein Kanji: It’s even more colorful. The two founders of the business are Australian, one of who moved to Vienna and married a local girl. They came from the tour space. If you ever want to go on safari in Africa, the way you’ll do that is you’ll Google “safari in Africa”. Most of the folks who provide tours are few bigger companies. It’s mostly boutique operators and there are hundreds of these doing all kinds of things. Nobody has taken up all that inventory and put it into one centralized database. That’s what they did. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to double-click down on some of these different types of businesses that you’ve invested in and ask you a few questions just to understand your thought process. What is it about a delivery company that is so unique? There are delivery companies all over the place right now in every continent and every country. Some of them are scaling well. Why is this particular company so special?

Hussein Kanji: Delivery was one of the early ones. Like I said, when a brand new market gets enabled, tons of companies are usually formed to try and build on that market. There was a company way back in the mid-90’s during the dot-com bubble called Kozmo. Kozmo tried to do delivery services in New York and it didn’t work. Kozmo didn’t work >>>