1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Nguyen of IT Farm (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 Julien Nguyen was recorded in October 2017. 

Julien Nguyen is General Partner at IT Farm, a seed-stage fund focused on Digital Health. We explore trends in the industry, as well as what IT Farm’s sixth fund likes to invest in.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about IT Farm. What is the focus of the firm? How big is your fund? What sized investments do you make?

Julien Nguyen: IT Farm is a seed level VC firm. We started in Tokyo and we have an office in Palo Alto. Most, if not all, of our >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Achler of MATH Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We started observing the social media trend in the 2003 to 2004 timeframe. In 2007 of course, iPhone came about. The Big Data trend really picked up in the late 2000’s as well. We zeroed in on AI in just about a couple of years ago. There’s a lot of machine learning and AI.

Of course, the cyber security thread is running all the way through and will continue to run. Especially with IoT, the vulnerabilities have magnified. There is no escape from a lot of cyber security threats.

Mark Achler: We’re also seeing a lot in Blockchain. There’s an awful lot of conversation right now in all the various aspects of Blockchain. We’re working hard to get our arms around that as well. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ho Nam of Altos Ventures (Part 4)

Ho Nam: There are some specific reasons why we like Korea. It’s an interesting overlooked opportunity. There are a lot of VC dollars taking on opportunities in places like China, India, and Israel. No one’s really focused on Korea. It’s only one of six countries in the entire world with a high per capita GDP in a population that’s more than 50 million people.

50 million is tiny compared to India and China, but it’s a pretty significant population, especially if you multiply with a high GDP and a population with a very high propensity to buy things online. They have the world’s most advanced broadband and mobile infrastructure. You could actually create pretty significant companies.

Korea has produced more Internet unicorns than any other country outside of US and China. We have some competitive >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Achler of MATH Venture Partners (Part 3)

Mark Achler: Our preference and our sweet spot is, we like it when there’s velocity and when there’s momentum in the sales pipeline and when there is a scalable way to generate growth, which is also another proxy for saying size and scale of the opportunity. There are a lot of wonderful companies out there that’s not just appropriate for venture. We need to get an understanding of the potential of the company, the potential of the market, and the team’s ability to sell.

Let me give you a concrete example. In the last three years, we’ve met with 4,200 entrepreneurs at my fund. We get pitches four or five times a day. The vast majority of entrepreneurs when they come and pitch, they start with, “Our product does…”. I stop them halfway through. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ho Nam of Altos Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Our philosophy is much more in the former kind of financing. We are very much in the capital-efficient business building with a fundamentals-driven approach. Even if you raise a lot of money, our approach is, you need to do that at the right time with an eye towards the finer fundamentals.

Ho Nam: Just because you’re being frugal and pragmatic doesn’t mean you’re forever being conservative. We have one company that raised a billion in funding last year. They didn’t need to raise a billion. They had $300 million of cash in the bank. Earlier this week, we announced that one of our later-stage companies just raised $50 million. We are working very hard to get that company to profitability this year. We don’t need the money.

As you scale that business, adding another $50 million to the balance sheet to be opportunistic makes sense. When you see >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Achler of MATH Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you also double-click down into cyber security? Cyber security has urgency. As a result, it is also one of the most crowded markets of venture capital. It has always been that way. I’ve been in this industry for more than 20 years. There has always been huge amounts of cyber security investments and huge amounts of cyber security startups. How do you parse cyber security?

Mark Achler: I’ll give you an example of the two portfolio companies that we have. One is called NowSecure. They are the experts in mobile. If you look at utilization, more utilization and transactions are done through mobile than on the web. But if you look at resources, the vast majority of resources and infrastructure around cyber security are on the web. If you ask the CSO of a large company to show their head count, >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ho Nam of Altos Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch back to our sweet spot which is the early stage venture game. Series A VCs these days are looking for a million dollar annual run rate and 100% growth rate. If you don’t deliver that, you can’t raise Series A except in very rare exceptions where you have a track record.

If you are a regular founder looking for a regular Series A, these are the things that you need to come to the table with. Let’s say a startup gets to that. What are the circumstances under which they ought to consider working with you as opposed to one of the larger VCs with bigger brand names? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Achler of MATH 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 Mark Achler was recorded in October 2017. 

Mark Achler, Managing Director, MATH Venture Partners, discusses their investment strategy and the industry trends.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about MATH Ventures. What is the focus of your firm? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make?

Mark Achler: We’re based in Chicago. We’re a $28 million fund. We’re just launching our second fund as well which will be twice the size. In our first fund, we made investments of $500,000 to a million dollars. Typically, we’re early stage investors. We do some Series A and seed investing. >>>