1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Lemkin of Storm 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 Jason Lemkin was recorded in October 2014. 

Jason Lemkin, prior to becoming a VC, was the CEO of EchoSign, a digital signature SaaS vendor that Adobe acquired some years back. This was an excellent discussion and offers very concrete pointers to where you might look for white spaces in the cloud computing space to do new ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a small window into how you look back your journey as an entrepreneur. Let’s start with EchoSign now that you have so much experience behind you and you’ve had a chance to consider the cloud landscape from a VC’s point of view. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your portfolio. What have you invested in? What’s interesting? Take a few highlights of your portfolio and walk us through what they are, why you’ve invested in them, and what is the thought process.

Nitin Pachisia: We’ve made 18 investments in two and a half years, which is reflective of our pace of about 8 to 10 investments per year. I believe we’re seeing about 1,500 companies a year but we like to maintain that pace to be able to dedicate enough time to every company we invest in.

In terms of the some of the examples of portfolio companies, we have a company in the driverless trucking space called Starsky >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled 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 Nitin Pachisia was recorded in October 2017. 

Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures, discusses pre-seed and seed investing.

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

Nitin Pachisia: We’re a very young pre-seed fund. We started about three and a half years ago. For our initial investments, we invest exclusively at pre-seed stage, which is effectively pre-product in most cases. We focus on immigrant founded companies. >>>

12 Investors Discuss Unicorn Mania via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Right now there is a lot of capital in the startup investment system. Investors managing a good amount of money have to think of an investment thesis where they can really get returns. One of the observations I’ve had is that if everybody is chasing Unicorns, it’s not going to work, because there aren’t that many Unicorns. Unicorns, by definition, should be rare. Right now, we have a lot of pseudo-unicorns because a lot of artificially-bloated companies have come into the market. In the private market, there are tons of artificially bloated pseudo-unicorns. This aggressive goal of trying to invest in Unicorns is not going to end very well. There’s going to be a lot of casualties in the process.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your investment thesis around online education right now?

Jason Stoffer: I don’t really do education either online or offline. The biggest area of opportunity in education is post-college. What you see is an environment where when I graduated college in 1999, it was very easy to get a job. You had a job in a consulting firm or a CPG firm.

Today it’s very different. Not only is it hard to find your first job but skills change so quickly. The area I like is how do you train post-college to gain the skills the workforce demands. It’s really telling that unemployment is such a big problem for college graduates. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch topics a little bit to look at some other categories that you tend to invest in. You like to invest in education it seems – online education. I saw that you’ve invested in Course Hero. We’ve done a big story on Andrew. I love what Course Hero is doing. Huge numbers of college students are hanging out on Course Hero both sharing and using course notes.

What I like about the business is it has a very clear monetization model. It’s not some foo-foo business. I love the fact that Course Hero is essentially a subscription business. A large number of their users are subscribing. Andrew bootstrapped that business for a long time. I think it was already about $10 million before they raised money. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: My observation is the venture capital industry needs to really get a lot more savvy and sophisticated about the discipline of merchandising if it really wants to play in this B2C brand world. Especially in domains like fashion and design it’s all about merchandising and curation.

Jason Stoffer: Look at Mickey Drexler. It’s all about the merchant. It’s about this magical outcome that takes place in combining the art and the science of retailing. That’s what we’re looking for in investments. We have a new investment called Dolls Kill. It’s almost an online analog to what Hot Topic was a couple of decades ago when I was growing up. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (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 Jason Stoffer was recorded in September 2014. 

Jason Stoffer, General Partner at Maveron – a consumer-only venture capital firm that has had a successful track record of investing in e-commerce ventures ranging from eBay, Shutterfly, and Groupon to the more recent Zulily, as well as education ventures – discusses e-commerce opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start off with e-commerce. I know you have invested in other things. We’ll discuss your other investments and your investment thesis in more general terms as well. To begin with, let’s talk about a couple of your e-commerce investments. What is your current thought process around the industry? >>>