1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Stewart Alsop of Alsop Louie Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about what you see as the early stage investment game. It has become very tricky. How does a small fund or even angel investors compete with the mega funds that put in $100 million in Series D with 3x liquidation preference. How do you prevent being washed out?

Stewart Alsop: It is a tricky business. It requires understanding of how to run a venture fund. You have to be very careful that you don’t get ahead of yourself in terms of investing. We can look at a company and go, “That’s cool.” That business is going to take $50 million to $100 million to really build out and we won’t really know until the later stages of that $50 million to $100 million whether this team will turn it into a successful company. >>>

6 Investors Discuss Startup Financing via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

From listening to VCs and Seed Investors over the past few years, we have learned that the options for startup financing continue to expand. However, it is important to remember that not all ventures can be financed and not all ventures should be financed. To learn if your startup might be of interest to VCs, Angels, or Seed Investors, please read this selection of interviews with a wide-range of investors.

Naren Gupta, Co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners – a firm with an excellent track record of investing in the Silicon Valley – India corridor, but with a global market point of view – shares his insights, nuggets, and interesting wisdom. He is a veteran investor who is also strikingly polite and humble.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Stewart Alsop of Alsop Louie Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the domain of self-driving cars, are there things that you have identified as opportunities where startups can play and perhaps venture-scale opportunities within that realm?

Stewart Alsop: We’re the lead investor of Twitch, which was purchased by Amazon about a year and a half ago. I’ve written checks to two of the founders who then started new companies. One of them started a company called Cruise Automation. Cruise Automation went down its path as a venture-backed startup developing autonomous driving capabilities originally as an add-on to existing cars.

I brought them in because I thought that what they were doing is pretty interesting. My partner thought I was crazy for >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Stewart Alsop of Alsop Louie 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 Stewart Alsop was recorded in May 2016. 

Stewart Alsop, Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, has been a VC for 20 years, and before that, a journalist for another 20 years in the technology industry. This conversation is wide-ranging, spanning autonomous vehicles, unreasonable entrepreneurs, etc.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve been in the business for 20 plus years and you’ve covered technology as a journalist 20 years before that. I’ve been in the business for 20 years. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Swati Chaturvedi of Propel(x) Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about the types of ideas your investors are looking for.

Swati Chaturvedi: There is a big trend of combining hardware with software. Robotics is another trend. What is specific to Propel(x) is, we do need some specific innovation.

Sramana Mitra: When it comes to IT and specific innovation, there are niche opportunities that are not as easily open right now given where we are in the history of technology. Let’s say there’s a particular sector of cloud computing. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Todd Belfer of Canal Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to us a little bit about geography. You mentioned you’re operating at about five geographies. What are the dynamics of these geographies? I know WebPT is in Arizona. What are the dynamics of the Arizona market right now? Are you seeing a lot of deal flow?

Todd Belfer: I see a lot of healthcare deals in Arizona. We see a lot of B2C deals.

Sramana Mitra: But you don’t do B2C. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Todd Belfer of Canal Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m in agreement with you, by and large. Let me then parse what you said. You’re talking about $1 million to $3 million investment in a company that is doing $1 million ARR. What is the calculation here? Are you going to exit the company with that capital infusion or are you expecting that company to go through another round of financing and still exit for relatively smaller amounts of money? How do you think about deals?

Todd Belfer: We built our businesses in the 80’s and the 90’s before there were venture capital markets. We didn’t take on a >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Swati Chaturvedi of Propel(x) Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How about some examples of companies that you have funded within the IT sector?

Swati Chaturvedi: One company was including a software in chips sent to OEMs like the Samsungs of the world. The idea there is it is an Internet of Things application. Those chips track every connected device in the home. The idea there is can you understand why those devices are failing. Is it because of the device itself or is it because of Internet failures? That was helpful.

Another company that we’re doing in information technology is focused on gesture recognition. The goal is that they >>>