1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures (Part 1)

Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures, and formerly Head of Corp Dev at Twitter, SuccessFactors, and McAfee and Akamai discusses exit strategy from the buy-side perspective at length.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you talk a little bit about your background in corp dev doing acquisitions from the buy side from various significant companies before you switched to the venture side.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Sardana, Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you what we do at 1Mby1M. We do bottom-up TAM analysis, which means we have to get the business model and pricing model hypothesis. When you’re starting out and raising money, that financial hypothesis is really important to get right. We emphasize a few specific elements. One is the business model. Two is the pricing model. Three is the bottom-up TAM analysis. Does that cover what you’re looking for in financial storytelling?

Sandeep Sardana: I couldn’t have said it any better.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Sardana, Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures (Part 1)

Sandeep Sardana is Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures. We had a terrific discussion on how we each look for a startup story through financial metrics.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself to our audience. Tell us a bit about your journey. What path brings you here?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: My question was a bit more like what percentage of these kinds of backgrounds have a combination of a stint at a major university like you did.

Bradley Harrison: I think a very traditional path to transition out of the military is to go to grad school. That is a very common path if you get out early in your career. If you’re getting out after 20 years, you probably already have a Masters or a Doctorate while you were in the military. The national labs population tends to not have the military background. Most of the people in the national labs have spent 10 years at Los Alamos, working under whoever was the pioneer in technology.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Coming back to the venture discussion, what do you like to see before writing a check?

Bradley Harrison: We over-index on the founders. Our biggest thing is chemistry with the founding team. We try to make sure that we have that chemistry. In checking that chemistry, we plan on being partners with entrepreneurs for 10 to 15 years. If that goes well, we plan on keeping them in our bullpen forever. It’s a little bit of coachability and compatibility. We want to make sure that there are no issues with integrity or moral code. That’s the people side.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What does Unite Us do?

Bradley Harrison: Unite Us uses the social determinants of health to provide optimization in the health system. They do that with two sets of customers. One set of customers is the Department of Health of Human Services at the State and City level. Currently, we have 41 states as customers. We have 26 State-wide engagements. In North Carolina, we have a relationship with the Department of Health and Human Services at the State level and we have presence in 140 counties.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 2)

Bradley Harrison: What people don’t realize is that the largest investor in innovation since World War II is not Silicon Valley; it’s the United States government. There are billions of dollars in each of these programs. The Army’s program for grants last year was $3.3 billion. That’s just the Army.

The government is passing the Endless Frontier Act which is about $110 billion to support innovation all through grants. We take our money, non-dilutive capital, and a bunch of smart people and build companies that we say are making the world a better and safer place.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Bradley Harrison, Founder, Managing Partner at Scout Ventures, discusses how military professionals are engaging in entrepreneurship with an ecosystem supporting them. Quite fascinating!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce you to our audience. Tell us a bit about your background as well as what you’re doing at Scout.