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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Venture Capital
1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ben Narasin, Founder and General Partner at Tenacity Venture Capital (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Today, the industry is segmented in to pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-Series A, early Series A. Where are you positioning yourself?
Ben Narasin: I’m happy with anything before the Series A. My focus has always been finding entrepreneurs that I believe are venture-scalable and helping them raise their first venture round. I got over 327 VCs in my eight years as a seed investor. In that eight-year period, between 63% and 71% startups I seeded went on to raise follow-on rounds. Typically, Series A. Those rounds often came from the introductions I made.
>>>1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ben Narasin, Founder and General Partner at Tenacity Venture Capital (Part 1)
Ben Narasin is Founder and General Partner at Tenacity Venture Capital, a new Seed fund.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself a little bit to our audience – both your personal background and the genesis of Tenacity.
>>>1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: When it comes to some of the patient monitoring stuff, which is a very active category, all applications of information technology, especially the AI algorithm in drug discovery, how do you view the role of FDA or an equivalent regulatory body?
Rajeev Singh-Morales: I’ll be very candid. I’m not an expert on FDA or the equivalent in Europe. We are working with a company that has developed a technology for the diagnosis of sleep apnea. In today’s world if you’re told by your primary care physician that you might have sleep apnea, you have to go to a clinic.
>>>1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see in your deal flow?
Rajeev Singh-Morales: We are a fund that is mostly B2B. We don’t a have an industry focus. There are certain areas in pharma and biotech which are extraordinarily hot right now. We don’t invest in that. We do invest in digital health. That is really quite interesting right now. Everything around telehealth and remote diagnostics and remote healthcare in the US and in Europe is gaining a lot of attention.
>>>1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Talk about the companies themselves.
Rajeev Singh-Morales: Let me start with one that was just sold about two months ago. Returnly is a firm that we invested in five years ago. It was sold to Affirm for $300 million. It was founded in 2014 by an immigrant from Spain. We invested in 2015 in a convertible note. E-commerce is booming now. Most people buy stuff that they want to return.
>>>1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures (Part 1)
Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures, discusses the Europe – US bridge for tech startups.
Sramana Mitra: Your name is so interesting. It seems like there is a whole story in your name and your firm’s name. Do you want to start with a little bit of background?
>>>1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: There is one question that I want to ask you today. In the deal flow that you are seeing and your analysis of the market, what are some open problems that you have identified where you are looking for deep tech teams to solve those problems? Are there any that you are looking to invest in?
Karthee Madasamy: We are more thematic than very tight thesis-driven. We look for large deep tech-related transformations in traditional industries like automotive, manufacturing, agriculture, and biology. We don’t try to figure out the exact market problem. We let the entrepreneurs bring that to us. They are the ones on the ground looking at the problem.
>>>1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: In the scenarios where are you doing deep tech and you need to bring in a CEO to manage a tech-savvy team going after an interesting market opportunity, what nuggets or lessons from the trenches can you offer as guidance to our audience?
Karthee Madasamy: It’s a hard question. I sympathize with you. It’s not easy to bring in an outside CEO. Oftentimes, it’s not the right fit. It’s just a theoretical fit. It doesn’t work a lot of the times. The first thing you need to be clear about is what the need of the company is and then bring in a person who is going to solve that. The immediate response is bringing in a salesperson. For me and the companies, being only sales-focused does not happen for a long time.
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