1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? Are you only doing Silicon Valley?

Cindy Padnos: No, we always had a broader view in that as well. We’ve had companies in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Canada, and Southern California. We have always had a broader view. My partner, Jennifer is in Seattle. We look deeply into the Pacific NorthWest as well.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s all North America?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Cindy Padnos: I don’t know if you know Neha Sampat, but she has a company called Contentstack. It is in the digital experience management space. We led her seed round of financing that enabled them to go from $1 million in ARR to over $4 million in less than a year. This was done with just a $2 million financing. This was rather extraordinary. Insight Partners then led a $30 million series in the company about a year later. She and her team had bootstrapped by having an IT services business.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Were they Americans? What ethnicity were they to move to South Korea?

Cindy Padnos: No, one of the founders is Chinese. The other is Indian. They were both born in their respective countries, but they were educated here in the US. They helped to build several companies here. The CEO had actually been the VP of Engineering of the company that I founded, which was an early SaaS software company.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures, discusses the impact of Covid on the fund’s portfolio, as well as the trends she sees. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by welcoming back Cindy Padnos to our show. She is the founder and director of Illuminate Ventures and one of the active female investors in the Silicon Valley Movement. We have a lot more female investors, but she is one of the earlier ones. We had her here before and she has been doing a lot of work in this area for a long time.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures 2021 (Part 6)

Tim Guleri: Second, we are a hungry partnership. We have a large network of friends in the ecosystem boomerang entrepreneurs to us. We have a young team of investors that are active in the ecosystem by market. For instance, we have a person that is dedicated to the Midwest region to reach out to B2B entrepreneurs.

We have somebody covering Canada and Israel, for example. The way those guys work is, they will partner with the local venture firms and make sure that they know us and we know them. There is a bit of a ground game involved.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Tim Guleri: Point number one is that it would be hard. It takes too much capital. The second is data. For AI to succeed in any domain whether you are building a horizontal platform or bespoke AI for a particular application set, you have a lot of data to train these models.

Data tends to collect in these massive PaaS platforms. If you have a view that data is necessary at scale to train an AI that you are putting into the market, it again brings you back to the big three or four. I know the folks at C3 really well.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was thinking about some of the work that we are doing right now around PaaS which is also a distribution innovation. One of the reasons why Salesforce has been successful as it has been is because it managed to do SaaS products but they also did this PaaS strategy early on.

They got traction on that and built traction on top of their platforms like Veeva and Velocity. I am curious to hear what you are seeing in your orbit of other companies pursuing this strategy.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few case studies. You have developed a very informed perspective on this. Walk us through a couple of examples of what they came to you with and what you saw. What was the business model or distribution model that made them successful?

Tim Guleri: The easiest example to give you that your audience will also understand are companies that have an open source genesis. I invested in a company called Sourcefire, which was my second investment in Sierra. This company was based in Washington DC in the security space.