1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 1)

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

Daniel Cohen, General partner at Viola Ventures, discusses AI, PaaS, and deep tech investments.

Sramana Mitra: We have known each other for ten years. We have observed the industry for a very long time. We often have guests with whom we’ve had long relationships.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you back these seed-stage companies, what are you looking for? It’s not inexpensive to build like this, so are you writing checks on a concept based on the background and domain expertise of the entrepreneurs? 

Ken Elefant: Most of our investments in Sorenson Ventures are pre-revenue. It could just be an entrepreneur with two or three folks with them. We are carte blanched to invest up to $5 million in ARR, so sometimes our investments have a little bit more. We are typically lead or co-lead in all of our investments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: On your point on needing smart engineers to do things, it has always been my observation that there are only a finite number of those people. We need abstractions and we need ways to enable and equip people who are not these really smart engineers.

This is one of the reasons why I find PaaS to be an interesting trend. It enables a large body of developers to develop stuff and things on top of stacks that they don’t necessarily need to build. You don’t need to be that savvy to be able to build a product and build a solution to problems. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you are investing in such companies that are supplemental to other ecosystems like the Zendesk ecosystem and others, are they getting substantial support from those ecosystems?

In the case of Salesforce, they have a marketplace in AppExchange and Zendesk has been trying to support the ecosystem as well. What is the experience of company building for such a company that has other players that already have a significant presence in the market?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, the company can access each enterprise on their different levels of vulnerability and then present that as an opening part of the sales cycle.

Ken Elefant: They have invented this space called Attack Servers Management. They could go into an enterprise and quickly bring up an analysis that shows the vulnerabilities.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

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

Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-founder at Sorenson Ventures, talks about trends and his investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your funds. I know you have been working with your fund one and you are in the middle of raising your fund two. Fund one was about $100 million, right?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to highlight from your experience or portfolio before we move to the entrepreneur pitches?

Sasha Mirchandani:  What we’ve learned over the years is that large markets are critical. A lot of times, we go after really good entrepreneurs, but the reality is going after a very large market helps the cause tremendously. I encourage entrepreneurs to think through the markets they’re going after.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights of your portfolio currently? If you have exited some, you can talk about those as well.

Sasha Mirchandani: Before I co-founded Kae capital, we’ve done several investments which were very successful like Myntra. We did a company where I am still a shareholder. I was the first investor in a company called Fractal Analytics which we closed with 200 million apex partners.