1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Suman Talukdar, Founder and Managing Partner at AiSprouts.VC (Part 1)

Suman Talukdar is Founder and Managing Partner at AiSprouts.VC.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about the unicorns in your portfolio.

Venktesh Shukla: Let’s talk about three different categories I mentioned that we invest in. We have a unicorn or soon-to-be unicorns in all those three things. We are invested in a cloud infrastructure company called Aviatrix.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: My next question is something that we touched upon a little bit when we spoke some time ago. In the fund strategy, one of the things we’re seeing is that there is a class of funds that is still focused on finding unicorns.

They are looking for the very large billion-dollar opportunities, but there are thousands of micro-VCs out there right now that are working in the mode where they will do the early stage and early exit at a sub-$50 million range. Some of them are doing it in two to three years and then selling their stakes into the latter rounds.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look back on the 30 companies that you invested in, which ones are concept-stage ventures that you have invested in without anything already built?

Venktesh Shukla: Practically every one of them. 

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. That’s actually unique. I’m going to give you some feedback on what’s happening in the venture world. There’s a lot of money available for companies that are doing some level of validation work and ideally generating some level of traction.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I am very intellectually curious. I feel very humbled with how little I know about all these segments that we are working with. At the same time, there are methodology elements that we have come up with in doing this for such a long time that apply to a lot of different scenarios.

Let’s say you’re doing B2B selling to small businesses, there’s a playbook for that. If you’re selling to enterprises, there’s a playbook for that. If you’re doing B2C transactions, there’s a playbook for that.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, General Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 1)

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

Venktesh Shukla is General Partner at Monta Vista Capital. I have known Venk for more than 20 years, and we discussed both industry trends and his fund strategy.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are your predictions on post-COVID trends? What are you seeing and predicting? What kind of businesses would you like to invest in the post-COVID era? 

Fabrice Grinda: Crises, in general, are extraordinary accelerators of underlying trends. They are also extraordinary generators of productivity growth. If you examine the 20th century, the Great Depression was the time where we had the highest productivity growth in the US.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your strategy is to go for the unicorns, is that right? 

Fabrice Grinda: Yes and no. With all of the companies that we invested in, we want them to have the control to be a billion-dollar company. If you are building a venture startup, you need to be able to sell and get 10x return on investment. With that said, in our case, we have had over 150 exits and we’ve made money in over half of these deals. Our average is 4x. We don’t need you to be a unicorn.