1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ray Chan of K5 Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Ray Chan was recorded in December 2018.

Ray Chan, Managing Director at K5 Ventures and Tech Coast Angels, shares his views on the segments his firms invest in.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get introduced. Tell us about yourself a little bit as well as K5 Ventures. What do you like to invest in? What size is the fund?

Ray Chan: This reminds me of the interview we did about nine years ago. We are based in Southern California. I >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shuly Galili of UpWest Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: As part of UpWest, is there a panel of CISOs who look at your companies?

Shuly Galili: We work with a lot of the industry CISOs locally in Silicon Valley as well as across the US. They’re so entrenched in understanding how to work with both ourselves and other players who have access to a funnel of solutions out of Israel. We do have a lot of relationships in the ecosystem.

We also have companies that are building infrastructure technology not related to cybersecurity in enterprises. We’ve had great opportunities to work with big players to be able to advise and look at founders at the early-stages in order to guide them into what it is that they need to do in order to build a really great solution. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shuly Galili of UpWest Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’re mostly doing B2B. Is that a reasonable point?

Shuly Galili: I would say that most of our companies are B2B. We do have a few companies that are more on the consumer side, and most recently, in the esports domain.

Sramana Mitra: Can you share a little bit about the Israeli startup ecosystem’s philosophy? Is the assumption always that US is the market you’re going after or are you going after other markets as well?

Shuly Galili: European and Asian markets are always interesting and becoming more and more relevant. For a lot of Israeli companies, >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shuly Galili of UpWest Labs (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are they coming to you with just the concept? Are they coming to you with some idea about what customers are looking for? What tells you that you want to give $250,000 to these two guys?

Shuly Galili: Founders typically find us through our network. For many of them, they understand that UpWest is the destination for them in order to have this kind of process validation. What we look for are founders with domain expertise. When they build something that is related to networking ,or to healthcare, or to any kind of vertical, they have to have that domain expertise.

It’s important for us that they have some idea of the market, or which vertical they’re going after and maybe have an initial idea and >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shuly Galili of UpWest Labs (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Shuly Galili was recorded in October 2018.

Shuly Galili, Founding Partner, UpWest Labs, talks to us about pre-seed and seed investments in the Israel – Silicon Valley corridor.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about yourself as well as UpWest Labs. Introduce our audience to your work.

Shuly Galili: I co-founded UpWest Labs in 2012. It’s been almost seven years. We’ve been building a platform and a fund to invest and support very early stage pre-seed and seed founders, primarily out of Israel. We are based in Palo Alto and are invested in over 70 companies. We’re on our third fund where we are heavily focused on several industries.
>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Miriam Rivera of Ulu Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did they come to you with?

Miriam Rivera: This was three people. They had developed the prototypes of these devices. Part of that was that they had already spent several years in this non-profit version pursuing this goal of developing cheaper devices that could be used in contexts where technology wasn’t being used. They have shown tremendous commitment to what they were doing and in creating affordable and quick-to-produce devices. That was something that could reduce the cost of creating Internet of Things device by an order of magnitude, and also make it happen in months as opposed to a year.

Sramana Mitra: Are you chasing unicorns? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Miriam Rivera of Ulu Ventures (Part 4)

Miriam Rivera: The other company was run by men and this was run by a mom. I think she really related to the issues. She related to the customers’ needs. She understood the importance of safety and reliability, and understood that for the parents, reliability was more important than the price.

They tend to have a more stable set of drivers. They tend to pay a bigger fraction than other transportation companies. They try to develop a set of >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Miriam Rivera of Ulu Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about sector? You said you only do enterprise software. Could you elaborate on what you like to invest? What trends are you following and are excited about?

Miriam Rivera: A lot of our companies are traditional SaaS companies, but many of them were also invested in Internet of Things and AI. Smart data is one of the big focus areas of our investing. Fintech and education technology are some other focus areas. What differentiate us is that we are selling into an enterprise customer. We do have some companies that are selling it to small enterprise, but that’s more unusual. We also consider enterprise to be a little different than the traditional Fortune or Global 2000 type of companies.  >>>