1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ben Mathias of Vertex 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 Ben Mathias of Vertex Ventures was recorded in March 2018.

Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures, India, discusses the trends and dynamics of the Indian startup ecosystem, including exits. India needs exits at this point, even if they’re relatively small exits.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing you to our audience. Give us some background about yourself and some background about Vertex Ventures. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anshu Sharma (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in the healthcare space?

Anshu Sharma: In healthcare, I started a company along with other founders. They’re still in stealth mode. People can learn more by googling RobinAI. We are attacking a huge problem in healthcare where doctors spend way too much time interacting with their EHR systems and not with their patients. We have a unique way of attacking that problem. When we come out of stealth, we’ll talk more about it.

Sramana Mitra: But you will be selling to doctors?

Anshu Sharma: Yes, the healthcare providers are the target market. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines of Webb Investment Network (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do they listen to your advice?

Jonathan Pines: In some cases, they do. In some cases when someone’s offering money at a high price, it can be very tempting to take it. The other piece that’s important is to be aware of the terms of the round. In some cases, the highest-priced offer may come with other complicated liquidation preferences and things that can have a real impact depending on the future of the company. At the very least, it is important to understand different scenarios that may happen in the future and what will happen to the capital of the company.

Sramana Mitra: One of my observations is that we’re in 2018. Lots of stuff have been built. Nowadays, there aren’t so many >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anshu Sharma (Part 4)

Anshu Sharma: Every niche of a market is part of a bigger niche. Forget about software and enterprise software, because it may be hard for people to understand what I’m saying. Let’s say someone says, “I want to start building cables. I’m going to start manufacturing cable for electricity.” That’s a very small market. It’s a niche.

That’s how telcom in India started. They literally started out by building cables. Then they started building handsets for the Indian government’s MTNL selling phones. As everybody knows, that’s not a cable company. It’s not even a phone device company. The founders may not know exactly how big the market can be, but if you can’t articulate even one or two paths to a bigger market, that’s a limitation of your vision. It’s not really a >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dennis Joyce of Alliance of Angels (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Given what you just said and if you’ll then look back on the deal flow that you have seen, I have a different question which is slightly off-center. Obviously we are at a time in history where there is a huge number of people who are unhappy and struggling and under tremendous stress. Their livelihoods are going away because of a lot of the things we’re doing with technology. Are you seeing deal flow with interesting concepts in addressing some of their pain?

Dennis Joyce: We see interesting products all the time that are addressing social issues. One is an app that helps with drug addiction and >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines of Webb Investment Network (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Some examples in your current portfolio.

Jeremy Schneider: There’s many. For example, PagerDuty is a company that we’re huge fans of and feel very lucky to work with. We met them through YCombinator but what made us really want them is, they had a great team.

Two is that Maynard struggled with this problem throughout his career. Every time he took on a new CIO role, one of the first things he has to do is to set up the alerting and on-call system to make sure that the infrastructure stayed up. When we heard Alex and Andrew pitching PagerDuty, we immediately knew that this was a pain point and something that >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anshu Sharma (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We’ve covered Nutanix extensively. Our community knows Nutanix very well. At what stage did you get involved with Nutanix?

Anshu Sharma: It was the stage at which it was just an idea. I had known and interacted with Dheeraj at Salesforce while he was at his previous company. He and I had done some work at Oracle. When Dheeraj started incubating, I was in the group of people that was the first check in.

From this investment, I learned that if you back a team that understands the market they’re going after, things work out well. Essentially, that set the template for me for every other investment. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines of Webb Investment Network (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at your last 15 months deal flow, what do you see? What are the highlights of the trends you see in your deal flow?

Jeremy Schneider: One thing that has been exciting for us is that WIN has been around now for about eight years. In 2017, we started to see repeat entrepreneurs come through our network. We were really excited to have the opportunity to back our founders again. That was one exciting trend on a high level.

As for sectors, last year we started to explore new areas as a team and with our network. We started seeing >>>