1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Wilson of Artiman Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are you seeing in your deal flow? We’ll come to what you’ve invested in in a moment. You’ve been in this business for a long time. Let’s look at the 2017 deals that has approached you for investment. What are the trend lines that you see in there? What are you seeing?

Tim Wilson: I see several different trends. One is more money is being invested at higher valuations prior to reducing significant risks. I’ve now done this for over 16 years. I’ve seen the ebbs and flows. Early stage venture capital requires a certain amount of ownership in order to work in the end. I’ve seen valuations creep up and up to the point where we walked away from deals not because they’re not good deals. We don’t think they’re going to make the metrics work for early stage ventures. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Greg Borchardt of Caerus 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 Greg Borchardt of Caerus Ventures was recorded in February 2018. 

Greg Borchardt is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Caerus Ventures, a firm that has a focus on connected hardware. It’s an interesting and differentiated investment thesis that is worth listening to, especially for IoT entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Caerus Ventures. What is your sweet spot? What is the size of the fund? What kind of investments do you like to make? What’s the focus? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Wilson of Artiman 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 Tim Wilson of Artiman Ventures was recorded in February 2018. 

Tim Wilson, Partner at Artiman Ventures, has been in the venture business for a long time, and refreshingly has the skill and the confidence to do very complex technology deals that are relatively early.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Artiman Ventures. Let’s get to know one another. Let’s get you introduced to our audience. What is the fund’s focus? What kind of deals do you like to make? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much total money did the company raise? How much revenue did they do?

Gaurav Jain: They raised sub-$10 million. It’s relatively small for a food delivery. Their numbers were not that far off from some of these bigger companies. A big reason for that was because they were based in Winnipeg where the cost structure is phenomenally different. They had 200 employees.

Sramana Mitra: It’s also a matter of culture and philosophy. Part of the problem we have created in this industry is this burn lots of capital and chase hyper growth at all cost and make yourself unsustainable for the

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital (Part 4)

Gaurav Jain: We don’t make a list of what’s been going wrong. The list, unfortunately, is too long. Instead, we look for what can go right. If the founder can accomplish these counter-intuitive things, could this be a massive business? Could this be a massive opportunity? Does the founder have the ability to execute on V1 of the product and get some traction, learn, and figure out V2. Neither of us knew what that is. Kyle did a brilliant job at that.

Another company I invested in is something called Firebase, which was two technical founders. It’s actually their fourth startup. The first three had failed. They were building a chat engine. They realized that the backend software to enable the chat was >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I think there is a lot of garbage and a few good ones. What are your pointers for people who are trying to understand good ICO examples? What are ones that you consider are good credible ICO’s?

Andrew Romans: Rahul Sood was the head of Microsoft Ventures. I knew him there. He left Microsoft Ventures to acquire a company they had invested in and merged it with a new company he established called Unikrn. It’s an ambitious name for a startup. They do real money gambling for esports. Madison Square Garden will sell out three to five nights in a row or people paying money to watch other people playing video games.

I recognize that that’s a real thing. People like to gamble on sporting events and people love to gamble on esports. That is legal in >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For a B2B business, getting to hundred customers is not an easy thing to do.

Gaurav Jain: For B2B, if they’re paying you $10 a month, getting 5000 customers is not hard. If you’re charging $10,000, maybe one or two is great.

Sramana Mitra: Quickly, what about geography? Are you US-focused?

Gaurav Jain: We’re based in San Francisco, but our mandate doesn’t prevent us from investing anywhere in the world. I’d say >>>

5 Investor Podcasts Discussing Changes in Startup Financing

The startup financing game has changed. Seed funding used to be the harder round to get. But right now there are 500 to 600 micro-VCs in the market who are funding tons and tons of companies at the seed stage. The numbers are 50,000 to 70,000 seed financing a year, while Series A financing per year is only about 1,500. There is a huge drop off in Series A funding happening. We don’t really have a great answer on how to cross this gap.

Entrepreneurs do need to be able to show certain levels of validation. The Series A investors are looking for a lot of different metrics which are not necessarily being tackled by the ventures who have raised just seed money. It’s become a very tricky environment.

>>>