1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alan Chiu at XSeed (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’re seeing more capital-efficient executions, which is good. In our philosophy, we strongly recommend that people bootstrap and be as capital-efficient as possible as long as possible before raising money. Even when they raise money, we prefer that they don’t raise huge amounts of capital, which is completely counter to the unicorn mania that has been running through Silicon Valley, which we’ll talk about in a moment.

I think the capital efficiency trend is a good thing from what you’re pointing out. Let me see if I understood what you’re trying to say here. You are saying that there have been a lot of seed investments in the last five years. The people who have invested are trying to get exits and not making a lot more seed investments.
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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rami Elkhatib of Acero Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? You are based in the Bay Area, right?

Rami Elkhatib: Yes, our office is in Menlo Park. The example I just gave you started out as an East Coast investment. The new CEO that we recruited is in the Bay Area. Then, the CEO built the management team around him in the Bay Area. The headquarters is in the Bay Area. I gave you Contrast by way of an example of how we are typically trying to find deep IP.

Another aspect of that is geography. If I were to pick another example from our portfolio where we’ve done that, there’s a company called Swrve in the mobile user engagement. That started as an Irish company. When I met the team, they had very deep and interesting real-time streaming >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Hasebroock at Dundee Venture Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That philosophy of “operators do not make good investors” does not exist in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, operators are highly-valued.

Mark Hasebroock: It’s really interesting. I hear it a lot. What you have is a mindset in the Midwest because of insurance, private equity, and hedge funds. They have a quantitative analysis approach to invest in.

Sramana Mitra: Early-stage venture capital is not about quantitative at all.

Mark Hasebroock: Not at all. There’s a big education that’s going underway- just getting money off the sidelines and teaching people what the >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alan Chiu at XSeed (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a bit about your current portfolio. This is your second fund. How much was the first fund?

Alan Chiu: The first fund was $50 million and it was invested across FinTech and software.

Sramana Mitra: How many companies did you invest in from the first fund?

Alan Chiu: I wasn’t with XSeed then. That’s not a part that I can speak about.

Sramana Mitra: When did you raise this fund?
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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rami Elkhatib of Acero Capital (Part 2)

Rami Elkhatib: We had been interested in the area of security, specifically application security. We found a fantastic technical team. We found the deep IP and the fantastic product. When we closed that Series A, we had a full product and a full technical team. I hope that illustrates where we tend to be a little bit different.

A typical Series A is typically looking for that initial revenue or that initial customer. We’ve done that as well. From our perspective, we try to take a different approach.

Sramana Mitra: I’m very happy to hear the example that you just provided because among the various tools that we have >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Hasebroock at Dundee Venture Capital (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 Mark Hasebroock of Dundee Venture Capital was recorded in February 2018.

Mark Hasebroock is Founder at Dundee Venture Capital, based in Omaha, Nebraska. The firm invests in the Midwest, likes small, capital-efficient deals and is open to early exits.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Dundee. What is your focus? What do you like to invest in?

Mark Hasebroock: We started Dundee Venture Capital in 2010 with the idea from Omaha, Nebraska that there was probably some really good >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alan Chiu at XSeed (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 Alan Chiu of XSeed was recorded in February 2018.

Alan Chiu is Partner at XSeed, a seed-focused venture fund based in Silicon Valley. Alan talks about the level of risk his firm is willing to take and under what circumstances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to XSeed. Tell us about the firm.
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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rami Elkhatib of Acero Capital (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 Rami Elkhatib of Acero Capital was recorded in February 2018. 

Rami Elkhatib, General Partner at Acero Capital, talks about his investments in companies that require a longer development cycle. As you know, 1Mby1M often uses Bootstrapping with Services as a core methodology to scale companies to fundability. Rami actually loves to invest in such businesses, read on.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as the fund. What is your focus? What kind of things >>>