1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the fund?

Andrew Romans: We’re investing out of a $50 million fund that has a hard cap of a hundred. We’re already actively making investments. For your audience, we’re actively looking for deal flow. If the company has not raised at least a million dollars of outside non-founder funding capital, we prefer not to hear from them.

We like to see companies that have raised at least $1 million from someone who’s not on the founding team. If founders invest, that’s great but we want to see outside investors who put in a million. We do like to see companies that are up to $100,000 MRR >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrew Romans of Rubicon 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 Andrew Romans of Rubicon Venture Capital was recorded in January 2018. 

Andrew Romans is General Partner of Rubicon Venture Capital. Our discussion includes an interesting segment on ICOs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get acquainted. What is you investment focus? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you like to make? Let’s start understanding the fund.

Andrew Romans: Rubicon Venture Capital has two main offices in Silicon Valley and New York City. We also have 18 venture >>>

406th Roundtable Recording On July 12, 2018: With Devdutt Yellurkar, CRV

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan of Clear Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That point that you made about seed capital being abundant and seed funding being abundant, and Series A becoming an issue is huge. The numbers are 50,000 to 70,000 seed financing a year, and Series A is only about 1,500. There is a huge drop off that is happening. We don’t really have a great answer on how to cross that gap.

You need to show certain levels of validation. The Series A guys are looking for a lot of different metrics which are not necessarily being tackled by the companies who have raised just seed money. It’s been a very tricky environment. As you pointed out, there are 500 to 600 micro-VCs in the market right now who are funding tons and tons of companies at the seed stage. >>>

Roundtable Recap: July 12 – Laser Sharp Competitive Positioning is Compulsory in Crowded Markets

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, who discussed his investment principles. It was an excellent discussion!

Elastic Storage Solutions
As for entrepreneur pitches, we started with Udo Neustadter from Ottawa, Canada, pitching Elastic Storage Solutions, a company addressing the ballooning storage needs of the digital universe. I asked for a thorough competitive positioning exercise, including input from storage buyers on how they’re evaluating solutions.

Velox Networks
Next, Martin Nygate from Singapore pitched Velox Networks, an Asian competitor to RingCentral-like hosted PBX vendors. The company is executing well and is already in revenue.

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan of Clear Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Reversing the question now, if you look at 2017, what have you seen? What trends have you seen in your deal flow? How many companies do you see in a year for example and how many do you invest in? What has been the 2017 deal flow nuggets of trends?

Rajeev Madhavan: In 2017, my average was eight companies a week. That’s 400 companies a year. Out of 400, we invest in six. It’s almost like one in hundred. One of the things that I believe very much in is giving them the feedback even if we’re not the investor. I have some empathy with them as I have gone through what they’re going through.

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in there? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: But the monetization is what builds businesses, right? Usage doesn’t build businesses.

Brij Bhasin: How many years did Facebook build its business before it started monetizing?

Sramana Mitra: Facebook actually monetized from the beginning. There is an article that I wrote about how Mark Zuckerberg preserved so much equity in the company. Since you bring up Facebook, Facebook’s India revenue with 240 million users is $50 million annual, which is miniscule and very disappointing for the company. The Economist article is not based on government data. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan of Clear Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is your perspective on enterprise companies? In a lot of sectors, the mid-market is underserved and enterprise is over-served.

Rajeev Madhavan: One of the mid-market companies we’re serving in that space is a company called Reflektion. Most of the retail vendors are mid-market. They’re now scaling to the higher end but they started out with mid-market.

The real delta is in the mid-market, the number of players that are there to support your software is almost zero. You really need to make your software completely deployable with the least amount of human beings required. It’s got to get completely >>>