1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Laurel Touby of Supernode Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What do you think of this particular phenomenon? We’re in the beginning of 2018. Lots of stuff have already been built. Nowadays, there aren’t so many wide open opportunities with multi-billion TAM’s but there are many niche opportunities.

Some of these businesses need to be built for very small amounts of capital – $1 million to $2 million and sold for $10 million. Maybe even smaller investments – $500,000 and then sell for $5 million. Do you have appetite for these kinds of investments?

Laurel Touby: As long as the founder is not trying to create a lifestyle business that they want to hold on to forever and they’re >>>

Roundtable Recap: June 14 – Spotlight on A Venture Firm that Specifically Supports War Veterans

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Kelly Perdew, Co-founder and Managing General Partner at Moonshots Capital, a firm that has a unique investment thesis of supporting military veterans. Very interesting insights.

VirtuBox
As for entrepreneur pitches, we started with Prakash Rastogi from Noida, India, pitching VirtuBox, a content management platform that already has validation and revenue. We discussed scaling strategy.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It also gives you a flavor of how good a product it is. Is the product really meeting the needs of the customers? I think churn is a very good indicator of that.

Mackey Craven: Coming back again, it really doesn’t have to do with revenue scale. It has to do with validating that repeatable value proposition. Aside from conversations with customers, that quantitative metric often speaks strongly about that point.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch the question to another quantitative myth that comes up all the time in early stage financing, which is TAM. Let me phrase the question slightly differently. At the beginning of 2018, lots of stuff have already been built. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Laurel Touby of Supernode Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What have you invested in? Give us an example or two and tell us why you chose to invest in those.

Laurel Touby: We are about to close the first close of our fund. We’re now looking at investment for that fund. In my angel investing, you can see some indicators of some  companies that I invested in personally that have been doing really well. One of them is a company called AppBoy which is in marketing tech. I did it five years ago. It wasn’t quite as crowded as it is today.

It has changed its name to Braze. It’s basically software to help marketers reach out to their community via the app. It’s managing your community of users better through your app. It’s analytics. It started out as doing one or two things. Another one is >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel of ff Venture Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s look at 2017. This is our last roundtable. We are about to close the year off. You have, I imagine, seen thousands of deals this year. What are the trends in your deal flow?

John Frankel: We’ve been leaning heavily into AI, cyber security, robotics, FinTech. We’re seeing a ton of opportunities in those spaces. The reality is, AI isn’t a space. It’s a toolset. You’re going to see AI embedded in almost everything over time just the way mobile or SaaS is when you look at enterprise. With regard to other trends, there’s a lot of noise, excitement, and manic behavior around Blockchain and ICOs. We’re looking at it and studying it. It’s not necessarily an area that we think institutional capital should be playing today. >>>

6 Investor Podcasts and Linking Bootstrapping to Financing

I’m a huge proponent of bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Having worked within the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem for all these years, I’ve observed with interest the development of different ecosystems in different parts of the world. Bootstrapping happens to be one of the really important ways that startup ecosystems come up. You get a few startups that become successful in a bootstrapped manner and then the investments start.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners (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 Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners was recorded in January 2018. 

Mackey Craven, Partner at OpenView Venture Partners, discusses what Series A VCs are looking for in the realm of software investments. We talk at length about the Series A gap from the perspective of a fund that focuses on Series A and beyond.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. Let’s get to know OpenView. How big is the fund? What sized investments do you like to make? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Laurel Touby of Supernode 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 Laurel Touby of Supernode Ventures was recorded in January 2018. 

Laurel Touby, Managing Partner at Supernode Ventures, and a former entrepreneur and avid angel investor, has now launched her new institutional pre-seed fund.

Sramana Mitra: I’m surprised our paths haven’t crossed until now. >>>