1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Your strategy is to not worry about the ones that are not really making it and will have to raise money with liquidation preference where you don’t have the negotiating leverage. Focus on the ones that will get to decent exit and you need three of those to make your fund economics work.

Charlie O’Donnell: Yes. I do 80% to 90% of my total investment upfront, which is a deviation from the way that most fund managers work on it. The way to think about my fund is, if you had a $100 million seed fund, what percentage of that fund goes into the seed round? If you’re following on three to one or four to one, you’re really talking about, at most, 20% of the fund and the rest of it was dollars when you double down on your winners. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Media buying has been the most obvious areas which needed to be automated because of the trends that you described. Machine learning applies very well into that space. Can you talk about other areas in marketing technology, where, powered by machine learning, there is venture-scale opportunity?

Ashu Garg: I’m going to talk about very broad themes. The beauty of entrepreneurship is, startups always prove investors wrong. I’m sure that there are folks in this audience who will have ideas that we haven’t even thought of. With that caveat, I published a book called The Decade of The CMO last year. We talked about five major technology trends within marketing technology and five buckets of areas where I think mostly billion-dollar companies will emerge. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream? Some of the funds that I’m sure you were involved in your previous life are becoming gigantic funds. As a result, they have to move upstream and deploy larger chunks of capital right away. How does a seed investor mitigate the Series A gap?

Charlie O’Donnell: For every fund that you’ve seen move up, you have some set of funds that fills in that space. The capital environment is pretty efficient. We certainly have Series A funds that insist on deploying $8 million to $20 million. It’s very hard to get a seed-funded company from their initial check to a position where they can take on a $10 million investment. >>>

5 Investor Podcasts Discuss A Wide Variety Of Startup Interests

There are currently about 500 funds spanning pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-Series A and startup investing is constantly evolving. Entrepreneurs with an eye on financing need to keep up with the trends and special interests of VCs, Angels and seed investors. Have a listen to my recent 30-minute podcast interviews with five investors who have a wide range of interests, from AI concepts to women entrepreneurs, from Indian startups to non-Unicorn ventures. Perhaps your startup fits within one of their areas of interest?

Ankit Jain is Founding Partner at Gradient Ventures, Google’s new AI venture fund, which will invest in and connect early stage startups with Google’s resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I was talking to John Staenberg up in Seattle. He’s one of the most prolific investors in the North West. He’s invested in 300 companies. One of the drivers of how he chooses which entrepreneurs he wants to engage with is what he wants to learn about.

For example, he’s not very knowledgeable about Bitcoin and he is interested in learning about Bitcoin. He’s interested in entrepreneurs who are working on new opportunities in Bitcoin as a mechanism of understanding that trend.

Yes, investors do look to entrepreneurs to educate them and train them, which is what was driving my question

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence 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 Brian Jacobs, Emergence Capital was recorded in October 2014. 

Brian Jacobs is General Partner, Emergence Capital, SaaS/Cloud domain experts boasting a fabulous portfolio, including solid exits like SuccessFactors, Yammer, and Veeva. He discusses his views on where cloud opportunities are likely to be at this point. While we’re in a mature market, he is still bullish on innovation.

Sramana Mitra: Silicon Valley seems like an incredibly arrogant place. Silicon Valley was actually afraid when the dot-com bubble had burst. You can actually feel the fear in the air. Against that backdrop, Emergence 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashu Garg of Foundation 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 Ashu Garg, Foundation Capital was recorded in March 2016. 

Ashu Garg, General Partner at Foundation Capital, outlines the top trends driving startups and venture capital from his firm’s perspective.

Sramana Mitra: What is your read of how the venture capital industry has evolved in the Silicon Valley over the last five years? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge 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 Charlie O’Donnell, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures was recorded in November 2017. 

Charlie O’Donnell, Partner at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, talks about his Seed investing activities and related industry trends.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by getting acquainted. Tell us about Brooklyn Bridge Ventures as well as yourself.

Charlie O’Donnell: Brooklyn Bridge Ventures is a seed fund based in Brooklyn, New York. It’s the first fund to be located in Brooklyn. I’ve spent the vast majority of my career in the venture capital asset class, which is actually pretty rare. Usually people >>>