6 Investors Discuss their Portfolios via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Entrepreneurs can learn a lot about investors from their process of evaluating the funding-worthiness of startups. Within the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum, I have asked investors to talk a bit about their own investment portfolios. What have you invested in and why? When did the entrepreneur come to you? At what stage and with what metrics? What convinced you to invest? In the following interviews, each investor shares the kinds of businesses in their portfolios and explains why they were drawn to those companies.

Susan Mason, General Partner at Aligned Ventures, talks about the dysfunctions of the broader venture capital model, and what her firm is doing to address those. Excellent conversation.

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The India e-commerce market is an active market, but it still operates on this cash-on-delivery mode. Are there indications that this is going to change and people will feel more comfortable with providing credit cards on the internet? That’s going to accelerate the trends.

Sasha Mirchandani: It has to change. It’s a mindset change more than anything else. It’s hard to scale without credit cards. You can’t have cash-on-delivery going on forever. Credit card is going to chip away at COD over the next couple of years. It’s something that we’re going to live with for longer than I would have liked. It’s inevitable. It has to happen. >>>

389th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Rob Schultz, Serra Ventures

Rob Schultz, Managing Partner at Serra Ventures, discusses catering to startups in under-served geographies. His point of view aligns with what we’ve heard from some other investors.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | RSS

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 3)

Nathan Lustig: Another company that fits that model is a company called GroupRaise, which went through Startup Chile. They’re originally from Houston. They now have an office with eight people in Houston, about 15 people in Santiago, and about 40 in the Philippines. What they do is they allow anybody to book an event at a restaurant. Anybody knows how to book one to eight people restaurant reservation. You can go to OpenTable or something similar.

What if you want to have a group of 20 or 100? They have 10,000 or so restaurants in the United States where you can book a big group event. The cool part is the restaurant actually competes over your business by donating 5% to 20% of the bill to the group >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: One thing you haven’t mentioned about this company is the business model and the monetization. What validation did you have that these 500,000 downloads were actually converting into paying customers?

Sandeep Singhal: Good point. They had a $10 charge for deploying their client for curl. It was a command line interface that you could commit into Postman. They were charging for that. More importantly, we spoke to some of the users who were at enterprises.

One of them happened to be our portfolio company and we asked the VP Engineering of our portfolio company how much they >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Which companies would you call out as some of the best companies in the Indian tech industry today and the most likely ones to have successful exits?

Sasha Mirchandani: Let me break that into two answers. I’ll talk about companies that I like in no particular order. I can think of Tracto. We have a company called One MG in our portfolio, which we think is going to do very well. There’s a company called Zomato.

Sramana Mitra: Zomato’s business model is a big problem. That business model is not doing well globally. >>>

211th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Yipeng Zhao, Embark Ventures

Yipeng Zhao, Managing Partner at Embark Ventures, talks about the firm’s investment thesis, as well as broader industry trends and what should and should not be funded.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | RSS

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 2)

Nathan Lustig: I got a call from one of the founding members of the founding team of Startup Chile who said that there was a family office that was looking to diversify and get into tech. I met up with my now partner Francisco Saenz whose family had done well.

They were the co-founders of one of the biggest mall companies in Latin America. They did a bunch of traditional things like retail and banking. They were ready to get into this next wave of technology that was just getting started in Latin America. They also wanted to give back to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

In 2014, we founded Magma Partners, which was $2 million of our own money that we invested across 32 companies. The >>>