1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Padmaja Ruparel of Indian Angel Network (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit about geography as it pertains to IT and IT-enabled services. That includes healthcare IT. Our audiences are focused on IT-enabled services. One core algorithm that we have picked up from the way Indian investors are operating by working with them is that they like all the SaaS, cloud, AI, and all of these companies to be facing the US market or the global market.

When it comes to those kinds of ventures, they prefer that these companies do not sell into the Indian B2B market. They want the B2B SaaS to be sold to the global market. Of course, there is the consumer B2C products that are India-facing that people are still interested in. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sunil Bhargava of Tandem Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The numbers that you quoted like $1 million to $2 million investment in a $5 million round, from the universe that we operate in, people are not ready to raise a $5 million round before a Series A usually. That’s what I find a bit confusing in how you position yourself as a fund.

Sunil Bhargava: $5 million is at the top end. We’ve invested in a company that ended up getting into YC. They raised $3 million when we put in some money. Now, they’re going to raise a $6 million round. The key thing is they didn’t have an operational system in place. They built some stuff. They got some prototype done, but they didn’t have a clear path to scale. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Mason of Aligned Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you do that capital efficiently and exit into a large company with the channel that has all those different verticals that they can access, you could conceivably broaden that portfolio and the acquiring company then gets a lot of leverage out of that platform.

Susan Mason: Indeed. What we’ve seen is that the companies that get acquired tend to be very successful acquisitions. You don’t see these big acquisitions that, invariably, fail within large corporations. Our companies get acquired typically between $80 million to $100 million in less than six years. The revenue run rate at that kind of sweet spot position is sub-$10 million. It is a textbook strategy and we run that on every one of our companies. >>>

215th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Mark Hasebroock, Dundee Venture Capital

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

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Padmaja Ruparel of Indian Angel Network (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 Padmaja Ruparel was recorded in December 2017. 

Padmaja Ruparel is Co-founder, Indian Angel Network (IAN), and Founding Partner, IAN Fund. She has been a key player in shaping India’s still somewhat nascent startup eco-system. Those interested in Indian startups and the funding trends should read on.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Indian Angel Network and the journey you’ve had building it. What is going on there now? What is working? What is not working? What have you learned through this process? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sunil Bhargava of Tandem Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The question is more about trends. In the companies that you’ve seen, what are people working on that are interesting?

Sunil Bhargava: It’s extremely broad. We have companies in the construction space. We have companies in the food space. We have companies in the transportation space. Now you hear a lot about Blockchain. I think it’s a very wide spectrum. The best way to get a better sense of the breadth of the companies is to go and look at the variety of different types of problems that are being addressed by a single YC class. You look at that. There are a hundred companies in there. There are B2B and B2C. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Mason of Aligned Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Very much in alignment with the philosophy we practice here is capital-efficient entrepreneurship. We encourage our entrepreneurs to bootstrap as much as possible and do things with not too much money such that you end up with not very much in wealth creation. You raise a lot of money and perhaps build to a certain amount of scale but don’t really get exits to justify that level of fundraising, which happens rampantly in the industry.

>>>

213th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Alan Chiu, XSeed

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.

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