Sramana Mitra: When something fits your investment thesis, what do you want to see in the company when you’re doing a seed investment? What is the earliest stage check that you’re comfortable writing and what do you want to see? Do you want to see paying customers or a certain MRR?
Yanev Suissa: A lot of these firms have, what I would call, nonsensical rules. Some of that is indicative of how a startup is performing, but I don’t think it should be a barrier. Our seed deals are not pure tech risk in that a product is already developed. It may not have all the features and it may not be in scale, but it’s deployed in some way so you can test it and play with it.
>>>Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures, discusses his firm’s successes as well as its investment thesis. Vertical Cloud is one of the key ones with an emphasis on Enterprise Data Platforms.
Sramana Mitra: You have big news. Let’s catch up.
Yanev Suissa: We did big closings on our third fund. Our performance has been top 5 percentile in the industry. We’ve been doing a great job. Things have been chugging along at SineWave.
>>>Anirudh Damani is Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund. We have a terrific discussion on the Indian Startup Ecosystem and its trends.
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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Anirudh Damani, Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund. We had a terrific discussion on the Indian Startup Ecosystem and its trends.
Wast-e-collecter
As for our entrepreneur pitch, we had Puneet Agarwal from Jaipur, India, pitch Wast-e-collector, a concept stage venture.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Dheeraj Pandey, founder of Nutanix and DevRev. The conversation spans a variety of topics and has some brilliant insights into the gaps in the tech industry.
Sramana Mitra: We’re going to continue the conversation we’ve had where we talked about his background as a founder of a successful high-growth company. We’re going to talk about investment today. Let’s start by however you want to introduce yourself and your companies.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in SaaS companies finding growth strategies? What are the primary customer acquisition channels that are producing really well?
Tea Hea Nahm: Whether you’re using product-led, outbound, or inbound, we just want to have one that we feel is really going to work for them.
Sramana Mitra: Are you seeing any of them coming up repeatedly? At one point, Google search was a big one. Now Google search has become very expensive. I’m hearing less of the Google search growth. I do hear a lot of inbound content marketing and capturing organic traffic.
>>>Sramana Mitra: How do you read the open source trend? The commercial open source trend has also been going gangbusters. A lot of interesting companies have come up with that trend. What are you seeing in your deal flow?
Tea Hea Nahm: Open source is great. You’ve got Databricks and others. Customers like open source. You want to go with what customers like. The challenge is, if it’s open source, how do you compete with your competitors especially if a big platform decides to adopt the open source? That’s what we look at. We like open source as long as we believe that the company could still have a differentiated position that will generate meaningful business for them.
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