1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: One of the areas that I am watching closely is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). I don’t know if you read some of my writing but I have been writing about this for about a year or more. I have had lots of conversations with lots of companies that are either already doing PaaS strategy or trying to PaaS strategy.

This is the classic Salesforce model where they started with a SaaS CRM application and then opened up their platform for developers to build applications around which led to the creation of the app exchange marketplace to sell through. This is a model that is being replicated by several players. Atlassian has done a nice job of it.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? Are you only doing Silicon Valley?

Cindy Padnos: No, we always had a broader view in that as well. We’ve had companies in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Canada, and Southern California. We have always had a broader view. My partner, Jennifer is in Seattle. We look deeply into the Pacific NorthWest as well.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s all North America?

528th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Alok Nandan, First Rays Venture Partners

Alok Nandan, Founding General Partner, First Rays Venture Partners, discusses the firm’s investment thesis which is very well defined and focused.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Cindy Padnos: I don’t know if you know Neha Sampat, but she has a company called Contentstack. It is in the digital experience management space. We led her seed round of financing that enabled them to go from $1 million in ARR to over $4 million in less than a year. This was done with just a $2 million financing. This was rather extraordinary. Insight Partners then led a $30 million series in the company about a year later. She and her team had bootstrapped by having an IT services business.

527th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Michael Smerklo, Next Coast Ventures

Michael Smerklo is Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures. We have a terrific conversation about a range of issues including solo founders and their ill treatment by VCs.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Were they Americans? What ethnicity were they to move to South Korea?

Cindy Padnos: No, one of the founders is Chinese. The other is Indian. They were both born in their respective countries, but they were educated here in the US. They helped to build several companies here. The CEO had actually been the VP of Engineering of the company that I founded, which was an early SaaS software company.

528th Roundtable Recording on April 29, 2021: With Alok Nandan, First Rays Venture Partners

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures, discusses the impact of Covid on the fund’s portfolio, as well as the trends she sees. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by welcoming back Cindy Padnos to our show. She is the founder and director of Illuminate Ventures and one of the active female investors in the Silicon Valley Movement. We have a lot more female investors, but she is one of the earlier ones. We had her here before and she has been doing a lot of work in this area for a long time.