1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The motivation for the infrastructure layer, whether it’s storage, security, or networking, is not very different. Timeline-wise, it’s behind. Let’s play out the argument with me for a second.

For an application layer SaaS company that has achieved $200 million ARR by selling one product, there are a lot of companies in the $100 ARR range with one product. They do not have to move out of that one product and broaden the portfolio to be a successful public company that goes to $1 billion in revenue.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the second company? What sector was it in?

Vishesh Rajaram: I’m not going to name the second one too much. This is a company that was developing tools to enable developing 3D and VR content for e-commerce. They were acquired by a large retail e-commerce group. 

Sramana Mitra: Also in India?

Roundtable Recap: January 28 – Cool Trends, Exciting Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-founder at Sorenson Ventures, talking about trends and investment thesis.

Biogreen Biotech
As for entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Mohammed Sadiq from Bangalore, India, pitching Biogreen Biotech, a company that is already generating serious revenue and wants to scale. Very interesting company!

Deepiotics
Next, Seshu Kanuri from Apex, North Carolina, pitched Deepiotics, an AI-based medical diagnostics company that is starting to see customer engagement. Exciting field, exciting company!

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I would say that the platform and the service world right now is under the assumption that most of the infrastructure layers and innovations are already in there.

Domain knowledge for a particular functional layer is where the innovation is happening whether it’s Shopify for eCommerce, Atlassian in the enterprise collaboration space, or Twilio in the communication path space. That’s where this class of companies is operating.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (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 Vishesh Rajaram was recorded in November 2020.

Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner, Speciale Invest, discusses his fund’s investment thesis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you look at teams for something like this? Is it somebody coming out of a domain with deep insights into solving the problem where they haven’t written the product, but they have enough domain knowledge to signal to you and the investors that they know what they are talking about?

Ashmeet Sidana: Since I invest so early, they almost have never written a product. They may have some samples of prototypes, but it’s rare because I am so early. In terms of the selection of the team, they need to have some form of technical insight or domain knowledge to take on a challenge like this. This is in addition to the usual characteristic of a great entrepreneur.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 1)

Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital, is the founder of a small venture firm that we have a great deal of respect for, and a personal friend. This is a wonderful conversation.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Keith Bank, Founder CEO at KB Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to do another case study?

Keith Bank: Another one is called Hammerhead Technology based in New York City. I made a small angel investment in this individual several years ago. His name is Pete Morgan. He’s an avid cyclist and had an idea that there was a way to create a better bike computer.