Learning From Failures: IMVU Founder Will Harvey (Part 5)

SM: Who were your investors at There.com?

WH: The first couple of rounds were angel rounds. The first official investors were Black Diamond Capital Partners, which is a small private institutional fund. Sutter Hill Venture Partners was the first major VC. >>>

Roundtable Recap: August 5 – Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation

This week’s roundtable had some very interesting businesses. Three out of the five that presented are going to be featured on the 1M/1M Incubation Radar shortly, and a fourth will be featured on Deal Radar. Here’s a brief recap, before we do the comprehensive profiles on them.

First up was Avinash Gavande for Hospitality Star, an eLearning SaaS vendor for the Hospitality industry. Avinash has several customers in the mid-market in India and South East Asia. They’re doing about $200k in revenue, and presented a plan to do a comprehensive SaaS solution for the Hospitality industry including ERP and Procurement. The company’s entire client-base, however, is in eLearning, an industry-pain that is recognized and acknowledged by customers. Most importantly, the revenues are coming entirely from that business. My read on this company is that they should stay focused on eLearning for Hospitality as a core focus, and skip ERP and Procurement for now. For small companies, focus is critical. No need to waste precious resources – engineering, marketing or sales – in building ERP and Procurement solutions at this stage.
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August 5 Roundtable Recording

In case you missed it, here is the recording:

The chat transcript is here.

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Roundtable Starting In 30 Minutes

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Learning From Failures: IMVU Founder Will Harvey (Part 4)

SM: What happened after you realized the second round of financing was not going to be available for Sandcastle?

WH: I then made a decision to have the company acquired instead of pressing forward. At that point it was viable. Fortunately, I made that decision before we ran out of money. We still had enough money in the bank to execute a strategy to get the company acquired. >>>

Learning From Failures: IMVU Founder Will Harvey (Part 3)

SM: In 1996, the Internet was in full swing. What was your next step?

WH: I started a company called Sandcastle, which sought to solve the problem of making highly responsive games run over the Internet. When the Internet was starting to become popular for consumer entertainment, video game programmers were adapting games for local area networks (LANs). >>>

Vision India 2020 Book Review: The Ideas Are So Tempting

Suresh Sambandam is the founder and CEO of OrangeScape.  Here is his review of Vision India 2020 by Sramana Mitra:

“First, it was a pleasant surprise to have Vision India 2020 autographed by Sramana Mitra when I met her in person at her beautiful house in Silicon Valley. Subjects on India are always close to my heart, and on top of that, this is a book about entrepreneurship! The dream of possible companies that can potentially change the face of the country and have us in style by 2020 is fabulous. Some of the ideas are so tempting that you want to go after them yourself. Some deserve to be included as good examples for the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. First fiction book on entrepreneurship I have ever read. Great book!”

Vision India 2020 by Sramana Mitra is available from Amazon.com and from Flipkart in India.