1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You can play this with a very specific domain focus with a specific set of corporate around you. In some cases, these corporates are investing in these little micro-funds that play this game. It is a little side of the industry that is developing. There are these little niches which are not venture-scale niches. They’re not going to be venture-fundable. You can only play these if you work with little bits of seed money and then, pretty much, go straight to acquisition and not go out to raise a venture round.

Venktesh Shukla: Absolutely. It is to critical to understand not only the niche and the technical chops but also the relationship in that target ecosystem. Do you have a member in your team that has that visibility and relationship with the key players in the industry? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll provide a bit of commentary for the audience on some of the things that you mentioned as trends. We’ve also seen this unstructured data problem being solved. For a couple of decades, there have been major companies that have been formulated on this unstructured data problem. Autonomy was one of them that went very big.

Today, one of the trends that we’re seeing is this whole unstructured data problem being solved for specific verticals or specific functional areas and solutions built on top of that unstructured data problem in a cloud-

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla of TiE Angels (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 Venktesh Shukla was recorded in September 2017.

Venktesh Shukla, founder of TiE Angels and General Partner Monta Vista Capital, discusses some shifts happening in the world of seed investing.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about TiE Angels and how you work with investors and entrepreneurs.

Venktesh Shukla: TiE Angels is a 7-year-old organization that is a collection of individual investors who, in general, tend to focus on B2B companies. The whole idea is that the collective wisdom of the group helps make better decisions, >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Victoria Pettibone of Astia Angels (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In some cases if you can exit your company without needing a Series A, that is not a bad way to mitigate the Series A gap.

Victoria Pettibone: Yes. Your angels are going to be happy for the most part. Even though it’s a short turnaround time, they will not have been diluted.

Sramana Mitra: So far, we’ve been talking about companies that operate in a more capital efficient mode. The other side of the coin is this unicorn mania, where there’s so much capital flowing into companies. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Victoria Pettibone of Astia Angels (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what you have invested in in your current portfolio. Maybe even exits. You talked about a couple of exits this year. One of them was an IT company.

Victoria Pettibone: The two exits are both public. One was Ciel Medical which exited to Vyaire Medical. The other was Cloudamize, which exited to a Blackstone portfolio company. Both were very good exits. They are not disclosing numbers on either of them, but our investors were happy. Both of those exits happened within two years of our investors investing in them.

Sramana Mitra: They didn’t have venture money in the company. They were pure angel-funded companies that straight away exited? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Victoria Pettibone of Astia Angels (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s discuss stage. The early stage investment has become quite complex. It used to be seed and Series A. Now it’s pre-seed, seed, post-seed, and pre-Series A.

Victoria Pettibone: It’s true. There are no rules anymore. Like everything we do, we invest at every stage. However, most of the investments end up at late seed or Series A – certainly past the friends and family round. We do convertible notes. It could be that first round before the first equity raise.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics are you looking for? Are you looking for revenues? Are you looking for customer validation but not necessarily revenue? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Victoria Pettibone of Astia Angels (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 Victoria Pettibone was recorded in October 2017. Victoria Pettibone, Managing Director of Astia Angels, a group focused on funding women entrepreneurs. She discusses what they like to invest in, as well as the trends she sees in the deal flow and the portfolio.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Astia Angels. What are you doing? What is the focus of the group? What size investments are you making?

Victoria Pettibone: Astia is an organization >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa of SineWave Ventures (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: This is your first fund, right?

Yanev Suissa: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Have you had any exits yet?

Yanev Suissa: No, we’ve been investing for about a year.

Sramana Mitra: Next question is about unicorn mania. How does a seed investor protect themselves in the event that there is huge amount of capital being raised? You said that you follow through in your investments, but how far can you go with that given that the trend right now is raising huge amounts of money. >>>