1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In some cases, the newsroom analogy is probably not the right analogy. Think about a toothbrush brand. That’s now news-oriented. If you think about how to do content marketing for those kinds of brands, it’s a very difficult problem.

Ashu Garg: In the newsroom analogy, I’m using the word very loosely. It’s the idea that you have to have a focused team thinking about content creation in the context of what users want. Take a toothpaste brand. Talking about your toothpaste, the color and the flavor is probably not that interesting for the audience.

Maybe stories about how the brand is engaging with changing the lives of poor people in third world countries would be interesting. I >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Media buying has been the most obvious areas which needed to be automated because of the trends that you described. Machine learning applies very well into that space. Can you talk about other areas in marketing technology, where, powered by machine learning, there is venture-scale opportunity?

Ashu Garg: I’m going to talk about very broad themes. The beauty of entrepreneurship is, startups always prove investors wrong. I’m sure that there are folks in this audience who will have ideas that we haven’t even thought of. With that caveat, I published a book called The Decade of The CMO last year. We talked about five major technology trends within marketing technology and five buckets of areas where I think mostly billion-dollar companies will emerge. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You spoke with me a year back about marketing technologies. It was a core area of interest at least a year ago. Help us understand what drives that interest.

Ashu Garg: That is absolutely a core area of interest for us. I would say it is one of the trends in the broad bucket of the transformation of software using machine learning. Marketing technology is probably, by far, the first category where that happened. We definitely made significant investments and have big bets on that. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital (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 Ashu Garg, Foundation Capital was recorded in March 2016. 

Ashu Garg, General Partner at Foundation Capital, outlines the top trends driving startups and venture capital from his firm’s perspective.

Sramana Mitra: What is your read of how the venture capital industry has evolved in the Silicon Valley over the last five years? >>>

What Happens After the Unicorn Carnage

Predictably, the technology industry is going through an adjustment. Many public stocks in hot sectors like cloud computing have crashed. Overvalued Unicorns are experiencing down rounds, layoffs, and all the other unsavory stuff that they deserve. More Unicorns will turn into Unicorpses as the correction continues. You could say that the industry is in bad shape.

I disagree.

The industry, actually, is full of wonderful companies that offer robust value propositions and excellent business models.

It is the market and the speculators — including the VCs who invested in the Unicorns at crazy valuations — who ran amok.
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From Unicorn to Unicorpse: Etsy Falters on Amazon’s Entry

Etsy (Nasdaq: ETSY) went public earlier this year, a much awaited IPO at an $1.8 billion valuation. But since listing, serious issues with the company have resulted in a tumbling valuation under public market scrutiny. At its current stock price, Etsy is still appearing above the billion dollar mark, but barely so. And its trajectory indicates that Etsy is on its way from being a prized Unicorn to a faltering Unicorpse.

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