Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Paul Bragiel, Managing Partner, i/o Ventures, San Francisco, California (Part 3)

By guest author Irina Patterson and Mridula Velagapudi

Irina: What are your relationships with mentors? Do they get any stake in those companies or do they just want to help?

Paul: They just want to help. One, it is exciting for them. Two, it gives them lots of visibility and, yes, it is really useful to the companies.

Irina: What are your metrics of success?

Paul: The first one is, do all companies go out and either get covered by financing to kind of reach their goal or not? After that, we look to see how they track as a company. For us, if we see an exit in five years, it is pretty far out, we will be successful or we won’t be, but we will know it.

Irina: What is your own business model?

Paul: We invest $25,000, usually for 8% of the company, and we become shareholders when the company is going forward. That is pretty much our model, and we hope that it works out. So far, we have had a few exits and we have been actually paid off quite a few times already. So, things are going really well so far.

We are an accelerator first and foremost. The money that my partner investors and I deploy via fund vehicle is our own personal money. The fund is an evergreen fund. We are four partners and we put money in it as we need it because it is personal money, which is generally limited.

Irina: Thanks, Paul. I enjoyed learning about i/o Ventures.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Paul Bragiel, Managing Partner, i/o Ventures, San Francisco, California
1 2 3