8 Investors Discuss Velocity and Financing within the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Almost all investors are looking for startups with velocity, ventures that increasingly solve real pains in repeatable ways. If you can achieve velocity, then investors will chase you, because they know it’s not so easy to find companies that hit their stride velocity-wise. Be mindful that the best way for your startup to get to velocity may be by bootstrapping. Entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues, and profits. Financing and exit are optional. There are many examples of companies that would have succeeded as bootstrapped companies, but went out of business because they went after financing. To learn about the various levels of velocity investors are looking for in the startups they finance, please read the following interviews with a wide variety of VCs and seed investors.

Mark Achler, Managing Director, MATH Venture Partners, discusses their investment strategy and the industry trends.

Ho Nam, Managing Director at Altos Ventures, makes a clear distinction between capital efficient company building and the “grow at costs in all sorts of unsustainable ways” philosophy. These are two distinctly different ways of building businesses.

Jason Lemkin, prior to becoming a VC, was the CEO of EchoSign, a digital signature SaaS vendor that Adobe acquired some years back. This was an excellent discussion and offers very concrete pointers to where you might look for white spaces in the cloud computing space to do new ventures.

Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures, discusses pre-seed and seed investing.

Eric Benhamou, Managing Partner of Benhamou Global Ventures, was the CEO of 3Com, a pioneer in the networking space, and the key competitor to Cisco. He also ran Palm, the first Smartphone maker, that 3Com acquired, then spun out, and took it public. He provides an insightful window into the opportunities in the enterprise cloud infrastructure space, and in Cyber Security, and also explains why he is not necessarily looking for Unicorn companies to invest in. This, I might point out, is a highly unusual perspective in today’s VC universe, so you may want to pay attention to his analysis of the market.

Jonathan Lewy, Managing Partner at Investo, discusses pre-seed investment strategies and the Series A gap.

Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses their investment thesis around e-commerce over the years – from BlueNile in 1999, to Zulily, Dot, and Bo, and Callisto Media more recently, and what he anticipates for the future.

Julien Nguyen is General Partner at IT Farm, a seed-stage fund focused on Digital Health. We explore trends in the industry, as well as what IT Farm’s sixth fund likes to invest in.