1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vivek Ladsariya of SineWave Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? Do you invest all over the United States or just in the two locations where you are located?

Vivek Ladsariya: We have companies across the US. We are also looking for companies outside the US. We have looked at companies coming out of Israel and Latin America.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a few companies from your portfolio and double-click down to understand what you’ve invested in. How do you decide what to invest in? Give us a few examples. Take us through the process of understanding of how you’ve decided to invest in those companies.

Vivek Ladsariya: I’ll start a little bit on the second part of that question. There are two components to it. We like to call ourselves a thesis-driven fund. We have a worldview around certain technologies and industries. We come at companies from that position. We tend to look at companies where we believe that the problem is a real problem and the solution that the company is offering actually solve that problem.

Diving down, we recently invested in a company called Jump Bikers where one would have argued that urban mobility was a solved problem. We didn’t see it as such. We think there’s still a lot to be done there. Uber and Lyft have captured all of that market and solved most of the issues there, but I think there is still some work to be done for small distances in high-density urban areas. There’s a lot of noise in that segment. We are seeing a flurry of scooters and bikes getting in that space.

What we look for is a team that really understands the problem in the industry. Jump Bikes had that team. Ryan, who’s the CEO of the company, was an urban planner in New York for a while. The entire team also understood the challenge. When we spoke with them, we thought that that was the team that was going to carry this problem through and really develop a solution that works for all stakeholders.

A key stakeholder that inexperienced entrepreneurs tend to ignore are cities. Part of the reason why Jump was successful is they work very well with cities. They know how to develop that relationship and try to address problems.

Sramana Mitra: When they came to you, what was in the company? What did you see in the company that were already proof points besides the fact that the guy understood the industry?

Vivek Ladsariya: When we invested in the company, the company hadn’t completed its launch of its new product. It was still Social Bicycles at that time. They had operated that business in several locations. They were in several dozen countries around the world. They were primarily working with governments.

The business model then was getting space from governments and deploying bikes so that people in the city could use it. The idea behind launching Jump Bikes was they had developed this new product which was an electric pedal-assisted bike. That was a far more convenient solution. This team had experienced and proven that they know how to deploy and operate bikes across cities. They know how to work with city governments.

Sramana Mitra: They were going to sell these newly-designed proprietary bikes to cities and manage the process of renting out bikes to the citizens.

Vivek Ladsariya: That played out in San Francisco. When we invested in them, they still did not have the exclusive license to operate in the city of San Francisco. They got a distribution agreement with Uber to distribute. It’s been in the press lately that they’ve been acquired by Uber. It was a very well-defined thesis for us going into that investment. A lot of that played out in a very short time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vivek Ladsariya of SineWave Ventures
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