1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deb Kemper of Golden Seeds (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the earliest stage at which they would go in? Would people go in with no product and just a concept?

Deb Kemper: People would go in before validated product market fit. It’s between the concept and having that. At least a beta. We rarely go in on an alpha stage. We like to see people figuring out a way to do that initial build out. We’d come in at the beta where there’s clear testing you’re trying to do.

There’s clear stage-gating of what’s going to happen and things that will be learned from that. It’s also very different. We’re sector-agnostic. Since we’re focused on the gender diversity question, we try not to limit too much on the technology and sectors that we look at. A big difference is, we might see some life sciences companies that are very far from revenue. It’s always hard to give a very definitive answer.

Sramana Mitra: For this conversation, let’s limit the discussion to technology and technology-enabled services only. We don’t do biotech. We don’t do pharma. We don’t do life sciences. You can answer all my questions with just the IT and IT-enabled services hat on. Within IT, are you doing both B2B and B2C? Are both of those okay?

Deb Kemper: The majority of our investments are B2B. If we do B2C, it’s what I would call B2B2C. Your ultimate end user is an individual but the channel to them is businesses where you’re selling into employee benefit programs, for example.

Sramana Mitra: What about geography?

Deb Kemper: Golden Seeds invests nationally. We only invest in US-based companies. We have hubs in six cities – Boston, New York, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Silicon Valley. We will look at deals from across the US. We funnel those to whatever group is closest. There is a regional bend to angel investing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about a few of your portfolio companies. Just pick one from the IT and IT-enabled services sectors. What are some of the highlights? What was the thinking behind choosing to invest in those companies? How does the angel group and micro-VC play into a deal?

Deb Kemper: A company in our portfolio is called Groupize. This is company that has been around for four or five years. We wrote the term sheets. We have someone who’s on the Board. They are a SaaS platform that is helping travel planners book small meetings. These are meetings of less than 20 people where normally you don’t have a formal event planner, but you need some technology integration to make this happen smoothly.

What made it attractive is, it was founders who knew the market. They came out of the travel industry. They started building the technology that was needed. We were able to build a team around them to do that technology build out. What kept us going over time is that they’ve really started building their reputation in the market and we’re seeing large industry players starting to stand up and notice.

They’re growing the revenue. It’s been great to watch how they’ve had to do some pivots and tailor their product over time. The market is catching up to the vision that they have. That’s one example.

Another example is a company called Constant Therapy which is in the healthcare space. It’s for stroke patients to help them do therapy at home and continue their speech therapy at home. One of the founders is an expert in this area out of Boston University and founded this company.

My portfolio is still young. It’s one of the exits I have. They were acquired within 18 months of our investment by a bigger player. There’s a thread between those. It’s people who really see a need in the market and are building the technology for folks to then say, “They’ve got a real customer base. We can acquire them and bring them in.”

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deb Kemper of Golden Seeds
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