1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There are a lot of SaaS platforms that are entrenched in enterprise workflow and they have a lot of customers. The one that you are talking about is going after customers that are deeply entrenched in Zoom for example.

To what extent is a company like this leveraging that deep penetration of another platform? How close is the partnership with Zoom for example? 

Vishesh Rajaram: A lot of these companies are built on top of the distribution of some of these companies in terms of integration and on top of the marketplaces. Companies like Zoom and other companies are fairly open. In some cases, the API access allows you to pick and leverage the pipeline of data that is provided. 

Sramana Mitra: Are you seeing the benefits of marketplaces? 

Vishesh Rajaram: Absolutely. In most of our SaaS companies, we see big benefits of being on top of marketplaces that have a distribution base and have API plugins that allow you to integrate and expand fairly quickly. 

Sramana Mitra: Which marketplaces are easing the most effectively?

Vishesh Rajaram: We have another company called True Lark that is a conversational AI company in the wellness industry. Mindbody is a software company that is in the wellness place and has market access and a customer base that is looking for other apps. 

Sramana Mitra: The one that you were talking about, which marketplace is that getting benefit from?

Vishesh Rajaram: They are not necessarily a marketplace. They are immigrating into a bunch of different CRMs.

Sramana Mitra: They are not getting marketplace effects yet? That was what I was pointing to. The platforms need to be more accessible to these marketplaces. They are not quite there yet. There are more API’s to integrate than marketplaces at the moment.

There aren’t a lot of API’s and there are individual API companies like Neilsoft and Snaplogic which you can integrate through. What is lacking is open marketplaces. Salesforce’s AppExchange has built a lot of companies in their pipeline.

There are some companies like Atlassian that have a nice marketplace that allows companies to write on top of their marketplace. This is where you can get an impact on the distribution. Shopify has it but not as many yet.

I was checking to see if you are seeing something different than what I was seeing. Are there any companies in your portfolio or any other trends in your work that you would like to discuss?

Vishesh Rajaram: On the hardware side, we have a robotics company. They are building vision and brain intelligence on top of robotic arms to behave more like human hands. That is an exciting space. We have a few companies in the US that are building similar tech. We are very excited about the future for them.

Sramana Mitra: What do you do when you get a company like that? In the early days, those kinds of companies take time to build their products. When do you come in? What are you looking for before you come in?

Vishesh Rajaram: The first thing that you do is you pick up the phone and call customers in your network to try to ask them if they need a solution like this. You want to know the ROI for someone in that vertical and in that category to build such a product.

You then find a few customers that you want to evangelize. You build your initial customers and start building prototypes that solve a problem. You can’t go and build solutions unless you know what customers want. 

Sramana Mitra: You are not expecting that to happen before you come in?

Vishesh Rajaram: We validate the market, but we don’t expect companies to have products and customers before we come in. We come in very early. 

Sramana Mitra: A lot of seed funds want to see revenue already. There is a large number of seed funds that already want to see revenue. That is why we ask what your definition of seed is.

Vishesh Rajaram: Revenue is a bonus, but we are looking for smart entrepreneurs who are building products that are not easy to build.  

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest
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