1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at March Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are you saying that you are willing to write a $5 million check on a concept if those criteria are there?

Sumant Mandal: Yes. 

Sramana Mitra: That is unusual these days, because people want the pre-seed and the seed guys to finance the company to significant traction before they are willing to write $5 million to $10 million checks. 

Sumant Mandal: That is very much the norm. It’s not to say that we don’t do that or look for that. If we know someone well and we have worked with them before and we think that they can build something worth billions of dollars, we are not afraid to do it by ourselves and write something right away. I am not saying that it will always work.

Sramana Mitra: If it is a first-time founder, then you want to see traction and validation before you write a check. You know TM Ravi well. That is what the Hive was created for. As you know, I helped Ravi start the Hive as a co-founder ten years or so ago. That is the kind of venture incubator/accelerator you look for as a first-time founder to get some help and get some traction before we look at it from the March side. We work at scale with first-time founders so that it is much the way that we operate.

I want to probe something that you said about the scarcity of talents and the whole game being about creating a team in a competitive market. The sheer volume of startups all around the world is way larger now than it ever used to be.

Talk to me a little about what your feeling is about virtual companies and remote teams. What is happening today is people are coming up with unique and interesting ways of locating and leveraging talents in different parts of the world. With COVID, all this has accelerated hugely. How do you view all of that?

Sumant Mandal: For sure, the aperture through which you look for hiring has become much larger. Geographic considerations are less important than the availability of talent. We have a company in our portfolio that went public 18 months ago called CrowdStrike. It is cyber security company that did really well.

That company is now nine years old, but when it went public it was seven years old. From inception to going public, it took seven years. This is extraordinary during these times. Part of the reason was the founders focused on building the company using collaboration technologies like smart sheep and video conferencing.

They built the company without trying to focus on one or two campuses. If they hired someone in the Midwest, East Coast, or in Eastern Europe, they just tried to find the best talent and use new technologies as the framework through which the company was built ground up. That works. If you try and have a company that has been built the old-fashioned way and you try to add on this geographic collaboration, it’s very difficult.

I’ll give you a simple example. I’m on multiple boards and all my board meetings are done using video conferencing or something like that. It works great as long as everyone is on video conference, but if there are five people in a conference room and there are two people on video conference, that does not work. There is no way for those two people to then have any say, point of view, or influence in any conversation. I think that it is cultural as well as deliberate architecture for a company to either be geographically distributed or not. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at March Capital
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