1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julie Lein, Managing Partner at Urban Innovation Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The narrative in the media is how much money have you raised. The maximum focus is on the people raising the most money. That is a flawed way of evaluating companies. There are a lot of innovations that are done in a capital-efficient way. As such, they have a lot more options. The exit option is larger. They are not so dependent on a constant infusion of capital to sustain themselves.

Julie Lein: I agree wholeheartedly. We call those vanity metrics. Capital raise and valuation are extremely important barometers, but they’re not the only ones. They’re the ones that tend to get the most coverage in the media.

What’s really impressive are customers, revenue, and growth. If you can go from bootstrapping to a million in revenue, that’s an incredible achievement. That’s very hard to do. That’s not what gets covered in TechCrunch though. The strongest validator of your business is your customers loving you and being willing to pay.

Sramana Mitra: One Million by One Million is probably the only media platform that covers, systematically, bootstrapped companies. We have thousands of case studies of successful entrepreneurs. We never ask anybody how much money they’ve raised. We ask, “Have you reached $5 million in revenue?”

Julie Lein: That’s impressive.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another example of something you’ve invested in.

Julie Lein: The one with Electriphi speaks to our values around the importance of climate tech and sustainability. I could give another example in another vertical. We led the seed round in July 2020 in a company called Jeeves. They’re providing corporate credit to small and medium-sized businesses around the globe.

What they’re allowing these businesses to do is operate across borders and in multiple currencies. You may be a company in Mexico. You may have vendors in Colombia. You may have employees in Canada. They make it easy to provide credit to all of those areas. We invested in mid-2020. They had early traction.

The two founders spent time building the infrastructure. It’s very challenging to do, especially in multiple countries. They started by offering their services to a handful of customers. We did the customer references. We were blown away by their early enthusiasm for the product. They had been live at that point for a month. They said, “They’ve made our lives so much easier. We’ve moved 80% of our spending to the Jeeves platform.”

What we saw in that was these guys can execute and grow. We invested in that seed about a year and a half ago. They, most recently, announced that they raised a Series B led by CRV and Andreessen. They’re now in 24 countries. We’re just really excited about them. Part of our thesis is looking at the economic vitality of cities. I think that’s an example of what Jeeves is doing.

Sramana Mitra: That sounds like a regular fintech investment and not an urban innovation investment.

Julie Lein: Yes, we don’t do just smart cities. We also like the livability and economic vitality of cities. One of the things we think about in economic vitality is the support of small to medium-sized businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julie Lein, Managing Partner at Urban Innovation Fund
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