1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 1)

Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC, discusses his firm’s investment thesis, and we have an interesting discussion about the definition of a “good” entrepreneur.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce yourself for our audience.

Bhaskar Ghosh: I’m an accidental VC. I did a PhD in Computer Science many years ago. I went to Yahoo. Then I was lucky and excited to be part of the founding data infrastructure team at LinkedIn. We got to do a lot of the open-source stuff that you might have heard about.

Then I went to run my own gig. I ran a small FinTech company called NerdWallet, which just IPO’d six months ago. After that, I retired. I was supposed to join Hillary Clinton’s administration, but that didn’t happen. I became an angel investor and advisor. Through a set of happy accidents, I came to 8VC for a year. I stayed and became an investor and focused heavily on enterprise infrastructure.

Sramana Mitra: What is the focus of 8VC?

Bhaskar Ghosh: We are based in San Francisco, Austin, and New York. We currently manage $6 billion and are investing out of our fourth core fund. We primarily do B2B. Our investing principles have been around smart enterprise. Our founder wrote a wonderful article back in 2013 which still proves fairly prescient.

The idea of smart enterprise is taking verticals and disrupting them with data, AI, cloud, and automation. In the last five years, we’ve moved more deeply into horizontal platforms and infrastructure. We’ve also started focusing on developers in addition to business and product personas.

I tend to focus heavily on platforms in all the tiers. While we are an investment firm, we are proud to call ourselves a build firm too. 23% of our core fund is allocated to the build program where we incubate three to five companies every year from health IT to InsurTech. Now I’m starting a company in the area of enterprise software security.

Our firm has a fairly strong entrepreneurial and operational spirit. We think of ourselves more as builders and less as investors. As I said, vertical SaaS with very heavy focus on data, AI, and automation was the core. Vertical SaaS took us to legacy verticals very productively in FinTech, InsurTech, and logistics. Then we started doing health IT and biotech before I joined the firm. We have now moved to infrastructure at all levels.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the early-stage investment work that you do? What check sizes do you write? What do you want to see in a company before you’re willing to write those checks?

Bhaskar Ghosh: We focus on early investing – pre-seed, seed, and Series A. Pre-seed and seed can be anywhere from half a million to $4 million. A’s can be from $5 million to $15 million. We’ve done some B’s too but those are rarer. The growth checks can be much larger. We do new companies but many of them are larger reserves for faster-growing companies.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC
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