1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Bice of Verge Fund (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take SaaS for a moment. If you were to look at a SaaS company, what would you look for? Would you look for MRR metrics?

Would you look for just a proof, just a minimum viable product? What is your comfort zone to get into a company?

Bill Bice: I’m often working with an entrepreneur at the earliest stages. I’m not likely to be interested in investing until they have hit a standard $10,000 in MRR. A big part of my incentive and what I love to do is to help entrepreneurs get to that point.

One of the things that I absolutely agree with you on is 99% of the entrepreneurs that I work with should never raise outside money. It’s a better use of your time to go sell to customers than it is to spend talking to angels and VC’s that are, in the end, going to screw up your company if you don’t have the right fit.

Sramana Mitra: The ones that you think may have potential to become venture-scale companies, you would invest at a pre-revenue stage?

Bill Bice: We have and we’d have to. When we started our firm, we had to go put it together. We had to either start it or find the entrepreneur and technology and put those pieces together in order to have a viable investment.

That was the very early stage of the ecosystem building here. That has really paid off. There’s tremendous amount of activity relative to that. As an example, I helped start the first accelerator in New Mexico called ABQID. Now, we’ve got seven or eight accelerators that are cranking out a ton of great companies.

Sramana Mitra: How many startups are active in New Mexico?

Bill Bice: I don’t have a number off the top of my head but we just did a little research project to see how many open positions there were at technology companies here. We came up with about 1,500 in Albuquerque. That’s running across a good number of startups. There’s a lot of much later stage startups that have all come into the forefront over the last five years.

Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome. What would be the split between life sciences and information technology? Where is the sweet spot?

Bill Bice: There’s a really nice selection of both. There is a great incubator here that’s focused on life sciences called the BioScience Center, which has really leveraged those opportunities. For anybody who is interested in life sciences, that is perfect place to go visit. You can see all kinds of amazing companies. I don’t know what the split is but there’s tons of opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: When you use the term life sciences, are you talking about biotech, pharma, and digital health?

Bill Bice: We are pretty inclusive. That includes drug development through the whole technology infrastructure. One of our biggest successes was a medical device company called Intellicyt that came out of the University of New Mexico.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Bice of Verge Fund
1 2 3 4 5