The Startup Velocity Question: What Hinders Acceleration in VC Funded Companies?

I have been running 1Mby1M since 2010. I find myself saying to entrepreneurs ad nauseam that VCs want to invest in startups that can go from zero to $100 million in revenue in 5 to 7 years.

Startups that do not have what it takes to achieve velocity should not be venture funded.

Experienced VCs, over time, have developed heuristics to gauge what constitutes a high growth venture investment thesis. 

How Do You Develop Seed Ecosystems Around The World?

In the last five years, there has been a distinct globalization of entrepreneurship. There is a lot more romanticism about startups now, a lot more startup related events, organizations, incubators, so forth and so on.

However, the seed capital eco-system around the world is inadequate. How do we change that?

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Innovation’s Next Decade

While the world economy continues to look shaky, the technology industry has never looked stronger.

Now is perhaps a good time to stop for a moment and reflect on what the next decade will be all about for the industry.

My vision of what the technology industry needs to focus on is best described by the title of Michael Dertouzos’s book The Unfinished Revolution (Dertouzos was the head of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, where I was a graduate student). The revolution that Dertouzos talks about is in “human-centric” computing. Indeed, today’s open problems are not so much in the domain of chips and networking as they are in the more human-centric domains.

For example, the technology that makes it possible for a digital worker in rural Africa or small-town India to work on data processing projects already exists. What do not yet exist are systematic methods of locating such projects and connecting these remote digital workers to them.
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How To Bootstrap a Company While Still Working a Full-time Job

At 1M/1M, we’re formalizing the process of ‘bootstrapping with a paycheck’ actively, in recognition of the fact that in many parts of the world, there isn’t much of a seed capital eco-system. Thus, somewhere between 6-24 months of bootstrapping while holding on to a full-time job is a reasonable option for many aspiring entrepreneurs.In fact, I would go so far as to say that most aspiring entrepreneurs ought to start their entrepreneurial journey while sitting inside a corporate umbrella. Especially for technical people, it allows for the enhancing of their technical skills, while also developing the bricks needed to build a venture. >>>

Indian Venture Capital: Age of Reckoning

Ashish Gupta left Silicon Valley to partake in the bonanza that venture capital in India was supposed to create. He founded Helion Capital, a $605 million fund that has been in business for a while.

The style of venture capital that Ashish and his compatriots at Sequoia, Accel, and others wanted to practice was the classic Silicon Valley model of putting $5 – 20M to work per technology company that is ready to grow at a furious pace.

The trouble is such companies are few and far between in the India of 2013.
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Seed Investors In India: Why So Few?

As I have written in previous columns, the seed capital ecosystem in India is a real bottleneck right now. There are no more than a couple of hundred seed investments that are happening a year. Even if the number doubles this year, it is still a terribly inadequate number to build a real pipeline of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs that can meaningfully impact the country.

How can we change this?

To answer that question, we need to first understand why there is such a shortage of seed money in the Indian IT entrepreneurship ecosystem.

You see, Silicon Valley’s angel investors were all either entrepreneurs themselves, or part of an entrepreneurial venture that succeeded sufficiently for its early employees to make significant money. Most of them went through the experience of building a technology product, taking it to market, watching it take off in the market, and then reaping the benefits of that success.
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The Other 99% (Entrepreneurs): Fortune In The Middle Of The Pyramid

With so much attention given to the 1% of entrepreneurs who do receive funding, Sramana Mitra turns the tables and presents her analysis of why over 99% of the entrepreneurs who seek financing get rejected in her new book, The Other 99% (Entrepreneurs): Fortune In The Middle Of The Pyramid (Amazon Kindle; September 19, 2013). This collection of instructive and thought-provoking essays by Sramana Mitra, a serial entrepreneur, writer, and founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) global virtual incubator, discusses top of mind questions for everyone concerned with startups, entrepreneurs, capital flows, and such.

What can be done to help millions of entrepreneurs be successful? What causes ‘Infant Entrepreneur Mortality’, and how to reduce it? What roles do incubators play? What roles do corporations play? How to plug the capital gaps in the eco-system? Why is Venture Capital not enough? And what could unlock the fortune in the middle of the pyramid?
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Trend Spotting: Platform Eco-Systems

Having a cloud-hosted platform has become the new trend for high tech businesses worldwide. App developers can receive the resources they need to build, launch, promote and integrate their apps with other businesses. This not only creates a bundle of exceptional business tools but it also creates a hotbed of savvy entrepreneurs with working solutions looking for partners.

Two large cloud hosted platforms are Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and the Google Marketplace. These two platforms-as-a-service are prime examples of environments that provide developers the cloud space and necessary tools to build and release their apps rapidly. In turn customers, whether other entrepreneurs, or small or large businesses, can integrate these apps into their own operations simply through the cloud with no downloads required.
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Platform Ecosystems In Big Data

I have written about the platform eco-system trend in technology recently. To recap, a business that has been gaining ground in the tech world is the technology platform developer network model, wherein large numbers of developers can use the platform to build their businesses cost-effectively without the handicap of huge infrastructure expenditure. Some of the better-known illustrations of this trend are Apple’s iOS, Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s Android, which provide developers the necessary tools to build and release their apps rapidly.

This model is now seen in the Big Data and analytics segments as well.

One of the major platform players in the analytics space is SAP’s HANA development platform. SAP HANA is based on a columnar in-memory database that allows deep analysis while capturing fresh transactions in real time. Through its HANA Enterprise Cloud programs, it targets developers as eco-system partners.
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What is the Future of Liberal Arts Education in America?

Ever since I read this recent WSJ article ‘At Harvard, Humanities Lose Status‘, I have been disturbed by this question. Actually, I have been thinking about the issue for longer, and wondering how the American Higher Education industry will evolve.

I am curious what your thoughts are on the subject. Here are some of mine:

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Trend Spotting: Love and Startups

There was a time in Silicon Valley when VCs did not like the idea of funding couples. Nonetheless, Cisco and 3Com – two legendary Valley startups – were founded by entrepreneur couples. These days, the startup world seems to nurture a lot more romance… Sometimes he is the CEO, sometimes she. Sometimes they switch roles. To have a baby. Or a few babies. Or not. In any case, the bias against entrepreneur couples needs to be over. Entrepreneurship is a passionate affair. A powerful aphrodisiac. Better acknowledge that phenomenon.

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