1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Financing

Raising money to build a startup is a huge challenge. To be able to raise any money at all, you must first understand how investors think. We have developed the following courses catering to entrepreneurs in different stages of their entrepreneurial journey.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Jason Lemkin was recorded in October 2014. 

Jason Lemkin, prior to becoming a VC, was the CEO of EchoSign, a digital signature SaaS vendor that Adobe acquired some years back. This was an excellent discussion and offers very concrete pointers to where you might look for white spaces in the cloud computing space to do new ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a small window into how you look back your journey as an entrepreneur. Let’s start with EchoSign now that you have so much experience behind you and you’ve had a chance to consider the cloud landscape from a VC’s point of view. >>>

Featured Videos

209th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Anshu Sharma, Angel Investor

Anshu Sharma is an active angel investor who invests in Silicon Valley and India. Anshu has deep experience in the enterprise software space, and a thoughtful, sophisticated perspective. He is one of the early investors in Nutanix, which currently has a market cap of over $8.5 billion in the public market.

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208th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Ashwini Anburajan, 22X Fund

Ashwini Anburajan, Founding Partner of 22X Fund, a tokenized fund that is investing across 30 portfolio companies. It’s a very interesting experiment and you will enjoy listening to some cutting edge FinTech thought leadership.

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207th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Dennis Joyce, Alliance of Angels

Dennis Joyce, Investor and Member of Alliance of Angels, talks about the largest Angel group in the Pacific Northwest.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Nitin Pachisia was recorded in October 2017. 

Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures, discusses pre-seed and seed investing.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Unshackled Ventures. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make?

Nitin Pachisia: We’re a very young pre-seed fund. We started about three and a half years ago. For our initial investments, we invest exclusively at pre-seed stage, which is effectively pre-product in most cases. We focus on immigrant founded companies. >>>

12 Investors Discuss Unicorn Mania via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Right now there is a lot of capital in the startup investment system. Investors managing a good amount of money have to think of an investment thesis where they can really get returns. One of the observations I’ve had is that if everybody is chasing Unicorns, it’s not going to work, because there aren’t that many Unicorns. Unicorns, by definition, should be rare. Right now, we have a lot of pseudo-unicorns because a lot of artificially-bloated companies have come into the market. In the private market, there are tons of artificially bloated pseudo-unicorns. This aggressive goal of trying to invest in Unicorns is not going to end very well. There’s going to be a lot of casualties in the process.

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391st Roundtable Recording On March 22, 2018: With Ben Mathias, Vertex Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: March 22 – Indian Startup Eco-system Needs Exits

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures, India. The discussion spanned trends and dynamics of the Indian startup eco-system, including exits. India needs exits at this point, even if they’re relatively small exits. We’ve seen some deals happen in the market with Nutanix buying Minjar, and Qualys buying a couple of small ones.

First Responders Live
As for the entrepreneur pitches, James Corbett from Vorhees, NJ, pitched First Responders Live, a video-based communication platform for local police. Very interesting idea.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Jason Stoffer was recorded in September 2014. 

Jason Stoffer, General Partner at Maveron – a consumer-only venture capital firm that has had a successful track record of investing in e-commerce ventures ranging from eBay, Shutterfly, and Groupon to the more recent Zulily, as well as education ventures – discusses e-commerce opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start off with e-commerce. I know you have invested in other things. We’ll discuss your other investments and your investment thesis in more general terms as well. To begin with, let’s talk about a couple of your e-commerce investments. What is your current thought process around the industry? >>>

4 Investors Discuss Early Stage Startup Investing in Podcasts

In the current early stage investment universe, we have had a lot of change. It used to be simply seed and Series A. Now it’s pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-Series A. It’s a very wide spectrum even within early stage investment. To give entrepreneurs the advantage of understanding these changes, I have asked several seed investors to share in specifics how they define early stage and in what part of the continuum they play. Have a listen to these recent 30-minute podcast interviews to learn where your startup might fall within the ever-changing early stage investment world.

Christina Brodbeck, Founding Partner at Rivet Ventures, talks about the firm’s investment thesis of funding companies that target the female demographic in its purchase decision cycle. Very interesting and under-served market.

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390th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Yanai Oron, Vertex Ventures

Yanai Oron, General Partner at Vertex Ventures, took us through his firm’s investment focus on deep technology ventures in Israel. The discussion includes an excellent window into how VC firms have different arithmetic depending on their size and structure.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Oded Hermoni of Rhodium Venture Partners (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Oded Hermoni was recorded in October 2017. 

Oded Hermoni is Managing Partner at Rhodium Venture Partners, and is also co-founder of an Angel group, J-Angels.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Rhodium. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make?

Oded Hermoni: Rhodium is not the typical fund. It’s an Israeli-US investment arm of a family office. We have only one LP. We >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Raj Singh of Singh Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Raj Singh was recorded in September 2016. 

Raj Singh, Founder and Executive Director at Singh Ventures, offers a window into his firm’s investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What size investments do you make?

Raj Singh: I run an early-stage VC fund. We are about $50 million right now. We were founded about two years ago. We focus on mobile technologies. We get involved with anywhere from a concept stage to less than $10,000 a month of recurring revenue. What’s really unique about our fund is what we do in addition to the capital. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Dougery of Inventus Capital (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with John Dougery was recorded in May 2016. 

John Dougery, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Inventus Capital, a fund that is one of the earliest players in the Silicon Valley – India corridor, discusses his firm’s investment focus, as well as reviews the trends of the Indian market.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about your firm. You’re a Co-Founder of the firm so you must have founded the firm with a certain thesis. How has it evolved over the years that you’ve been in action in this corridor?

John Dougery: This firm is one of my entrepreneurial efforts along with my co-founders. It all came out of my mutual >>>

390th Roundtable Recording On March 14, 2018: Yanai Oron, Vertex Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: