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.

How To Fund A ‘Fat’ Startup

These days, we focus a lot more on lean startups than startups that require capital to get going. The entire industry has moved away from the ‘fat’ startup category. However, infrastructure software, hardware, networking, chips – they need capital. Even in cloud software, to build complex technology like personalization and analytics requires some investment.

How do people fund those?

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Featured Videos

Funding Rejection Statistics Of Key Players

You’ve often heard me say that over 99% of the entrepreneurs who seek financing are rejected. This post offers a set of rejection statistics culled from credible sources on some of the key players:

YCombinator: 97.15%

YCombinator started as a summer programme and the roots still show, with courses running for three months, about the length of an academic summer break. Teams all join at the same time, in batches. Applicants are rigorously screened and the best invited for interview. For the latest batch 74 (including six not-for-profits) were selected from a field of more than 2,600. Those lucky few get paid between $14,000 and $20,000 to attend. In return they have to hand over about 7% of their firm’s equity. [Source: The Economist]

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Who Are The Top VCs in Silicon Valley Today?

I have been having this discussion with a few people whose analysis of the venture capital industry I respect. The exercise is not just to assess who are the top investors, but more, to assess where the industry is going, and where the next generation of venture scale companies are going to come from. In this post, I will provide a framework for the discussion. Please weigh in with your thoughts.

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Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

This is an interesting story of how an open source software company built around Cassandra was incubated by RackSpace and has grown to $5 million in revenue. Founded by engineers Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, the interview traces not only the successes of their journey but also the mistakes they made in structuring their funding rounds.

Sramana Mitra: Jonathan and Matt, let’s start with both of your backgrounds. Where you were born? Where did you grow up? How did you get together?

Jonathan Ellis: I grew up in New Jersey. I met Matt after I moved to Texas to work for Rackspace. Rackspace hired me to build a scalable database for their internal infrastructure as they started to compete more with companies like Amazon, Google, and the Cloud. In late 2008, I started working on Cassandra. I met Matt Pfeil shortly afterwards as he led the group that was going to be deploying Cassandra internally at Rackspace.

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Harvard Business Review: How To Fund Indian Start-Ups

Harvard Business Review has published Sramana Mitra’s piece How To Fund Indian Start-Ups. You can read the entire article here.

New Book – Seed India: How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap In India

While tremendous interest in entrepreneurship in India continues to surge, there is a troubling and corresponding shortage of seed capital to help get these entrepreneurs’ ventures off the ground.

Sramana Mitra, one of the most highly regarded writers on the Indian startup scene, analyzes the current state of the startup eco-system in India in the latest addition to her acclaimed Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Seed India: How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap In India (December 2013; Amazon Kindle). Mitra proposes ways of navigating the rest of the decade, such that a robust pipeline of entrepreneurs can survive the current malaise, and thrive, while the eco-system develops and matures in parallel.
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Seed Capital: Inventus Capital Partners

1M/1M ambassador Irina Patterson talks with Parag Dhol of Inventus Capital Partners.

Irina Patterson: Please tell us briefly about your personal background and about your fund.

Parag Dhol: Inventus Capital Partners is a U.S.–India venture firm managed by successful entrepreneurs and industry operating veterans who have backed over 100 entrepreneurs with operations in India and/or Silicon Valley. Inventus backs entrepreneurs first and foremost. The companies financed by Inventus include redBus (acquired by MIH/Naspers and our biggest success), Vizury, Credit Sesame, Savaari, PoshMark, Power2sme, Policybazaar and eDreams, among others. Inventus started investing out of Fund-II earlier this year. >>>

How to Navigate India’s Seed Capital Gap

India has a minuscule seed capital ecosystem. Entrepreneurs thus have to be really creative to survive.

My new piece How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India offers a synthesis of how entrepreneurs are getting around. Two companion pieces offer perspective on why the ecosystem is developing so slowly: Seed Investors in India: Why So Few? and Venture Capital in India: Age of Reckoning. >>>

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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How To Navigate the Seed Capital Gap in India

Even though interest in entrepreneurship is at its highest in India, the country has a nominal seed capital infrastructure. As you know, I concern myself with issues of scalability and pipeline building. The question that I have been pondering for the last ten years is: how do you develop a sustainable pipeline of entrepreneurs?

Of course, this discussion pertains to my field: IT and IT-enabled services. India has numerous small retailers, service providers, etc. who are shining examples of scrappy entrepreneurship at its best.

But how do we take advantage of the increasing penetration of information technology into the consumer and business populations in India? And how, through technology, do we empower Indian entrepreneurs to build global businesses?
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Is Too Much Liquidity In The Angel Capital Market Good or Bad?

Too much dumb money rushing into the angel investment game is inevitable with crowdsourcing, AngelList and other innovations. Innovation is welcome. Liquidity for startups is welcome. How much is too much?

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The Indian Startup Eco-System Wants Acqui-hiring!

I spent large chunks of time in the last two days with my friend Sharad Sharma, one of the true deep thinkers of the Indian startup eco-system. I first met Sharad when he invited me to co-chair the Nasscom Product Conclave in Bangalore with him in 2010. I really enjoyed working with him, and over the years, have come to appreciate what he is trying to do for the Indian eco-system.

Sharad, by the way, is one of the 20 odd effective angel investors who invest in the technology sector in India. While the total number of angel investors is much larger, many of them come from outside the sector, and hence are not capable of leading deals. If you look at Indian Angel Network or Mumbai Angels, for instance, a vast majority of the angels made their money elsewhere (like real estate), and often find it difficult to fully grasp what’s happening in the software, mobile or Internet businesses, let alone networking or semiconductor. Thus, these lead angels are critical for the eco-system to mature.

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How To Start An Incubator

This is REALLY exciting!

As you know, we’ve been working with many partners around the world over the last year.

This has helped us develop an informed perspective on the need for a scalable incubation system that our partners can use easily, affordably, seamlessly to launch their own incubators, with our help, anywhere in the world, but with deep ties into Silicon Valley.

And now, we present the 1M/1M Incubator-in-a-Box, a new program to support partners in how to start a business incubator.

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The Million Dollar Club: Quantifying The 1Mby1M Value Equation

At 1Mby1M, our agenda is to help you figure out how to put one foot before the other and build a sustainable business, irrespective of financing. If you use the program the way it is designed to be used, you would be able to derive value from it on multiple vectors. Let me quantify that equation for you. >>>

The Million Dollar Club: Conclusion

I know many of you are struggling to figure out how to put one foot before the other in your quest for a successful entrepreneurial journey. I also know that many of you are continuously chasing investors over customers.

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