Roundtable Recap: May 16 – Spotlight on Mexico

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Hernan Fernandez, Managing Partner at Angel Ventures Mexico. The firm invests in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia. Excellent discussion on Latin America trends.

Lightwing

As for the entrepreneur pitches, from Bangalore, India, we had Ravitej Yadalam pitch Lightwing, a cloud monitoring and optimization solution for SMEs.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I understand when you are working with Hive companies feeding into your venture fund. When you’re working with the more general market of people approaching you, what are you looking for in terms of validation when you want to invest in a company?

We’ve heard all kinds of metrics and all kinds of conditions from various VCs who are looking at maybe $1 million ARR. What is your comfort zone?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said you have companies in India. Does that mean that you invest globally? What’s the geographical coverage?

Sumant Mandal: We will never say that we won’t do something. But if you look at what we’ve done, 75% of our investments are in North America and about 25% is global. Out of that 25%, most of that is in India. The reason is for what we do, we need local presence. We have a partner in India. We have someone on the ground there to manage our investments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital 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 Sumant Mandal was recorded in March 2019.

Sumant Mandal is Managing Director at March Capital Partners, a firm that invests largely in enterprise-facing businesses with deep technical differentiation. The conversation includes excellent insights into the changing dynamics of the networking space and how companies like Cisco and Juniper are managing their existential threats.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as March Capital and your other early stage investment activities.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shalini Prakash of 500 Startups India (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: People are learning to market better. The packaging in India used to be really shabby. People understand that if you’re trying to position a sophisticated product, it needs to have sophisticated packaging.

Frankly, India has such a great tradition of artisans and craftsmanship. There’s no reason why you can’t do phenomenally beautiful packaging to market some of these products. The opportunity is actually really fantastic on that side.

Shalini Prakash: I totally agree. With more and more exposure for everyone in the last 15 to 20 years, finally we’re known for the art of marketing.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shalini Prakash of 500 Startups India (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you don’t invest in the major metro-oriented, the higher end consumer-oriented businesses, or the global enterprise?

Shalini Prakash: Of course, we do. We do everything. Nothing has changed. Most companies that we’re seeing today in the market are mostly focused towards the next 200 or 300 million people. Having said that, we’ve of course invested in the last 12 to 15 months in companies that are completely focused on deep technologies.

443rd Roundtable Recording on May 9, 2019: With Eghosa Omoigui, EchoVC Partners

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With David Lambert of Right Side Capital Management (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You gave a very good and interesting answer to a different question. The question that I was trying to ask you is across the deals that you see, what trends have you seen?

David Lambert: The biggest trend is an extension of a trend that we’ve seen the entire time we’ve been investing. That’s an extension of 30-year trend in the software business.

At the earlier stages of product formation when you’re building your product, it’s gotten cheaper and cheaper every year to build that initial product prototype and to get to that stage where you can go to the market to prove whether you can generate revenue or not.