442nd Roundtable Recording on May 2, 2019: With Vikas Choudhury, Pivot Ventures

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Selcow of Costanoa Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Quizlet reminds me of Course Hero which is a company that we have covered extensively as well.

Mark Selcow: I’m not as familiar with Course Hero but the world of online mastery and online learning is pretty rich.

Sramana Mitra: Course Hero is doing tremendously well. Now you may want to check out Course Hero. Actually, you’ll find a couple of great interviews about Course Hero on the 1Mby1M blog.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Selcow of Costanoa Ventures (Part 4)

Mark Selcow: We had a market thesis that more and more employers were going to steer their employees to high-deductible plans because they work. There seemed to be a possible regulatory tailwind where the constraints on a high deductible plan might be relaxed at some point and anyone would be eligible for an HSA.

So we thought this was a market that had some positive trends. We were interested in Lively because I had an HSA with a different bank. It wasn’t a good experience. People will tell you that sometimes big incumbents who’ve been around for centuries can’t innovate in technology and the HSA products are kind of like that.

Roundtable Recap: May 2 – India Has Come A Long Way

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Vikas Choudhury, Managing Partner at Pivot Ventures, and President at Reliance Jio. Vikas is one of the earliest Angel investors in India, and invested in early successes like InMobi and Myntra. We discussed the evolution of the Indian startup and venture capital industry.

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As for the entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Eesha Sheikh from Colorado pitching a Digital Health concept.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Selcow of Costanoa Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another company that I encountered. It was an Australian company that also did very well starting in Australia. It was also this mobile temporary workforce management type of thing. Have you seen this company called Deputy?

Mark Selcow: Yes. Deputy has done really well.

Sramana Mitra: Yes. I love these kind of stories of companies that are developing outside of the core circle Silicon Valley ecosystem doing really well. Then they come into Silicon Valley. Sometimes to other parts of the United States and raise money with proven products.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Selcow of Costanoa Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some examples of what you have invested in. In particular, talk about when you encountered the company. At what stage did you invest? What did they have that convinced you that this is a really interesting opportunity that you would like to bet on?

Mark Selcow: Skedulo is a company founded in Brisbane, Australia where the product development team, the founder, and CEO were based. They had just moved to the US to come after the North American market. That’s when we were introduced.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Selcow of Costanoa 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 Mark Selcow was recorded in March 2019.

Mark Selcow, General Partner at Costanoa Ventures, talks about the firm’s primarily B2B investment thesis and strong penchant for investing in companies that have grown outside the Bay Area.

Sramana Mitra: We had Greg Sands of Costanoa a few months ago. We’re going to continue the conversation today with Mark. Let me just recap a little bit of the vital statistics of the fund that we’re talking about here.

440th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Shripati Acharya, Prime Venture Partners

Shripati Acharya is Managing Partner at Priven Advisors, advising Prime Venture Partners, a firm focused on core technology ventures in India. Unlike most VCs, Prime does do concept-stage investments.

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