439th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Michael Smerklo, Next Coast Ventures

Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures, talks about some of the ventures his firm has invested in and the philosophy in general.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Harald Nieder of Redalpine Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the other two parts of the portfolio where things are coming by referral, is there anything specific that’s interesting that you would like to discuss?

Harald Nieder: What’s interesting there is that there are a lot of different factors between the networks. If you look at our fund investors, that’s actually quite a broad range of people. We like to have entrepreneurs in there. We like to keep that entrepreneurial spirit throughout our whole structure.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Harald Nieder of Redalpine Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down within the geography? How do you go about finding these teams?

Harald Nieder: You have to have a lot of tools available if you have a certain topic that you’re looking after. If you already know what you’re looking after, it’s relatively easy to go out with the databases that are around, with our own database, with our network that we have in that area.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Harald Nieder of Redalpine Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: B2B versus B2C, what’s your comfort zone?

Harald Nierde: We’re, in general, open. We don’t have a focus on either. So, we invest in both. If you look at the portfolio, we have both cases in there. We actually do like to have a mix in there.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Harald Nieder of Redalpine Venture Partners (Part 2)

Harald Nieder: The other thing that’s important is obviously, the network, in particular for the early-stage investing. Network is very important. Keep in mind that in geography, we’ve been active more than 15 years, which means that we’ve had a lot of time to build our network.

For example, we’ve been connected in Berlin long before Berlin has become the hub that it is now. When you go to other countries or where we want to focus elsewhere, we really need to build our network there first.

440th Roundtable Recording on April 17, 2019: With Shripati Acharya, Prime Venture Partners

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Harald Nieder of Redalpine 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 Harald Nieder was recorded in March 2019.

Harald Nieder is a Partner at Redalpine Venture Partners, a European firm primarily focused on Germany and Switzerland.

Sramana Mitra: So tell us about yourself as well as Redalpine. Let’s get you introduced to our audience.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chowdhri of Stellaris Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Besides these three categories that you’ve talked about or aligned to these three categories that you talked about, what are you seeing in your deal flow over the last 12 to 18 months? What’s in the pipe in India? I imagine you see several thousand deals a year, right?

Rahul Chowdhri: We see up to 1,400 to 1,500 deals a year. They vary across sectors. We are a sector agnostic fund. We have a very active problem-thesis based approach. So each one of us looks at one or more sectors. Then we go out and look for companies in those sectors.