184th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Bill Bice, Verge Fund

Bill Bice, Partner at Verge Fund, discusses New Mexico’s startup ecosystem and his fund’s activities in that region.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rebecca Kaden of Union Square Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see the blitz scale style of the businesses being the most successful? This is acknowledging the fact that you’re not going after that model. You have stated clearly that your firm thesis is more in the capital-efficient, fundamentals, software-driven approach. What point do you have for entrepreneurs to look for opportunities where blitz scaling is a good model?

Rebecca Kaden: I don’t think that’s exactly the framework. Blitz scaling refers to extreme exponential growth. We are focused on that. That’s not synonymous with high capital intensity.

Sramana Mitra: No. If you read the book Reid Hoffman has written, he offers extraordinary amounts of capital as one of the strategies of blitz scaling it. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rebecca Kaden of Union Square Ventures (Part 5)

Rebecca Kaden: One of the great things that I really love about entrepreneurship and company building and being an early stage investor is, there’s definitely no one way to build a company. It’s about finding the right model for the business you’re building and your goals.

There’s also no one way to kill it. Companies get killed by overfunding. Companies get killed by underfunding. Companies get killed by co-founder problems. There’re all kinds of ways that these companies don’t work. So the biggest thing is, can you find the model that is the right fit for the product that you are building, the team that you’ve assembled, and the goals you have in mind? Can you out-execute competitors on the right model for what you’re doing? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rebecca Kaden of Union Square Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are your thoughts on the Unions Square’s analysis of the unicorn phenomenon? How are you thinking about unicorns?

Rebecca Kaden: We want our companies to be as big as possible. What piece of it are you curious about?

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure you want all your companies to be as big as possible, but some very unhealthy models and practices have developed in the industry around trying to get as big as possible. For example, flushing companies with capital without figuring out a lot of the unit economics or fundamentals is a rampant practice right now in the industry. How do you view all that? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Swapna Gupta of Qualcomm Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the 2018 deal flow, how many deals do you look at in a year? What are the trends in that deal flow?

Swapna Gupta: We have a three-member India team. Between us, we end up looking at 200 plus deals a year. There’s always a flavor of the season such as food delivery and social commerce. For trends in the last 6 to 9 months, we’ve seen a lot of healthcare and educational players because some of the infrastructure value has been taken care of, we’re able to build a famous organization. We’re also seeing a lot of momentum in the electric vehicle space surprisingly. US has Tesla, China has lots of other players, but India hasn’t seen any electric vehicle players. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rebecca Kaden of Union Square Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The reason I’m asking is for a little bit of specifics. For example, one of the trends that I’m observing right now is there’s an increased emphasis on blending of business lending products of various kinds. This could be consumer lending. There’s a bunch of companies that are doing payday loans equivalent which is shark-infested water.

But they’re doing a very much cleaner and much more sophisticated humane job of that value proposition to ease the cash flow and working capital requirements of the low income workers. Then we’ve seen a lot of small business lending kinds of products come through. Various companies are taking various different spins on it. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Swapna Gupta of Qualcomm Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Technology consumer products and consumer electronics hasn’t really happened in India. It’s all been from elsewhere. China is very strong. Chinese products come into India fairly aggressively, right? The competitive landscape is very tricky. You’ve invested in about 25 companies.

Why don’t we talk about a few case studies of what you have invested in. Take us through the journey of when you saw these companies, what did they have? What caught your attention to convince you that this is something that you want to invest in? >>>

185th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Sarbvir Singh, WaterBridge Ventures

Sarbvir Singh, Managing Partner at WaterBridge Ventures, talks about the firm’s India-focused investment thesis.

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