1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In 1Mby1M, we have a rolling admission. Anyone can join at any time. There’s no three-month program. There’s no concept of graduation. We’re building companies. What would you graduate from? We don’t believe in graduation from an accelerator really.

I think these are important points, important differentiators, and important markers to pay attention to. The other thing I would point out here is, I think both Arka and 1Mby1M have a shared philosophy of bootstrapped entrepreneurship. $200,000 is not $200 million. You can’t throw money around. You have to be very capital efficient. You have to spend the money that you have access to very carefully and very conservatively and on the right things. >>>

434th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Rahul Chowdhri, Stellaris Venture Partners

Rahul Chowdhri, Investor at Stellaris Venture Partners, shares some fascinating examples of consumer ventures catering to the next 400 million consumers in India.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In selecting customers to go after, what is the positioning of your company? Are you going after large enterprises? Are you going after mid-market? Are you going after small businesses? Each of them has a slightly different go-to market strategy. The inside sales point that you raise is very interesting.

Freshdesk, now Freshworks, is a company that we watched grow from the very beginning. They were in the program for three years. That company actually didn’t go to the enterprise at all until much later in the game. Now they’re going after enterprise deals by doing very large deals and so forth. But when they started, they acquired customers including closing paying customers all on the phone and internet. It’s fully inside sales driven go-to market strategy and they did it all from India. >>>

433rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Rebecca Kaden, Union Square Ventures

Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at Union Square Ventures, discusses her firm’s capital efficient investment thesis and debates the pros and cons of blitzscaling.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 5)

Nandini Mansinghka: I think what has happened is that even in our portfolio, once in a while we do come across a company that looks like a potential unicorn. And that’s when you finally see a lot of investors coming in. Over a period of time, we haven’t always seen that case.

So the ones that you actually think are potential unicorns are also the ones that run out of money. You say, “Okay, here is money for 18 months.” Then in twelve months, the money runs out. Because you’ve not built a steady revenue or haven’t built a product by then, the next round of money isn’t coming in. If you ask me to choose between scalability and sustainability, I think I’m more on the sustainability side of things. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One point I will double-click on which comes up a lot is that we have a huge overlap in the Indian market. 1Mby1M has a big presence in the Indian market and we’ve been present for a very long time. The whole Indian SaaS category was one that we played a very big role right from the beginning. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned traction. For Mumbai Angels to be interested in a company, what kind of traction do you want to see? It sounds like you don’t do concept financing, do you?

Nandini Mansinghka: We would do concept financing. We will fund anything which is a people company. It’s not an idea stage that we’re looking at for sure. We would require revenue traction in all cases except two. One exception would be highly suspect products. If it’s an IP buildout, we’re okay to say, “We’re funding because we want to walk with you to the IP buildout.” >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (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 Yash Hemaraj was recorded in February 2019.

Yash Hemaraj, Founding Partner at Arka Venture Labs and Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), discusses Arka’s recent partnership with 1Mby1M to accelerate Indian B2B SaaS companies.

Sramana Mitra: Tell our audience about Arka and we’ll take it from there.

Yash Hemaraj: We launched Arka Venture Labs in the summer of 2018. Arka Venture Labs is India’s first B2B focused cross-border accelerator. Our idea is to seed the next wave of enterprise innovation coming from India and to connect them to the global ecosystem. Primarily, we’re forward-looking at B2B-focused companies. >>>