436th Roundtable Recording on March 20, 2019: With Sumant Mandal, March Capital Partners

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about sectors? Of course, India has gone through a lot of different cycles already in terms of sector popularity and experiments. So what are your conclusions and investment thesis around sectors at this point?

Nandini Mansinghka: That’s a very interesting question. We’ve seen a slight shift in the trend over the years. So if you look at our portfolio of 130 companies, we were focusing a lot on tech and tech product companies because the hypothesis was that we need to look at startups in a similar way as the Valley. Over the last three to four years, we’re seeing a distinct change in how they are being looked at. >>>

Roundtable Recap: March 20 – How Large Companies Address Existential Threats

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Sumant Mandal, 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.

V Words!
Then, Tim Lieu from California pitched V Words! a mobile game that he wishes to raise money for. Unfortunately, games don’t get funded unless there is proven traction.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a bit about the way you work? If an entrepreneur wants to work with Mumbai Angels, what would be the procedure? Is it a subset of the angels who are investing? How do you manage that process? Just give us a little bit of color on the mechanics.

Nandini Mansinghka: We receive about 5,000 applications for funding every year. These come through several different channels. One of our strongest ones are recommendations by members and by companies that got funded earlier in our ecosystem. That’s one. A lot of startups have a line to pitch directly at mumbaiangels.com. There’s the outreach that we’re doing continuously. We’re there at events. We’re there at different forums and trying to attend. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (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 Nandini Mansinghka was recorded in January 2019.

Nandini Mansinghka is CEO and Managing Director at Mumbai Angels Network, one of the oldest angel networks in India.

Sramana Mitra: Nandini Mansinghka, from Mumbai Angels Network, has been a very early entrant into the Indian entrepreneurship financing ecosystem. She’s a big influencer at a big high impact player in the Indian ecosystem. I’m thrilled to catch up after so many years. Nandini and I last saw each other in person back in 2011 when I was doing a workshop in Mumbai. I will let you introduce yourself and the work of Mumbai Angels Network as a starter and then we’ll dive into the details. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Preeti Rathi of Ignition Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If an entrepreneur takes $6.5 million in seed, how much ownership does he have left in the company?

Preeti Rathi: Entrepreneurs have to be careful about making sure that they manage the valuation from that perspective. It isn’t really a good idea to give up so much of the company that it actually will make rates for the next round really difficult. Because if the entrepreneurs don’t really have enough skin in the game, the VC’s also don’t really want to invest in the next round. So if you’re taking in so much money early on, you better have an idea that will lead to higher cap and higher valuation so that money doesn’t lead to really giving up ownership completely. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Preeti Rathi of Ignition Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about trends that you see in your deal flow. So if you look back on the last 12 or 18 months of deal flow, what are the highlights?

Preeti Rathi: When I think about that, one thing that I’ve seen is this winner-take-all phenomenon that we’re observing. Earlier, it used to be a trend only on the consumer side. Increasingly, it’s true even on the enterprise side. Because of that, too much money is chasing a few deals whereas a lot of deals end up starving. That’s one thing we’ve seen. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Preeti Rathi of Ignition Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are all the names that you rattled off seed investments?

Preeti Rathi: Yes, most of them. We’re seed investors in Splunk and DocuSign. Not everyone of them is a seed investment. Like I said, we partner. Series A is a very good place for us to start with as well. If it’s something we’re absolutely drooling over, we’ll start a partnership with a company at series B. But primarily we’re early stage investors where we say we want to spend time helping you build a company. So seed and series A is where we focus.

Sramana Mitra: This probably is going to be hard for you to answer but I’m curious. Your partner from Ignition who invested in DocuSign or Docker or one of those companies that have really taken off, what did they see at the seed stage to make that bet? >>>