1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the last 30 days, we’ve done story after story analyzing what’s happening on the acquisition side of B2B SaaS. I think one of the things that’s very attractive about Arka is that you’re not chasing unicorns and I’ll let you elaborate on that.

Yash Hemaraj: You’re right on the point that a lot of companies, especially in the B2B side, get acquired for anywhere from $50 million to $100 million according to some statistics published very recently. That’s the opportunity where if you’ve taken in $50 million into your company, there’s no way you can sell the company for $50 million and everybody is happy about it. >>>

189th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Arihant Patni, Ideaspring Capital

Arihant Patni is Managing Director at Ideaspring Capital, a fund focused on enterprise companies born in India and selling to the global market.

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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. >>>