1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. There’s one more?

Susan Stone: There’s one more. The last one is Canvas, which is based in New York. Canvas is the very first company that measures emotions analytically. I’m very proud of the founder Jared Feldman for really opening up that market for emotional measurement. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: But I think Mighty Network is not just for entrepreneurs. I’ve talked to Gina about this. It’s also about educators who want to run their own courses and they want conversations around certain topics that they are experts in. There’re are many use cases.

Susan Stone: You don’t have to use it to make money. If you’re a niche brand, you can use it to bring people together around your niche brand.

Sramana Mitra:  It’s a great brand marketing tool actually. Personal brand as well as any kind of brand. It’s a good marketing tool.

Sustan Stone: Absolutely. By the way, we think of all those people as entrepreneurs. All those people fit into our definition of entrepreneurs. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you walk me through a bit of a use case? For example, I’m just going to use our own video content as proxy. We have a YouTube channel, that is the 1M1M roundtable channel that’s full of entrepreneurship-related content. If I were to use your technology to distribute this content, what are you bringing to me? What is this company bringing to me?

Susan Stone: I’m not sure that you would necessarily want to use this technology because you’re using YouTube. If you’re already distributing on YouTube, you’vea little bit of this already because YouTube has a personalization engine. When somebody watches your video, they’ll give you the thumbnail of who you should watch next. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting and quite different from a lot of the perspective that we see because there is a huge question mark around the media industry’s evolution. I’m quite involved in a bunch of things. We have at least one partnership with a large media company.

All that aside, I’d like to understand how many investments you have made in this sector with this investment thesis. Could you walk us through what each of those ventures are? I normally would ask for just maybe one or two examples to get a sense or feeling for the thinking.

In the case of the media industry, it would be interesting to see where you see possibilities of sustainable businesses emerging. I’m very interested in working through that with you and bringing that to our audience. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital (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 Susan Stone was recorded in January 2019.

Susan Stone, Founder and Managing Partner at Sierra Wasatch Capital, discusses their investment thesis around media technology.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get acquainted. Tell us about you. Tell us about the fund. What’s your investing focus? Let’s get to know one another. >>>

430th Roundtable Recording on January 31, 2019: With Nandini Mansinghka, Mumbai Angels Network

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Cahill of McCune Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The stratification that’s happening in the industry right now is creating a different dynamic. Earlier, a small fund would not even exist. Right now, smaller funds exist. The smaller funds take the company for three to five years of its life, and then it exits into the larger funds, which would take it to the next 5 to 10 years of its life instead of the small funds growing from 0 to 10-year time frame. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Cahill of McCune Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So what is the best and easiest way for me to do this? I would like to acquire another product that is relatively cheap to acquire and be able to put it through my channel and just go from $1 million to 200 in million in revenue. That with the $700 million to $800 million is perfectly doable.

Jason Cahill: It’s funny because when you watch movies and they show the Wall Street banker, you’d think about the super cut-throat competition. When I think of a West Coast VC, I actually think people don’t collaborate on deals. By and large on the East Coast, especially in New York, there’s this very collegial environment where we share deal flow just because we tend to elevate things that we find interesting. The reason that I mention that is, if I’m only investing in unicorns and really chasing those, then I have to have a sharp elbow because there simply aren’t that many of them. >>>