1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nihal Mehta of ENIAC Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Very well. It’s definitely the age of the incumbents these days on the B2C side.

Nihal Mehta: Consumer venture funds are actually going down in size because gone are the days of Instagram, WhatsApp-like billion-plus acquisitions. Google and Facebook will just try to build it or buy it before it gets big enough. The return profile of these startups tends to go down. You have to have a smaller fund size to return your fund.

On the enterprise side, there are so many more opportunities. On the SaaS side, you have Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe competing for the MarTech stack or the CRM stack. There’re still huge gaps where entrepreneurs can grow very quickly. That being said, I read a stat on Facebook recently. 40% of millennials have removed Facebook from their phones. Snapchat is not doing well either. I think there’s a real opportunity for very large breakout unicorns over the next few years. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Krishna Srinivasan of LiveOak Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did this entrepreneur find you or how did you find him?

Krishna Srinivasan: It’s the old myth of this business, which is you need a strong recommendation to be able to get to a venture firm. He just cold emailed us with his back story. We brought him in. We introduced him to a few law firms ourselves. Two of them became customers during diligence. We knew we were onto something special. He had many of the great attributes of a great entrepreneur. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nihal Mehta of ENIAC Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down to the point about seed? What is your definition of seed? What needs to be in the venture for this to qualify as a seed investment?

Nihal Mehta: That’s a great question. Typically, the team has been built out and there’s a product prototype. There’s some usage on the product. If it’s B2B, there’s some revenue, but not a lot. If it’s a consumer product, then there’s some user data. That’s really important for us because we want to reference customers. It’s definitely pre-product-market fit. The product is not flying off the shelves by itself. The founders are still pivoting, tweaking, and iterating on the product to make it stick. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Krishna Srinivasan of LiveOak Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re pointing out about repeat entrepreneurs versus first-time entrepreneurs is interesting. The vast majority of our community is first-time entrepreneurs. I always say this. If you are a repeat entrepreneur with track record, you can get away with a lot.

You can do a fat startup with somebody writing you a check. There are lots of options, but as a first-time entrepreneur, none of those doors are open for you. You’re going to have to do it the hard way. You have to bootstrap to product/market fit at some level. What about B2B/B2C? Are you doing both? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nihal Mehta of ENIAC Ventures (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 Nihal Mehta was recorded in November 2018.

Nihal Mehta, Founding General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, provides a great set of insights into his definition of a full-stack founding team. Either a set of co-founders who cover all the requisite skillsets, or a solo founder who is a full-stack person – both configurations can work. Listen to the discussion for more color on the topic.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get you acquainted with our audience. Tell us about yourself and ENIAC Ventures. Give us a little bit of context. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Krishna Srinivasan of LiveOak Venture Partners (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 Krishna Srinivasan was recorded in November 2018.

Krishna Srinivasan is Founding General Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, a firm focused on investing in Texas. Great conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s first get our audience acquainted with yourself as well as with LiveOak. Tell us about the fund. Tell us a bit about your background. What do you like to invest in? How do you think about your portfolio?

Krishna Srinivasan: I grew up in India. I graduated from one of the IITs. I came to the United States to get a Masters from the

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If I were to synthesize what I heard from you, your relationships are more of the corporates who are either co-investing with you or are becoming early customers of your portfolio companies, and not necessarily with the acquirers. The acquirers are coming as you go along and develop the businesses.

Evangelos Simoudis: When we select corporate partners, it is important to identify companies that are thought leaders in the space and in the industries that we want to work in. We feel that it’s through these thought leaders that we will find the hard and important problems that need to be solved. We don’t invest in companies that try to solve every single problem we hear about.

We hear from our partners about problems where data can play a role. Then we have to apply our own filters. We use our advisory >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did the acquisition come about? I’ll give you a bit of context about where I’m going with this question. It sounds like you and your syndicate partners are open to relatively early acquisitions. You’re not trying to go for this unicorn kinds of companies.

I happen to believe that that’s great because there are many more opportunities out there that are mid-sized opportunities of building very interesting companies solving very interesting problems. They don’t necessarily have multi-billion dollar TAMs to build these unicorn types of ventures. One thing that I’ve heard from a number of 

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