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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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of check sizes are we talking about?

Evangelos Simoudis: Low hundreds to maybe half a million.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit more about the portfolio companies. Let’s actually talk about the two that you talked about that have exited already. Give us a window into what kind of company they were. What attracted you to them? What stage did they come to you at? I like to do this just to understand how the investors think about their investments. It provides a lot of insight to see what they have invested in and why. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What fund size are we talking? What size of checks are we talking?

Evangelos Simoudis: The second part of the question is more important. We invest in every stage if they have a little bit of revenue. We like to see some proof of revenue, some proof that what the company is developing is being accepted.

Sramana Mitra: What is a little bit of revenue? Are we talking $10,000 MRR? Are we talking $100,000 MRR?

Evangelos Simoudis: The investments that we have made tend to have initial revenue of $200,000 to $1 million. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse 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 Evangelos Simoudis was recorded in November 2018.

Evangelos Simoudis, Founder and Managing Director at Synapse Partners, takes us on a deep dive into AI investing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get acquainted. Tell us about the fund’s investing focus and your background. What size investments do you make? What kind of things do you like to dig into?

Evangelos Simoudis: I’m based in Silicon Valley. I’ve been here for about 30 years now. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Baumel of Ohio Innovation Fund (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your experience in the venture capital industry, you must have realized that the bulk of the exits in the industry happen in the $50 million to $60 million price point. Unless you can build businesses capital efficiently, you don’t really make money of those exits.

Bill Baumel: Bingo. We are exactly focused on that. We love the billion-dollar exit. It’s tough to make money in a $10 million to $20 million sale but when you start getting into the $50 million to $100 million range, you start getting nice returns there. Hopefully, a few of them can achieve close to a billion.

Sramana Mitra: I strongly suggest that you take a look at these spotlights on Colorado and Utah. There are two or three >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Baumel of Ohio Innovation Fund (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have preference between B2B or B2C?

Bill Baumel: Twitter and Facebook have shown that you can make a lot of money on B2C. My background is on the B2B side. We do have one B2C technology company that’s in the financial payments area. Most of the other companies are B2B SaaS, cybersecurity, and data science.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down into your ecosystem. What are the numbers in Ohio? How many startups are operating in Ohio? You can include venture-fundable as well as bootstrapped startups. We are a huge supporter of bootstrapped startups as well. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Baumel of Ohio Innovation Fund (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 Kara Weber was recorded in November 2018.

Bill Baumel, Managing Director at Ohio Innovation Fund, shares terrific insight into the region’s progress.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourself. Tell us about Ohio Innovation Fund. What is the investment focus? How big is the fund? What sized investments are you making? Let’s get you acquainted with our audience.

Bill Baumel: I grew up in Ohio. I went to Ohio State. I went to its archrival school in Michigan and actually was a venture capitalist in >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kara Weber of Brilliant Ventures (Part 4)

Kara Weber: I talked about a female-founded company in LA and a female-founded company in New York. We don’t just invest in companies founded by women but 65% of our companies have female founders. Today, I’m going to focus on female-founded businesses.

Riveter is a Seattle-based company with locations in Seattle and Los Angeles. Riveter is a female-forward co-working space and community designed by women for everyone. It’s this incredible new addition for women who are starting businesses, running their own businesses, doing creative work, and running companies. They’ve got three locations in Seattle. They now have two in Los Angeles.

All of those locations have very quickly not only attracted lots of members who do co-working but fantastic events. Jane Fonda has held a couple >>>