1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Devdutt Yellurkar of CRV (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 Devdutt Yellurkar was recorded in July 2018.

Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, discussed his investment principles. It was an excellent discussion!

Sramana Mitra: The first thing I’d like to do is introduce our audience to yourself as well as to CRV’s current activities, philosophy, and investment thesis. Let’s start there.

Devdutt Yellurkar: I’m still masquerading as a venture capitalist after only nine years into this gig. I got into this after a two-year sabbatical in India.  >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Miriam Rivera of Ulu 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 Miriam Rivera was recorded in October 2018.

Miriam Rivera, Partner at Ulu Ventures, a firm committed to diversity as its core investment philosophy.

Sramana Mitra: In order to introduce you to our audience, I think the first place we would like to start is to explain Ulu Ventures and your background. Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What kind of investments do you like to make? Let’s get to know one another? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you start with the intent of doing that, that addresses some of those issues. My last question is, you have talked about Checkpoint at the beginning. Checkpoint is a relatively older investment of USVP. How about newer investments? What are you really proud of and why? What is it about those companies that made you proud?

Dafina Toncheva: I like all my investments, even those that didn’t work out. One that I should mention is a security company called Prevoty. There’re a lot of unusual things about that company. I invested in them three years ago. They’re an LA-based company. You don’t see many security companies out of LA. LA is not the place you think about when you think about cybersecurity. But I found the company very compelling. It was building real-time application security.

We invested three years ago. It has been a long ride in some ways. The market was early so we had to wait it out. The founders had to deal with some >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You invest in both healthcare IT and cybersecurity and your partners invest more in the life sciences angle of it.

Dafina Toncheva: Correct. I actually invest in cybersecurity and enterprise applications, mostly business process automation for various verticals.

Sramana Mitra: I know everybody is talking about AI and Blockchain. If you look at the last 18 months of what you’ve seen, are there nuggets that you could share that are overriding trends?

Dafina Toncheva: It’s a difficult question to answer because it’s broad. It depends on the angle. First of all, there’s a lot of deal flow. The seed >>>

423rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Krishna Srinivasan, LiveOak Venture Partners

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

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s build on that and understand your geographical preferences. Are you investing only in Silicon Valley or are you investing more broadly?

Dafina Toncheva: When it comes to cybersecurity, we like Israel a lot. It’s an area that we have been investing in for 20 years.

Sramana Mitra: There are lots of great security companies in Israel.

Dafina Toncheva: We invest in Israel but most of our investments are in the United States. Within the United States, we have made investments in the Valley, LA, New York, Atlanta, and Utah. I’ll tell you one thing. I, more and more, like companies out of the Valley, especially companies that >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alexander Ross of Illuminate Financial (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: These are banks in the UK? What kind of banks are we talking about?

Alexander Ross: These are tier-one and tier-two European and US banks. What we find is that given that every company that speaks to us will likely get an introduction to one of our bank partners if they’re relevant or one of our strategic investors, an increasing number of companies want to remain engaged with us and refer companies to us. About 70% to 80% of our pipeline is inbound at the moment across our strategic investors and strategic bank partners. The rest comes from conferences, outbound-themed outreach.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as the trends emerging from the B2B FinTech space? How would you synthesize that?

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you have seen it on our blog. We have a Thought Leaders in Cyber Security series. Ray has actually been on it. He’s running a company these days. In that series, one of the questions that comes up a lot is, if you put yourself in the shoes of a CISO, you have to make decisions about which vendors to work with.

There are hundreds of vendors coming in with hundreds of point solutions. It’s really a complicated job. Let’s say your portfolio company in security, it’s very difficult to get these meetings. How are your companies dealing with this? What are you advising your companies to do?

Dafina Toncheva: That’s a very good point. That goes back to me saying that there’re thousands of companies with a similar marketing message. >>>