412th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Bill Baumel, Ohio Innovation Fund

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

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kelly Perdew of Moonshots Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the definition, in your case, of late seed and early Series A? What metrics are you looking for?

Kelly Perdew: Typically, there’s an MVP. They’ve found a problem where they’ve either built a solution for and have started selling that to more than one client. They’ve raised some money. Usually, it’s in the $200,000 to $500,000 range that helped them to get to that point. Frequently, that’s friends and family, credit cards, and maybe one or two angels.

Interestingly enough, a lot of our deal flow comes from the ecosystem itself. Techstars, YCombinator, and 500 Startups are already curating lots and lots of entries to select the company that they think could be the most viable. Criteria in terms of where we want to invest is they have some revenue >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kelly Perdew of Moonshots 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 Kelly Perdew was recorded in June 2018.

Kelly Perdew is Co-founder and Managing General Partner at Moonshots Capital, a firm that has a unique investment thesis of supporting military veterans. Very interesting insights.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you share a little bit about your background as well as the background of your fund. What is the investing focus? How big is the fund? What kind of investments are you making? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Biplab Adhya and Venu Pemmaraju of Wipro Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I want to ask you one question about the cyber security practice of Wipro and how all these investments play into the dynamics of that. One thing we are hearing from CISOs is that they are bombarded with vendors trying to sell them solutions.

Cyber security is one of the most active spaces for both startups as well as venture activity. There are a lot of vendors who are trying to get mind share with CISOs and CIOs. What is your guidance to this community of entrepreneurs who are trying to sell into these buyers? For small vendors to get mindshare, it’s very difficult. How do you navigate this dynamics? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kerry Rupp of True Wealth Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is the woman decision maker in the purchasing decision critical?

Kerry Rupp: It is critical. Not all decisions are always going to be made by women, but they are in markets that are dominantly women.

Sramana Mitra: We’re on the same page so far. Talk about geography. Where do you like to invest?

Kerry Rupp: Definitely US-based entities just because we are a small fund. We are based in Austin, Texas, and there’s a lot of opportunities here in Texas. There actually aren’t any other funds with a specific gender lens in Texas. We spend most of our time in going to events and co-working within the State. We’re pretty mobile in going to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. We will take deal flow from anywhere. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kerry Rupp of True Wealth 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 Kerry  Rupp was recorded in October 2018.

Kerry Rupp, Partner at True Wealth Ventures, discusses their women-focused investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get you introduced to our audience. Tell us about your investing focus. What is the size of the fund? What sized checks are you writing?

Kerry Rupp: True Wealth Ventures fund one is approximately $20 million. We’re typically focused on women-led companies, which we define as >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Milos Sochor of Y Soft Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: For just your niche, you’re seeing a couple of hundred ventures from that hinterland. It’s actually very encouraging that that much entrepreneurial activity is happening in that region. That means that other sectors are getting into entrepreneurship as well. Conceivably, there are around 500 to 1,000 startups in action in that geography.

Milos Sochor: Absolutely. That would be a correct assumption. Entrepreneurship and startups have really taken off. I spent some time in the United States and I came back right when the crisis hit in 2009. I worked at an incubator that I had built into the largest incubator in the Czech Republic. When I compare what was happening in 2009, the type of deals and the way that people were presenting them, it was laughable.

The whole Silicon Valley way of raising money came and a lot of know-h0w was transferred. More Western Europe and US VCs visited and they >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Biplab Adhya and Venu Pemmaraju of Wipro 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 Milos Sochor was recorded in June 2018.

Biplab Adhya and Venu Pemmaraju are Co-Heads of Wipro Ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourselves as well as Wipro Ventures. Let’s introduce our audience to the investment activities of Wipro Ventures. >>>