1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kyle Asman, Managing Director at Backswing Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That’s after they have come to you and decided that they want to work with you. These are two different, slightly off-center entities – a company that is already doing a million dollars in revenue that is profitability focused and is interested in a relatively early exit. Those are the characteristics of the business.

On the other hand, you have a venture fund that is looking for those kinds of businesses. What is the source of your deal flow?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kyle Asman, Managing Director at Backswing Ventures (Part 1)

Kyle Asman is Managing Director at Backswing Ventures, a firm that has a non-Unicorn investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get acquainted. Tell us about your background and also about Backswing Ventures.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There is a Series A gap. There are investors that are doing pre-Series A, but it’s a smaller pool. The Series A investors want to see a lot in place before they’re willing to write a check. How do you see this? This is not specific to your firm. I’m asking you generally as an industry observer. How do you see this resolving?

Some of the trends we are seeing is that some of the pre-seed and seed companies are exiting into companies that have raised a lot of money without trying to raise as much money themselves. They have to find some path either through exit, funding, or becoming profitable.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about this company that you invested in from the Freshworks ecosystem. Is it built on the Freshworks stack?

Bhaskar Ghosh: The founders are second-time founders. Their first company, Rocketlane, was acquired by Freshworks. I just want to call something out. We are huge fans of the entrepreneur ecosystem coming out of Freshworks and Zoho, which have revolutionized the B2B SaaS ecosystem of India.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the pre-seed and seed first. Are you investing in concepts? Are you looking for a certain amount of proof point? What is the sweet spot?

Bhaskar Ghosh: If you look at founders, products, and market, we focus heavily on the founder and on the market size. We are not looking for product-market fit. We are not even looking for a product. We tend to gel closely with highly technical entrepreneurs. There is bimodal DNA there. We do back first-time entrepreneurs coming out of schools. We have a very strong campus program at Yale, Caltech, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. We tend to back founders out of these campuses fairly heavily.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 1)

Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC, discusses his firm’s investment thesis, and we have an interesting discussion about the definition of a “good” entrepreneur.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Giuseppe Donvito, Partner at P101 Ventures (Part 4)

Giuseppe Donvito: I can mention several exits just in our portfolio. In some, they were successful exits. What I found very interesting is, as a VC, you always need to be clever to find the right time. This is key. Otherwise, it is easy to say you’ll keep the company for 10 years.

In our case, we were able to find the right moments. In some cases, if we don’t sell the company at a particular time, the company wouldn’t exist because of other reasons. The exit is evolving. There will be more and more in the coming years.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Giuseppe Donvito, Partner at P101 Ventures (Part 3)

Giuseppe Donvito: When we analyze a company, we always apply our proprietary framework. We are obsessed with the quality of the founding and management team. This is the main point for us. We thought the management team could be the right people for this kind of deal.

At the same time, given our knowledge of the FinTech sector, we thought that the company had significant improvement for growth. They’re one of the largest in Europe in embedded finance. They were always able to navigate the ups and downs. It can’t always be positive. The founding team built a resilient top management team. Even in difficult times, they were able to find the solution. They proved to be resilient.