Roundtable Recap: September 1 – More on Vertical Cloud Investment Thesis

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures. Yanev discussed his firm’s successes as well as investment thesis. Vertical Cloud is one of the key ones with an emphasis on Enterprise Data Platforms.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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587th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix

Dheeraj Pandey, founder of Nutanix and DevRev. The conversation spans a variety of topics and has some brilliant insights on the gaps in the tech industry.

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587th Roundtable Recording with Dheeraj Pandey

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: August 25 – Open Problems in Data and Design with Dheeraj Pandey

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Dheeraj Pandey, founder of Nutanix and DevRev. The conversation spans a variety of topics and has some brilliant insights on the gaps in the tech industry.

HOP into Homecare

For our entrepreneur pitch, we had Monika Virk from Aldie, Virginia, pitching HOP into Homecare.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We are big fans of capital-efficient businesses that are not necessarily chasing unicorns. Partly, the problem I have with this unicorn chasing is flushing these companies with too much capital. Then the exit bar is so high that companies end up in this twilight zone where they’re burning too much cash, can’t raise more money, and can’t find an exit because the valuation requirements are too high to have a profitable exit.

I’m pleased to hear that you are acknowledging that there are other ways of building businesses. Now there is a question though. How much exit capacity exists in the region? If there are 5,000 to 10,000 startups, how do you think this is going to play out?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Sometimes when you’re in a fundraising cycle, you may not be quite ready for the investor to write the check, but you build the relationships and show traction. At some point, it will converge potentially if you know what your target is. Pawel is explaining that the target is $50,000 MRR.

If you start the relationship when you’re at the $10,000 point, you have to inch your way up to $50,000 MRR before the investment is going to happen. Investor relationship management is important. If the market is of interest and the team is of interest, sometimes investors just take a little bit of time to see how you’re performing. That is the notion of investor-entrepreneur fit.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 2)

Pawel Maj: We would like to have about 10 to 15 companies in our portfolio at any given moment. We like to get hands-on since our history comes from the private equity market. For pre-seed or seed, we invest smaller tickets but much in larger number of projects to spread the risk. In our case, we don’t have a large enough team to have a large operation to be able to provide hands-on experience for 50 companies. This is why we prefer to invest at a later stage after the product-market fit.

Sramana Mitra: The reason I’m probing this point is, there are a bunch of things that happen between pre-seed, seed, pre-Series A, and Series A. You have to achieve product-market fit, which means you have to get some customers to say that they’re willing to write a check for this product.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pawel Maj, Investment Director at Warsaw Equity Group (Part 1)

Pawel Maj, Investment Director, Warsaw Equity Group, discusses post-seed and pre-series A funding in Eastern and Central Europe in the context of his firm’s investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about what’s up in Poland. You are in a semi-warzone. What’s happening with the startup ecosystem?

Pawel Maj: The war is in another country, but we had a huge wave of immigrants coming from Ukraine. We already admitted almost five million immigrants. These are difficult times. It’s great to see the Polish population come together to help the neighbors.