1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eva Yazhari, General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures (Part 1)

Eva Yazhari, General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures, discusses Impact Investing in Africa and India.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Beyond Capital Ventures. Tell us a bit about your background and what you’re trying to do with Beyond Capital.

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562nd Roundtable Recording with Naganand Doraswamy, Ideaspring Capital

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

Roundtable Recap: February 3 – More Discussion on Non-Unicorn Chasing Investor Philosophy

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital. Naganand added to our thesis on great investment opportunities within the sub $100 million exit space.

Tonic Audio

As for our entrepreneur pitch, we had Eithan Clift from Reno, Nevada, pitching Tonic Audio, a platform for musicians to create songs.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said many times that the ecosystem is still immature. Can you underscore the points where you see the Indian ecosystem needing maturity?

Dr. Aniruddha Malpani: Sometimes, it’s the unrealistic expectation on the part of entrepreneurs partly because they don’t understand the grind that startups need to go through. A lot of the diet they’re fed on is the Silicon Valley success stories or the Indian success stories. They don’t understand the emotional angst they need to go through.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It’s wonderful to exchange notes. There are a couple of things you’ve said that I want to underscore. One is the importance of failure. The Indian ecosystem didn’t accept failures for a long time. It’s a cultural change where it’s okay to fail. You’re not penalized.

A very long time ago when I was a young entrepreneur, I talked to a lot of investors all the time. They would say, “We love entrepreneurs who have failed once and are doing it again.” This is deeply underappreciated.

Somebody who has tried it once and failed has already done a lot of learning on somebody else’s dime. It’s a prized commodity for investors.

Somebody who has tried it once and failed has already done a lot of learning on somebody else’s dime. It’s a prized commodity for investors.

Sramana Mitra

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take those two sectors – SaaS and the fintech sectors. In SaaS, the metric is MRR. Do you have a particular metric that you measure by when you’re doing your SaaS investments?

Dr. Aniruddha Malpani: No, numbers can be easily gamed, and they are often not necessarily representative. As long as the entrepreneur has a plausible story and he can convince us, we’re more than happy to look at these investments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One of the observations I have about the global startup ecosystem is this position of looking for paying customers is not at all unusual. I would say the vast majority of investors are looking for paying customers at this point. It has become so much easier to bootstrap companies. There’s a lot of methodology and knowledge about how to bootstrap a company.

The point that you’re making of wanting to see validated companies that already have product-market fit and customers does not come to anybody as a surprise at this stage of the game.