Roundtable Recap: September 30 – What Works and What Doesn’t in AI Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Lloyed Lobo, Co-founder and President of Boast.ai, discussing his failures and eventual success building AI startups. Wonderful conversation.

Teleperson

For the entrepreneur pitch, we had Jesse Hollander, from Delray Beach, Florida, pitch Teleperson. Unfortunately, as I have said repeatedly, it is impossible to raise money to build MVPs, and this conversation is yet another iteration of this same flawed assumption that pervades the startup ecosystem.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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543rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Hamiz Awan, Plutus21 Capital

Hamiz Awan, Founder and Partner at Plutus21 Capital, discusses BlockChain infrastructure and platforms.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: My question was a bit more like what percentage of these kinds of backgrounds have a combination of a stint at a major university like you did.

Bradley Harrison: I think a very traditional path to transition out of the military is to go to grad school. That is a very common path if you get out early in your career. If you’re getting out after 20 years, you probably already have a Masters or a Doctorate while you were in the military. The national labs population tends to not have the military background. Most of the people in the national labs have spent 10 years at Los Alamos, working under whoever was the pioneer in technology.

Roundtable Recap: September 16 – Startups from Tanzania, New Delhi and New York

During this week’s roundtable, we did a global romp through startup land.

Beem

First up we had Taha Jiwaji from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, pitch Beem, a terrific cPaaS company that is already doing over $1M in revenue.

OneNDF

Then we had Nitin Khandelwal from New Delhi, India, pitch OneNDF, a terrific FinTech company that is also doing over $1M in revenue, although not all of it through their FinTech platform yet.

Green Transport

Next Mohammed Tai and Jian Ming Lin pitching Green Transport, a concept stage idea. Mohammed is an intern in the 1Mby1M program.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Coming back to the venture discussion, what do you like to see before writing a check?

Bradley Harrison: We over-index on the founders. Our biggest thing is chemistry with the founding team. We try to make sure that we have that chemistry. In checking that chemistry, we plan on being partners with entrepreneurs for 10 to 15 years. If that goes well, we plan on keeping them in our bullpen forever. It’s a little bit of coachability and compatibility. We want to make sure that there are no issues with integrity or moral code. That’s the people side.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What does Unite Us do?

Bradley Harrison: Unite Us uses the social determinants of health to provide optimization in the health system. They do that with two sets of customers. One set of customers is the Department of Health of Human Services at the State and City level. Currently, we have 41 states as customers. We have 26 State-wide engagements. In North Carolina, we have a relationship with the Department of Health and Human Services at the State level and we have presence in 140 counties.

9 Udemy Courses on How to Raise Pre-seed Startup Funding

The toughest round of funding an entrepreneur seeks to raise is pre-seed investment. It sports the lowest probability of success, the highest amount of ambiguity, is poorly defined, and is causing the greatest amount of confusion and road wreck out there.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 2)

Bradley Harrison: What people don’t realize is that the largest investor in innovation since World War II is not Silicon Valley; it’s the United States government. There are billions of dollars in each of these programs. The Army’s program for grants last year was $3.3 billion. That’s just the Army.

The government is passing the Endless Frontier Act which is about $110 billion to support innovation all through grants. We take our money, non-dilutive capital, and a bunch of smart people and build companies that we say are making the world a better and safer place.