539th Roundtable Recording with Geoff Ralston, Y Combinator

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

539th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Geoff Ralston, Y Combinator

Geoff Ralston is President of Y Combinator. We had a terrific discussion on what we each are seeing in the startup ecosystem.

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538th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Ben Narasin, Tenacity Venture Capital

Ben Narasin is Founder and General Partner at Tenacity Venture Capital, a new Seed fund.

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Roundtable Recap: July 22 – Conversation with Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator. We had a terrific discussion on what we each are seeing in the ecosystem.

Re:Mind

As for our entrepreneur pitch, we had Bindu Thirupathi from Bengaluru, India, pitch Re:Mind, a wellness wearable.

CultureTalk

Then, 1Mby1M Premium members Theresa Agresta and Cynthia Forstmann pitched CultureTalk, a corporate culture solution.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There is one question that I want to ask you today. In the deal flow that you are seeing and your analysis of the market, what are some open problems that you have identified where you are looking for deep tech teams to solve those problems? Are there any that you are looking to invest in?

Karthee Madasamy: We are more thematic than very tight thesis-driven. We look for large deep tech-related transformations in traditional industries like automotive, manufacturing, agriculture, and biology. We don’t try to figure out the exact market problem. We let the entrepreneurs bring that to us. They are the ones on the ground looking at the problem.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the scenarios where are you doing deep tech and you need to bring in a CEO to manage a tech-savvy team going after an interesting market opportunity, what nuggets or lessons from the trenches can you offer as guidance to our audience?

Karthee Madasamy: It’s a hard question. I sympathize with you. It’s not easy to bring in an outside CEO. Oftentimes, it’s not the right fit. It’s just a theoretical fit. It doesn’t work a lot of the times. The first thing you need to be clear about is what the need of the company is and then bring in a person who is going to solve that. The immediate response is bringing in a salesperson. For me and the companies, being only sales-focused does not happen for a long time. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We have been doing 1Mby1M for over a decade and with our experience, technical founders can be taught the business side. I would say that the biggest achievement of 1Mby1M is teaching technical founders this accelerated mini-MBA that gives them all the pieces that they need to put things into perspective at least for that early stage.

In a deep tech deal, you are going to spend quite a bit of time just building the product and talking to customers to figure out what products you are doing. You don’t gain anything by bringing in a salesperson at that point. It is a founder-led sales process at that point. 

536th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Rajeev Singh-Molares, Alma Mundi Ventures

Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures, discusses the Europe – US bridge for tech startups.

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