528th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Alok Nandan, First Rays Venture Partners

Alok Nandan, Founding General Partner, First Rays Venture Partners, discusses the firm’s investment thesis which is very well defined and focused.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Cindy Padnos: I don’t know if you know Neha Sampat, but she has a company called Contentstack. It is in the digital experience management space. We led her seed round of financing that enabled them to go from $1 million in ARR to over $4 million in less than a year. This was done with just a $2 million financing. This was rather extraordinary. Insight Partners then led a $30 million series in the company about a year later. She and her team had bootstrapped by having an IT services business.

527th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Michael Smerklo, Next Coast Ventures

Michael Smerklo is Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures. We have a terrific conversation about a range of issues including solo founders and their ill treatment by VCs.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Were they Americans? What ethnicity were they to move to South Korea?

Cindy Padnos: No, one of the founders is Chinese. The other is Indian. They were both born in their respective countries, but they were educated here in the US. They helped to build several companies here. The CEO had actually been the VP of Engineering of the company that I founded, which was an early SaaS software company.

528th Roundtable Recording on April 29, 2021: With Alok Nandan, First Rays Venture Partners

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director at Illuminate Ventures, discusses the impact of Covid on the fund’s portfolio, as well as the trends she sees. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by welcoming back Cindy Padnos to our show. She is the founder and director of Illuminate Ventures and one of the active female investors in the Silicon Valley Movement. We have a lot more female investors, but she is one of the earlier ones. We had her here before and she has been doing a lot of work in this area for a long time.

Roundtable Recap: April 29 – What to Expect in Investor Due Diligence

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Alok Nandan, Founding General Partner, First Rays Venture Partners. Alok discussed the firm’s investment thesis which is very well defined and focused.

Tariy.at

As for our entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Andres Sigcha from Phoenix, Arizona, pitching Tariy.ai, a B-to-B venture.

YapPolitics

Next, we had Aidan Stephen from Los Angeles, California, pitching YapPolitics, a B-to-C venture.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Best of Bootstrapping: Discussing European Startup Funding with Alastair Mitchell, EQT Ventures

If you have been bootstrapping and think you are ready for investors, you need to learn how investors think. First, please study our free Bootstrapping course and Investor Introductions page. Then start looking for entrepreneur – investor fit. Today I introduce you to Alastair Mitchell.

Alastair Mitchell, Partner at EQT Ventures, discussed European Startup Funding trends when we spoke in 2018. You can listen to the podcast interview here.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What size investment do you make? Help our audience get to know your investment activity.

Alastair Mitchell: EQT Ventures is a relatively new firm that is about 18 months old. We started out of Sweden, the Silicon Valley of Europe. It’s an amazing place with a phenomenal track record of building some global companies. When we started off, we were a $630 million fund.

We are pretty big. We invest in Series A through C, but at fairly early stages. Most of our investment is centered in Europe. About 30% of it is in the US. Our two main offices are in Stockholm and London.

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