1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Rajeev Madhavan: It’s no longer enough to provide a set of solutions. You have to provide the entire platform as a solution. Salesforce was the first one to apply this. I was one of the first customers when I was at Magma deploying Salesforce. We had the same VC as Salesforce so I had no choice but to use it.

I was one of the first customers at Magma. We ended up realizing that we could build our system around it. Back in 2001 to 2002, we built our entire company’s operations on Salesforce.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel, Partner at ff Venture Capital 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The AI sector of the industry, which is not actually a sector but a horizontal technology that is being applied to all kinds of sectors, has exploded even with the downturn. The amount of money that has gone into AI startups globally is huge. It doesn’t seem to have missed any beat in this process. 

John Frankel: To us, AI is a bit like how we would think of mobile ten years ago or the internet 20 years ago. There used to be internet companies and now there are just companies. Companies used to be mobile companies and now they are just companies.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the kind of things that you have invested in AI? What is your investment thesis on AI?

Rajeev Madhavan: In AI, we have a company called Reflection which has been doing e-commerce. Today, when you shop on many of the websites, you and I would get the same webpage. You may get a small carousel where it would say people who bought this may have bought this other stuff. That is the level of automation.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel, Partner at ff Venture Capital 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What has been the experience at your fund in your existing portfolio companies as well as new investments?

John Frankel: We were very concerned in March and April that our companies would be hit hard. Some were hit hard, however, since we predominantly invest in secular rather cyclical businesses our companies held up incredibly well.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There are a couple of questions that come into my mind as I am listening to you. First in the battery company, how did you do technology validation in making this investment? What did the company come to you with? What was the decision to assume that this team can build this technology? What is that decision predicated upon?

Rajeev Madhavan: In this particular case, this is David Su and Masoud Zargari who were the founding engineers of a company called Atheros which everybody knows as the company that invented Wi-Fi. They were the first company that created the first Wi-Fi chips sold out of Teresa Meng’s lab.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With John Frankel, Partner at ff Venture Capital 2021 (Part 1)

John Frankel is Partner at ff Venture Capital. We had an extensive discussion about Covid’s impact on the startup ecosystem, the changes we notice, so forth.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s catch up. How has the pandemic year been? What are you doing these days?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Rajeev Madhavan: You have IoT devices like headphones where you do not need to replace the batteries. First, it untethers the device from all the electrical connections that you need. Second, it gives you the ability and the freedom of not being tied to a bunch of battery replacements that you have to go through.

It’s almost like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Once you are done with one end, you have to start from the opposite end. Here, you don’t need to do that. You have a self-charging environment. That is on one side.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Rajeev Madhavan is Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures, a firm focused on seed-stage deep tech investing.

Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s session with a conversation with Rajeeev Madhavan, the founder and general partner of Clear Ventures. I have known him for a long time. He has been here before. You may have listened to his previous session. It has been a while and we want to catch up. Welcome back to the show!