Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub (Part 1)

Connected devices are creating very interesting opportunities for new types of businesses. Read on for more insights.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as PubNub to our audience.

Todd Greene: I am a multi-time entrepreneur. PubNub is a company that I helped start as one of the two co-founders. It was a side project for me until 2012 but full-time for my co-founder, Stephen Blum, who ran the company. In 2012, we raised our first angel round. PubNub is an interesting company. The best way to think about it is the infrastructure needed by developers for software that powers real-time experiences. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Greg Borchardt of Caerus Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you a slightly different question. Given what you are doing, it sounds like there must be tons and tons of niche use cases out there of your model. We’re in 2018. There’s a ton of stuff that have already been built. Some of these use cases are not necessarily all billion-dollar TAM use cases.

Some of these are smaller niche opportunities. You can build great businesses with one or two million dollars and these probably can be good acquisitions for other larger companies for $10 million to $15 million. In some cases, slightly larger or smaller. You could be investing $5 million and selling for $25 million. You could be investing $250,000 to $500,000 and selling for $5 million to $10 million. Is that something that’s interesting to you?

Greg Borchardt: My non-answer is it depends. We look for deals where we can be happy without needing a multi-billion IPO. For example, if we >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Greg Borchardt of Caerus Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you where I am a little bit uncomfortable with what you’re saying. I don’t feel a token angle of it. Your point is well-taken that somebody with a proven business model is a more interesting scenario than a concept financing or concept ICO. Why do I want tokens in this ecosystem and this exchange?

There are certain businesses that are very token-friendly businesses where the tokens will naturally float around and change hands. There are certain businesses that have that characteristic. There are others that don’t have that characteristic which in my opinion should not be doing ICOs. In this case, I’m struggling to understand the token angle.

Greg Borchardt: There are two separate tokens that the company is releasing. I don’t work for the company. I’m an investor. I’m not on the >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Greg Borchardt of Caerus Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy for this company?

Greg Borchardt: There are two sides of the business. They started off in the medical device space. They created a consumer product that we help them down the supply chain to develop the components for the product and ship it over to the US. They initially launched the product in the United States. Initially, they started with online-only.

We felt that it made the most sense to get feedback from the early adapters and be able to iterate from generation one to a generation two product, based on the early feedback we were getting from the heavy users. Then they subsequently launched the product at major retailers in the US including Best Buy and Target as well as a few overseas markets. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Greg Borchardt of Caerus Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s then talk about the investment thesis. This is your second fund. You’ve already used this investment thesis and invested your first fund in a bunch of companies. If you could take us through a few examples that illustrates how you think about your investment thesis and how the companies you’ve invested in fit with that investment thesis, that would probably be the best starting point to understand your unique investment thesis.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Greg Borchardt of Caerus Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Greg Borchardt of Caerus Ventures was recorded in February 2018. 

Greg Borchardt is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Caerus Ventures, a firm that has a focus on connected hardware. It’s an interesting and differentiated investment thesis that is worth listening to, especially for IoT entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Caerus Ventures. What is your sweet spot? What is the size of the fund? What kind of investments do you like to make? What’s the focus? >>>

Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Czech Republic: Vaclav Muchna, CEO of YSoft (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Have you started seeing revenues escalate from that yet?

Vaclav Muchna: In the United States, this year we are going to be close to $3 million. Our business has a very long sales cycle. We expect that the bigger revenue growth is going to happen next year.

Sramana Mitra: You said you did $30 million in 2016, right?

Vaclav Muchna: Our fiscal year is from July to June. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2016, revenue was $30 million.

Sramana Mitra: This is all business that you’ve built organically. There is no outside funding?

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Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Czech Republic: Vaclav Muchna, CEO of YSoft (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What do you do with the venture capital fund? Do you invest in companies in the Czech Republic or in eastern Europe? What is the scope?

Vaclav Muchna: I suggest we take it chronologically.

Sramana Mitra: Sure.

Vaclav Muchna: Today, we are doing a lot of things, but the biggest pie of revenue is from the print management product. Back in 2006, we had another big milestone that opened the German market for us. I mentioned in the beginning of the interview that we have these external control units that were basically terminals that we use for user interaction. >>>