This Week in Venture Capital #8 with Farb Nivi

Episode 8

This Week in Venture Capital #8 with Farb Nivi

Mark Suster hosts This Week in Venture Capital, with his guest Farb Nivi, Founder & CEO of Grockit.

Mark’s show notes.

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Ricardo Oliveira
i don't get how a company like grockit needs to raise multi-million dollars, Farb's explanation doesnt make sense at all, how could someone give $10M to a guy with a set of slides in this market?
http://kirstenwinkler.com KirstenWinkler
I guess because he is disrupting an established industry which makes a boat load of money every year. It's always a chance for a young fast moving start up to get market share from the old established market leaders.
Similar to Livemocha getting $14M to compete with Rosetta Stone.
virtuallybing
The best episode of TWiVC yet. Having a CEO share his/her experience with the fundraising process is great – a lot more detail on fundraising than TWiST, and a great complement to the VC guests' perspectives.
http://twitter.com/saadshamim saadshamim
Hey Mark do you know the article name that was talking about how 100m isn't enough?
http://twitter.com/ravikannan Ravi Kannan
Great Grockit.com story, interview and people who have funded them. Very good advice from Nivi, especially on raising more money than required to put yourselves in a position to attract and get the best in the business to help your venture.
Folks you should check out TutorVista.com which raised USD $35 million from Sequoia, Lightspeed ventures, and Pearson Education to name a few. TutorVista is into K-12 One-On-One online tutoring and help digitizing education in schools in India.
Mark, great episode.
BCB123
Mr. Suster apologized for the “cheesy old-school” musical intro and mentioned it'd be changed soon.
My 2 cents (the angel round): it's the Onion Radio News therme (hilarious news spoof; you can find the vid & aud podcasts at iTunes or go to, I think, TheOnion.com). Not “kinda sorta like”. It's the SAME clip (which, though old school, fits a news show format, even a spoof one, much better than it fits TWiVC). My guess is that they both got it from the same royalty-free music site or stock music DVD.
2 more cents worth of my venture thought capital: I started with TWiSt and have been gradually exploring a few other TWi branches. This is the first TWiVC I've watched. Enjoyed it. Learned from it. Got some ideas to take away with me…and a few more sites to check out (ie TextPlus).
Good job. Good luck. ttyas
http://mytutorblog.org Mytutorblog
Very interesting story.
This provides excellent insight into getting funded. I’m going to start applying some strategies to obtain funding for mytutorblog.org