Roberto Saint-Malo from Adara Venture Partners

On Friday, Roberto Saint-Malo from Adara Venture Partners gave us lecture in Managing the Tech Start-up class. Though many entrepreneurs have spoken in this class so far, it was first time that the VC guy lectured and it was really fresh.

During the class, he stressed 2 important insights.

● Respect for imitator

As a successful entrepreneur, we do not always have to come up with new innovative business ideas, as Google and facebook do. Imitating the existing business model and applies it to a different market segment, such as expanding geographically, are also successful elements for attracting VCs.

Certainly, creating innovative & new business idea which have a great potential to make money and contribute society might be an ideal pattern for entrepreneur, but we can not always come up with innovative business ideas/technologies ; not every entrepreneur can become Larry Page or Sergey Brin…

● Professional background/MBA is not required

Every entrepreneur who attracts VCs is not always necessary to have professionals back ground. I mean, we do not need from Consulting or Banking sectors to become an entrepreneur.

In addition, MBA is not necessarily required to become an entrepreneur. It is sad story but it might be true in a certain point. Successful entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates and Steven Jobs, do not have MBA degree. Actually, some of my successful entrepreneur mates do not have MBA….

However, I do not want to say MBA is useless for future entrepreneur because MBA life, especially IE, gives us many opportunities to cultivate entrepreneurship and contact with many successful entrepreneurs.

Kibo ventures investment takes only 8 weeks – that is too short cycle because normal VCs take 4-6 months.

Kibo invest in 3 types of ventures.

Type1)   Proven model optimization

Type2)   Early stage investments

Type3)   International opportunities

The following are the Kibo’s criteria for investment

●  The characteristics of entrepreneur

●  Good Team

●  Business model / business opportunity

●  Low capital at the beginning

10 sessions have already passed. Through this class, I have learned a lot as entrepreneur focusing on technology business. After the MBA, I will join Internet search engine company in Japan and would like to create new service in the future by reference to the enlightenment that I have learned in this course.