Trends Watch: Early-Stage B2B and B2C Investing

EisnerAmper’s Trends Watch is a weekly entry to our Alternative Investments Intelligence blog, featuring the views and insights of executives from alternative investment firms. If you’re interested in being featured, please contact Elana Margulies-Snyderman.  

This week, Elana talks with Ronald Hans, Co-Founder & Director, MetroCap Partners.

What is your outlook for accelerating early-stage startups?

Supporting early-stage entrepreneurship is now being reimagined across the world, as technology and the markets themselves have matured. The standard incubation and acceleration models are continuing to rapidly evolve with omni-stage and hybrid support for entrepreneurs now inside a single ecosystem. With the proliferation of automation and innovation, the requirements of startups have changed over time, which is now the direction of the industry where there is emerging support for founders from all backgrounds and industries including ESG and social impact.

Where do you see the greatest opportunities and why?

Finding the proper applications for the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) across sectors from cybersecurity and marketing to customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) is what will drive the innovation forward in this new phase where the generation of information is no longer 100% a product of humankind.

What are the greatest challenges you face and why?

Finding the critical infrastructure to monitor and manage the ethical behavior of AI in these early public facing stages, as the sector is in a rapid expansion phase where the risks are quite high prior to technology stabilization.

What keeps you up at night?

The desire to create a global ecosystem where the maximum number of entrepreneurs are empowered to succeed through collaboration, thereby creating more positive impact across all sectors of technology and channels of engagement. As impact investing continues to grow, this point becomes more critical to mankind. 

The views and opinions expressed above are of the interviewee only, and do not/are not intended to reflect the views of EisnerAmper.