I recently participated in a panel at the NextGen Cloud Conference & Expo alongside fellow venture capitalists Ben Black, managing director and co-founder of Akkadian Ventures, and Cliff Boro, general partner of Entry Ventures Group. Each of us brought a unique perspective based on our different investment focus: IDG Ventures is a classic early-stage Series A firm,  Entry Ventures is a seed investor, and Akkadian is a growth stage/secondary firm.

The panel discussed channel partnerships for VC-backed companies, an important but rarely covered topic. The key takeaways:

• There is a lot of demand in the channel for cloud-based businesses
• It still costs a lot to scale a SaaS company
• The big danger for venture-backed startups is looming competition with cloud giants AWS, Google, and Microsoft

Watch the video for details.