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Meeting Magic Mike Moritz XXL

What is common to Cisco, Oracle, Google, Apple and WhatsApp?

Besides being some of the most iconic technology companies in history, all these marquee firms share one more thing in common – an investor named Sequoia Capital.

Sequoia Capital is arguably the most prestigious VC firm on the planet and its chairman, Michael (Mike)Moritz is undeniably a legend in the tech investment arena. In a glittering career spanning over thirty years, Mike Moritz has presciently identified and backed companies like Google long before they were the behemoths that we see today.

Mike was recently in Bangalore and shared some insights in an event organized by iSPIRT, India’s leading technology thinktank.

Backing unfundable startup chasing seemingly impossible dreams

When asked about what Sequoia looks for in a startup, Mike says that they look to fund people with a deep sense of purpose working on ideas that seem unfundable to others. In his view, the best entrepreneurs are obsessed with a particular idea and see it as their life’s mission to make that idea work.

They are ready to perseverefor years and make painful decisions to achieve this mission and exhibit an almost unnatural clarity of thought when they communicate this dream to others.

Start small, dream big

While history inevitably builds a romantic narrative around successful companies post facto, Mike believes that at the time they got off the ground the household names of today, each worth billions of dollars, started off with things that seemed small with little inkling on how that their startup would evolve into anything big.

On day one, very little is obvious – but as time goes by, opportunities open up almost magically so much so that a seemingly arcane PhD thesis about a way to index information metamorphosizes into a platform called Google that is valued more than Microsoft.

Steve Jobs – what to emulate and what to ignore

Many Indian founders are besotted with Steve Jobs and are fashioning themselves after him. Mike knew Steve Jobs well, in fact he authored a seminal book on him. He feels that the media largely missed the truth about Steve Jobs – while there are multiple stories about his temper and acerbic personality traits,at his essence, Jobs was a dreamer obsessed with his ideas on personal computing.

Despite all the failures that he had to face, he preserved through over a very long period and brought out innovations like the iPhone and the iPad. Rather than emulate his personality traits, Mike feels that entrepreneurs should learn this sense of playing the long game against impossible odds from Steve Jobs.

Go East

Mike is of the opinion that while hitherto, the US had a near monopoly on tech innovation, the next twenty five years will belong to the East.

He feels that the biggest companies of tomorrow will emerge from China and to a lesser degree from India. This has as much to do with the large local markets where competition is fierce as it has to do with the greater appetite for work, the resilience and the stronger fortitude that entrepreneurs from the East have.

In an era where competition is global and information is transmitted instantly, these qualities put Eastern entrepreneurs at a marked advantage compared to their Western peers.

Unicorns that may go extinct

While there is so much euphoria about Unicorns – startups that are worth at least $1 billion – Mike feels that there is a good chance that many of these companies are overvalued and will die sooner rather than later. In his considered opinion, the best companies will not get stuck up in valuation but will instead try to build sustainable business models.

Epilogue

While Mike’s insights were valuable and his humility and candor were admirable, one couldn’t help but notice a proverbial sting in the tale.

Does the thought of backing unfundable entrepreneurs still hold true in a world where VC firms are fiercely competing with each other to fund the next hot startup in thehot category du jour? While traditionally Sequoia has avoided funding competitors, six of the largest funded hyperlocal startups in India are all funded by them opening up seemingly irreconcilable conflicts of interest.

Similarly, it seems incongruous to caution about Unicorns and bubble valuations but simultaneously deploy huge rounds of capital in unproven companies in crowded winner-takes-all markets feeding the frenzy further.

While history has already recognized Mike Moritz as a doyen of technology investing, time will tell whether his firm will continue to build on his pioneering path or chalk out a completely different destiny.

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Startup Founders: Give no room for confusion

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As part of my job I meet a lot of startup founders. These Founders, despite numerous job options, have chosen entrepreneurship as the way forward. They are dead serious about their startups; highly passionate; and very hardworking.

What bothers me the most is that many of the Founders don’t critically think through what makes teams and companies fundable.

All founders must critically assess their team, as well as their idea, and bucket their startup into one of these two categories:

  • a) our startup is fundable or
  • b) our startup is not fundable today. Therefore, I need to get to profitability with minimal angel money.

A majority of startups that I meet, unfortunately haven’t done their homework to understand what type of companies get funded and whether their startup belongs to the category of fundable companies. Most of the Founders, for some reason, postpone understanding the rules of the funding world and spend way too much time trying to raise money, when the idea or team itself is not fundable.

Please note – not all teams and their ideas are fundable.

It doesn’t mean these startups have no future. A significant number of high-quality profitable companies are built with no money from VCs. These companies focus on revenues from day one and continuously iterate in making their products for revenue generation. By generating revenues and getting to profitability, these companies become self sufficient and they are not at the mercy of anyone. Many times, these companies raise growth capital when they want to scale as well, or for liquidity.

The worst thing for Founders is getting stuck in between the two options: they can’t raise money and they don’t have enough runway to get to profitability. Once they are stuck, it is not an easy escape, and this impact  can be detrimental to the startup ecosystem.

Founders, before time runs out, critically assess your team, idea, strategy and pick your path accordingly.

The purpose of this article is to get all entrepreneurs to take action of discovering their path. There is enough content on the web on what makes companies fundable or how one can build bootstrapped companies. The other way is to talk to those who have done it, but, get on this work sooner than later

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If you want to do something, don’t over-analyze it! We do mostly Series A Funding! Helion Ventures #ThinkInvestor

ThinkInvestor is iSPIRT and ProductNation’s new initiative to serve as a catalyst between Venture Capital firms, Angels, Angel Networks and Entrepreneurs. It is to go beyond brochure ware and dig deeper into the whole life cycle of a typical investment; from introductions, funding, styles of on-going engagement, to exits. And in the process, capture their views on global and local trends, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. This interview is done with inputs from Shashi Bhagnari.

think-investor-helionHelion Venture Partners is a $600 million venture fund focused on India with offices in Bangalore and Delhi. The company is an early to mid-stage investor in Indian startups in sectors such as Enterprise software, Internet, Mobile, Outsourcing, Retail, Education and Financial Services. In a conversation with iSPIRT, Helion’s Alok Goyal, Partner, talks about the company’s funding strategy, evaluating projects and making the right investments.

Tell us about the company’s background. What is its focus? What is your current fund? What is it looking at?

We formed the firm in 2006 with four founders that included Ashish Gupta, Sanjeev Aggarwal, Kanwaljit Singh and Rahul Chandra. Besides our team of analysts, our CFO doubles up as an operating partner for finance. We also have an HR advisor who works closely with our portfolio companies. We recently got someone in Product Management from Google to help portfolio companies. We are now a group of 15 people and have our offices in Gurgaon and Bangalore in India.

We focus our investments on early to mid-stage ventures, investing in technology-powered and consumer service businesses in sectors like Outsourcing, Internet, Mobile, Technology Products, Retail Services, Healthcare, Education and Financial Services. We have done about 60 investments so far.

In our current fund, we have raised about $250 million. The focus of this new fund will be divided between technology side and tech-enabled consumer investments. We will continue to look at Internet services like Makemytrip where we invested earlier, taxi services like TaxiForSure etc.

What’s your strategy on verticals? How do you characterize them?

Within e-commerce, we are bullish on Internet-only brands and marketplaces. For example, YepMe–a Web only brand focused on tier two and tier three markets. We have also invested in a venture called ShopClues which is an eCommerce marketplace.

Within consumer services, we have invested in consumer facing travel ventures like TaxiForSure. We have also made an investment in a company that makes planning travel experiences much easier. We have also funded a housing and real estate venture, Housing.com.

What stage of investment are you most interested in? Seed funding or later stage investments?

We are mostly the first or one of the first institutional investors in the company. Our sweet spot would be Series A or Series B funding. I would imagine 70 to 80 percent of our investments are in Series A. We invest between $10 to 20 million over the lifetime of an asset.

Any interesting investments you have made recently?

We had been looking at investments in the healthcare sector for a while now. We have recently invested in Denty’s, a chain of dental care units. This Hyderabad based company focuses on dentures, jaw replacement and other high end dental care treatments.  We have also invested in the area of enterprise mobility, in a company called Rapid Value that provides services in the area of mobilization of enterprise applications. Another recent investment is Linguanext, which has created a unique technology for language translation. It allows Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and enterprises to translate any application from one language to another without any changes in the application itself.

How do entrepreneurs get in touch with you? Is there a defined process they need to follow?

Entrepreneurs are at the heart of the venture capital eco-system. It is as much or more of our job to find entrepreneurs than they reaching out to us. In fact, we use a lot of our bandwidth to get to reach out to entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are most welcome to reach out to us directly. There are two ways entrepreneurs typically get in touch. First is through our personal network. Second way is through bankers. We also like to make ourselves visible in forums and events so that entrepreneurs can reach out to us and we can reach out to them.

We also have a strong outbound program through a team of analysts.

What is your due diligence process? Is it specific to all?

We view around 1500+ business plans each year. The process is similar for most. Usually the first meeting takes place with one of our analysts, unless it comes from personal contacts. Different analysts focus on different areas and they all gain a good idea after the first meeting, which is then followed up with another meeting with one of the partner(s), to understand the business better.

Due diligence for us is more Market Diligence. We also do primary research, secondary research and make reference checks. After we are through with the entire due diligence, we invite the entrepreneurs to present their business plan to the whole team.  If the partnership is positive, we issue a term sheet after which financial/legal due diligence cycle along with documentation is completed.

The entire end-to-end process is completed within a month and a half typically.

How do you interact with your entrepreneurs? Is there a process outlined for this?

Investment is not only about money. We have developed reasonably strong relationships with our entrepreneurs which begins when we start the process of due diligence. We have both formal and informal interactions on a periodic basis.

In the early stages, face-to-face meetings are held every quarter, in addition to monthly calls. But outside of that, we do not interfere in their work at an operational level. But entrepreneurs reach out to us whenever they need help. For instance, if they need clarity on product direction or to connect with other prospects, they contact us. Those interactions are in fact, quite regular. However, I personally find myself being in touch with them on a very regular basis.

Do you have any avenues where you meet your portfolio company CEOs informally during the year?

Yes, we are doing this once a year. We have also started to form groups now. For instance one group that focuses on product management can share tips with portfolio companies in that area.  We also reach out to our portfolio companies through webinars.

Tell us about your recent exits? What do you think of the climate for exits in India like?

We are just an eight years old entity, so there have not been too many exits. Our first was an IPO exit from MakeMyTrip when they went public. We also exited redBus when it was acquired by Naspers. Then we got out of Amba Research. We are hopeful that the market climate in the next few years will get a lot better for favorable exits.

What excites you about entrepreneurs these days, and what is it that you like to see in them?

In all my discussions there is a general belief that the quality of entrepreneurs has gone up significantly. We are also seeing a whole class of entrepreneurs moving back from the US. We are seeing a generation of entrepreneurs starting their second ventures now. Their scale and thinking is different, very bold.

What we’d like to see is stronger talent in Product Management. It is relatively more difficult in India compared to a place like the Bay Area. We are also not seeing as many deep technology assets. What we are seeing are more applications based and light IP based businesses from India. Over a period of time, I have no doubt that India will create more deeper technology companies as well.

What advice would you like to give young guys who want to start a new venture?

You should ask yourselves if you have the entrepreneur inside you or not. If you are over analyzing, you are probably not. An entrepreneur has to be “foolish” enough to purse the dream besides being passionate about it. If you want to do something, don’t over-analyze it. The important thing is the ability to take the plunge.

Entrepreneurship is not a solo sport; but a team sport. You need to find complementary capabilities in others. The bottom-line is that you should be able to pull together a team that has complimentary skills and the same passion to do it.

A startup is successful because it is focused. Defining that focus is important. Startups succeed because they choose a specific market segment or a specific problem or a specific customer set etc. and serve that market better than anyone else.

Lastly, it is important to be close to the market. You need to continuously listen, learn and act with agility. It is important to be able to iterate quickly. 

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The redBus Founders on Motorbikes Story! Interested in India Domestic Consumption Start Ups! Seedfund #ThinkInvestor

ThinkInvestor is iSPIRT and ProductNation’s new initiative to serve as a catalyst between Venture Capital firms, Angels, Angel Networks and Entrepreneurs. It is to go beyond brochure ware and dig deeper into the whole life cycle of a typical investment; from introductions, funding, styles of on-going engagement, to exits. And in the process, capture their views on global and local trends, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

Seedfund is an early-stage venture capital fund, with operations in Bombay, Bangalore and New Delhi. Seedfund was founded in 2006 by Bharati Jacob, Mahesh Murthy and Pravin Gandhi and the team has grown to include Paula Mariwala, Sanjay Anandaram, Sarabjeet Singh, Shailesh Vickram Singh and Tarana Lalwani. All Seedfund team members have been entrepreneurs at some point or the other in their careers. Seedfund investees include AFAQS, CarWale, Chumbaka, EduSports, Fetise, Frontier Markets, Healthizen, Heckyl, Ixsight, Jeevanti Healthcare, Jeeves, Level10 Comics, Lifeblob, myDentist, Nevales Networks, Printo, redBus, RupeeTalk, Sportskeeda, ThinkLabs, Uhuroo and Vaatsalya.

ThinkInvestor-SeedFund

 

 

 

 

 

ProductNation sat down with  Sanjay Anandram, Venture Partner of Seedfund for this interview.

Here’s what we heard :

What is Seedfund? Tell us a little bit about your fund, stage, investments you like? How are you structured? What’s your current fund? How far along are you in your current fund?

The name Seedfund implies only seed funding but really is a seed or early stage fund that likes to get in early and stays on through multiple rounds of funding. We can invest up to $5M in a company. The sector is India Domestic Consumption – anything that the Indian consumer spends money on; financial services, entertainment, travel, hospitality, healthcare, education, etc,. We are structured like a regular VC fund. Our first fund was a small $15M fund but our second and current fund is $55M. The first fund is nearing its end of life and the second fund is about 2 years and 10 months old.

How do you get to know companies and entrepreneurs? What’s the best way for an entrepreneur to get in touch with you?

Sanjay-AnandramWe are less driven by broad trends than by the specific opportunity and the category we find them in. In many cases, we have invested in companies that created a whole new category. For example, when we invested in redBus, there was no category called Bus Ticketing Services but they created one! Our investment in Vaatsalya created a category called Hospital Chains for Tier 2 and Tier 2 towns. Our investment EduSports created a category for Physical Education Services for schools. Sportskeeda is a Sports Online Community site. All these have been started by people completely embedded in that space.

We have a large network and many companies and entrepreneurs we get to know through referrals. We also have a number of companies approaching us directly also. I started in 1999 an online magazine aimed at entrepreneurs. In 2002 I started one of India’s first VC fund called Jumpstartup. Since 2006 I have been associated with Seedfund as a venture partner. All of this means that we have been long enough in this space to build a large network and get to know people. That’s how we get a lot of referrals and many of them come in directly as well, through email for example.

How long does it take for you to do the due diligence process? What is your due diligence process?

At the stage of the companies we are dealing with, there is usually not a lot of due diligence we could do because many of our portfolio companies create their own categories. That said, we place a few phone calls to check out the space a company is in, any competition they may have. Apart from the usual things like checking out the team, sometimes, we may need to clean up existing company structures if they have involved a lot of friends and family investments. Sometimes companies need time to pull things together for us to do due diligence. All of these typically take from about 3 to 5 weeks time.

What kinds of interesting new categories are you seeing in India? Exciting business models, technologies?

There are two ways to look at the categories we see – one could be the mode of delivery – cloud, mobile, SaaS, etc. The other is along verticals that correspond to consumption of the Indian consumer – financial services, education, healthcare, entertainment, travel. The interesting companies we are seeing deliver something faster, better, cheaper to the Indian consumer in these verticals using one of these delivery methods.We are not seeing a lot of fundamental technology advancement plays from India. We are seeing  more innovations in Business Models, throwing together unusual methods of delivery being the innovations.

Although we are focused on the Indian market we have invested in a company like Heckyl that provides financial analytics that includes social media targeted towards brokers and traders. This company has international markets in its scope.

We are very excited about Chumbak, a designer, a brand and a retailer that does India designed Motifs and colors. They have a presence in Japan, have retail stores also in addition to the online one and growing extraordinarily well. Chumbak is creating a brand new category for Indian designed, Indian made products. 

AxisRooms is a one of a kind cloud-based start up in the hospitality industry. It enables an exchange for price and inventory discovery to bring together agents and consumers in the hospitality industry with hotels in real-time. Till now there has never been a single place where all travel agents, consumers and hotels can interact, transact business, and get contracts done.

Sports advertising market is about $800M in size and growing at 25% per year. Sportskeeda is right in the middle of this market to serve consumers with a multi-sport content and community platform. Jeeves is a portal for in-warranty, extended warranty and out-of-warranty appliance repair in India.

What caught your attention about redBus? Any stories or interesting pivots you want to share about that company?

There are a few remarkable things about redBus. They proved that you can build a large company in a very ethical way, focusing only on the Indian market, and building a strong consumer brand without splurging money on marketing and advertising. They also proved that it is possible to create a category by co-opting all the players – the bus operators, consumers, ticketing agents and the Government. It wasn’t easy at all; they had lots of roadblocks but they overcame all those! They made a high-end service possible for the end consumer and at the same time, made it transparent to the bus operators how much money they can make by using redBus, and where their weak points were with consumer feedback. Now a lot of the bus operators’ growth is tied to redBus’ growth and vice-versa, a symbiotic relationship! It was a very unorganized, unprofessional, not transparent business. redBus made it a transparent, democratized one!

Here’s an not often mentioned story about redBus: It was one of those early days when they were selling 30 to 40 tickets a day which was really, really small.  As happens in small start up companies the co-founders were helping man the customer service phone lines one evening. They got a very angry call from a customer whose Bangalore to Mumbai bus was cancelled and he was stranded in the middle of nowhere with his luggage! It was late at night and Phani, and one of his other co-founders got on their motorbikes and met this irate customer where he was. From there they took him and his luggage on their motorbikes to Bangalore airport, bought him a ticket on a late night Air-India flight to Mumbai and saw him off! Although they were not directly responsible since the bus operator was the one that cancelled the bus, they took it upon themselves to make sure that their customer was treated right! The customer reached Mumbai, wrote them a nice letter thanking them for their service and has been a loyal customer since!

Another remarkable thing about redBus is their commission structure for the tickets they sell for large bus operators and smaller ones. It has been the same and they have resisted lowering it for larger operators that bring them more business or increasing it for smaller operators that don’t bring them that much! It is always a standard transparent one for all of the operators. They have done this in spite of intense pressure from larger and smaller operators alike! Over time everyone understood the value of a transparent, consistent commission structure.

The point I am trying to make is that it is possible to conduct business in India this way – ethical, fair, transparent and consistent!

Once you have invested in a company, what’s your engagement model? How do you interact with these companies?

It’s informal and easy-going (but not at all lax). We focus more on helping the portfolio companies build their business rather than manage from spreadsheets. We focus on strategies and tactics for the company; hiring, customers, business model tweaks, what would the next round of financing look like, partnerships they need to create, what kinds of mentors and advisers they need to bring on board, etc,. We see ourselves as partners rather than investors who write a check, and disappear.

There are formal board meetings with the companies on a pre-arranged calendar. Beyond this the informal interactions are all driven by the entrepreneur needing us to help with something. We share interesting anecdotes, articles, meeting minutes, etc,. Apart from these, we do have CEO meetups a few times a year where they share problems, solutions, experiences, lessons learned, especially in the areas of hiring, sales, etc,.

Let’s move to exits! How do you help them prepare for exits? Do you prepare them for exits?

We believe that you build a good company the exits will suggest themselves automatically! CarWale built a good business around a portal for buying and selling new and used automobiles. The German group Axel Springer and the India Today group did an acquisition.  With redBus we were out raising funds when the Naspers group came along and acquired it.

There is no general preparations for exits. Our responsibility as investors is to see the company grow and if they grow well, exits will happen automatically.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening in India? Advice for entrepreneurs and start ups? What’s your advice for people leaving stable jobs for start ups?

There is a lot of activity in India currently. However, we advise entrepreneurs not to get too excited after reading TechCrunch and things happening in Silicon Valley! You need to be excited about opportunities that happen in India! There are enough problems to be solved right here. The customers are here, you can build partnerships here. It is important to be grounded and present in the market for you to build something worthwhile.  It is possible to build big,  interesting companies, businesses right here in India. But for that to happen, you really need to understand the customer problem you are solving and why they would write a check for your business. A lot of youngsters get excited about what’s going on in Silicon Valley. But you should be spurred by customer problems here, not what’s happening in some other market.

You don’t do a start up because you want another job. Not for sex appeal or the glamour! You do it for the passion. You do it because you want to do it! You may need to get used to downsizing your life significantly. You may not have the same compensation and others things that go with a stable corporate job. You may need to deal with social pressures because your friend continues in a corporate job and has bought a brand new house and a Mercedes recently! I have written extensively about these economic and social pressures, why should you be an entrepreneur,  and should you be an entrepreneur. When your passion to go out and do something is greater than the analytical assessment of all these costs, you should do it! You will have to deal with a lot of emotional issues such as self-esteem.

Think of all the possibilities! Don’t let constraints come in the way! It is easy to blame the ecosystem, the lack of money, VCs, Angel Investors, etc,. This question is like asking Is it possible to climb Mt.Everest? Yes. It’s always possible. The key questions are what is required to make it happen? You need to be physically fit, you need to know the lay of the land, you need to have people who have knowledge and experience with doing it before, you need to have the right equipment, a timeline that is suitable and all other resources for such an expedition to succeed. You need to lay all of these in sequence and execute and in 18 months or so you may be on top of Mt.Everest. Constraint based thinking make us give up too soon when you lack one or more of things that are needed. Entrepreneurs use possibility based thinking to address and overcome these limitations one way or another. That’s the difference!

What’s your take on companies getting Mentors? When should they look for one?

Before answering this question it may be better to get some terminology defined correctly since people tend to use words rather interchangeably.

A Consultant is one you bring in to solve a transient, bounded problem. How do I put in an IT system? How do I do Risk Assessment? How do I design a compensation plan?

An Adviser has a longer term strategic and functional objective. What should my IT Strategy or technology be? How should I be doing my marketing?

A Mentor is a like a coach helping them become better. 

In Mahabharata, Krishna tells Arjuna to aim and kill Duryodhana below the waist. That’s a Consultant!

When Krishna give Arjuna advice on how to kill Bheeshma, he’s an Adviser!

Before the battle, Arjuna asks Krishna how he could kill his cousins and grandparents in battle. He’s very conflicted about this. Krishna’s advice then is Mentoring!

It depends upon what the entrepreneur needs. Mentors are needed for high level coaching type of advice. Not for finding customers or helping with this or that. You need to be sure that the problem you have needs a Mentor, not an Adviser and definitely, not a Consultant!

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We invested in Ezetap, the Square for Emerging Markets! Mobile, Internet, Payments interest us! AngelPrime #ThinkInvestor

ThinkInvestor is iSPIRT and ProductNation’s new initiative to serve as a catalyst between Venture Capital firms, Angels, Angel Networks and Entrepreneurs. It is to go beyond brochure ware and dig deeper into the whole life cycle of a typical investment; from introductions, funding, styles of on-going engagement, to exits. And in the process, capture their views on global and local trends, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

AngelPrime is a Seed-stage fund that sits between incubators/accelerators/angels and large VC firms. Started by serial entrepreneurs, Bala Parthasarathy, Shripati Acharya & Sanjay Swamy, Angelprime believes in getting deeply involved with the companies they invest in. They have been serial entrepreneurs that understand that entrepreneurship is a long and lonely journey and having multiple minds spend sleepless nights on the business dramatically increases the chances of its success.

ThinkInvestor-AngelPrime

ProductNation sat down with  Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner of AngelPrime for this interview.

Here’s what we heard :

What is AngelPrime? What’s your Stage, Focus and typical investment sweet spots?

We are a group of serial entrepreneurs and we bring the perspective of an entrepreneur to our fund. We are very seed stage and we are hands-on investors. In the early 70’s  in Silicon Valley, VC firms worked side by side with entrepreneurs building their companies. Later on, they evolved to become more of financial investors. India now is somewhere in the middle. However, we believe in working side by side with the entrepreneur in building companies. We help our portfolio companies in product definition, building teams, building products, getting them validated in the market and building a global strategy if needed. There are Angels and Incubators that may invest in the order of a few lakhs. Typical early stage VC firms may do $2M to $5M and do 8 to 10 deals a year. We are in the middle, and we can dedicate a lot of time to the companies. We have bandwidth only to do 3 or so highly curated deals a year.  Our typical investments have a broad range,  from  $100K to a $1M. Our sweet spot is $400K to $600K.  Our focus is Technology-led Start ups, Mobile and Internet, Financial Services and Payments. All three founders of AngelPrime were volunteers with the UID program in India and so we are very interested in Identity related start-ups. We are seeing a lot of companies in the healthcare space and have invested in a recruiting start-up. Most important thing for us is how much value can we add.

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What’s the best way for an entrepreneur to get in touch with you? What works and what does not?

Referrals are still the best way to get in touch with us. However, we still get to know entrepreneurs and their companies through email. One of our portfolio companies HackerEarth, we bumped into at a conference! We are also finding early stage incubators to be a rich source of deals. We have found interesting companies at incubators like the Microsoft Accelerator, GSF India and Morpheus. We find that the deals we come across at these places have gone through some level of curation already, with something of a team in place, and some limited level of product validation already done. These are the kinds of referrals that we like! Typically we are the first institutional money and we are also the larger lead in a seed round.

How long does it take for you to decide on investing? What is your due diligence process?

The first thing we assess is the caliber of the entrepreneur; we look at the scrappiness of the entrepreneur and the typical two person (or so) team.  If the members of the team are similar in backgrounds, that’s not necessarily a plus. We are looking for teams made up of people who are complementary in backgrounds but work well together.

The second thing that’s important is the size of the market. This is not something you can create. It is what it is, but we assess how the entrepreneur is wanting to go take a piece of that market.

Coming to the due diligence process, we try to move very fast. We don’t believe in stringing the entrepreneur along but sometimes additional market validation may be needed. Typically at this very early stage, very little has happened that we can do do due diligence on.  However we look at how the company is structured and clean it up if we think it can create problems downstream.  We make sure that the founders, vesting schedules, CAP structures are all set up properly.  We look at the legalese and make sure that’s all good. We are very strong believers in clean and simple Silicon Valley style term sheets. No funky clauses; our liquidation preferences are usually 1X, non-participating.

Typical timelines for a decision have been as fast as 24 hours where the company is ready and it’s in our sweet spot. Sometimes we may need to go do some research on our own before a decision. Sometimes it becomes a question of our learning an area as well.  Due diligence and paperwork takes about 3 weeks.

Once you have invested in a company, what’s your engagement model? How do you interact with these companies?

There are two ways we interact with our portfolio companies. The first one is the formal weekly or bi-weekly meeting. More interesting is the informal interactions we have. We have a co-location space in our office where many companies situate themselves at this stage of their development. It helps us to have a number of water cooler-type conversations with them. We learn about new things and we also provide our advice as relevant, and asked for by these companies. We tell these companies that we can take on a variety of roles for them all the way from mopping the floors to wearing a suit and meeting with bankers with them.

There is another way to look at this hand-holding, in three phases:

1. Experiments: We help them in do a series of experiments both in the technical approach, and also with the business model. These days the cost of doing experiments is very low and the cost of not doing them, very high!  For example, in payments,  is it a per transaction fee or a subscription model? The cost of doing A/B testing these days is not much. Many times we  end up learning something from the entrepreneurs,  when they push back and say “this is today – this is what works unlike something five years ago”, because they may be  closer to the market.

2. Narrowing Down: The second phase is the weeding out of those experiments that failed and narrowing down the business and building the team for “scale-hacking”

3. Scaling: The third phase is scaling the business and in parallel preparing the company for the next round of funding. We address questions like – Do we raise additional monies here in India or the US and help facilitate introductions to suitable investors.

What are some of the exciting companies in your portfolio now? Exciting new business models?

Ezetap is a company we incubated, invested $5ook initially. It is a very exciting company where we took a very different approach than Square. We designed and developed the hardware in India instead of the usual approach of going to China for it! We took an Apple-esque approach to keeping all of the hardware and software development in house. The business model is also not a per transaction fee model like Square but a SaaS based subscription model. We raised a $3.5M Series A round from Social+Capital. Chamath Palihapitiya brought in other investors like Peter Thiel and David Sacks in this investment. Ezetap has gone on to raise another round from a consortium of Helion Ventures and Berggruen Holdings who are very well connected in Europe.

HackerEarth is a company that has put a nice business spin on TopCoder!. They are providing a very useful solution to the problem of sifting through 100’s of resumes in India to find those few programmers whose skills are  excellent! HackerEarth has solved this problem with some clever algorithms that automates this sifting process. Top companies like Adobe, inMobi and Symantec are using this solution for their hiring. The two founders are from IIT Roorkee, in their early 20’s and are phenomenal in their speed of implementation of ideas!

We have invested in another company in the Mobile Wallet space that we have not yet announced. This was also founded by two young entrepreneurs whose ability to execute is phenomenal, have boundless energy and ultra capital efficient! We have invested in another company, SmartOwner. SmartOwner is a company that allows individuals to invest in highly curated real estate deals for investment purposes.

ZipDial is not technically part of this fund but I am a co-founder, and we all individually are investors in the company. ZipDial makes clever use of the “Missed Calls” phenomenon in India where a call is made but never completed by mutual agreement. ZipDial piggybacks various kinds of actions – marketing, customer service, etc. You could send marketing messages or customer service can send back a message about being very busy now and other suggested times to call. Political parties in India like the Congress and BJP are using it for increasing engagement of voters. Out of AirTel’s 200M customers, only 60M or so have ever sent a text message. Text messaging literacy is not that high but number literacy is. They can dial numbers easily. By dialing a number toll-free (since it is a missed call), you can get feedback or information. For example, a market survey ZipDial missed call sends back a question about your MLA’s performance. It sends two or more phone numbers for each of the possible responses. You just do a missed call to the right one and it is done! This is a completely India-based business model but the funny thing is that the founder is an American, Valerie Wagoner! ZipDial was rated #8 in FastCompany’s most innovative companies!

What kind of advice would you have for someone interested in becoming an entrepreneur, especially from a stable job like at a services company?

There are some very great fortunes to be made in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. I think we need more people willing to be early employees in start-up companies. The risks look daunting but the rewards, especially in India could be huge! Get out of your comfort zone and take some risks! The opportunity cost of not trying is very big! The technical challenges involved in putting together an innovative start-up that changes people’s lives, could be rewarding in itself.  You get to conceptualize products, test them in the market and if it works out, watch it scale. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to a safe job.

A lot of entrepreneurs hesitate to say that they are in it for the money. Culturally, we are not yet attuned to this but there is no shame in it! Secondly, we are not accustomed to failure and fear the stigma attached to it! We don’t celebrate failure – the best lessons are when things go wrong!

Exits are crucial for Product companies to have money come in through the front door as investments. What are your thoughts on what’s happening in India?

There have been very good exits like  Little Eye Labs and the Redbus, The Little Eye Labs was a good technology company exit and Redbus took a dis-aggregated market and consolidated it nicely. MakeMyTrip had an IPO exit. There were also a number of exits that were not talked about – VentureInfoTech was a $100M+ acquisition by a european company. Prizm payments was acquired by Hitachi for over $275M. For technology companies,  Silicon Valley still seems to be the destination. Services companies are being acquired by European entities. Considering returns,  we need a little more patience in India. Things take longer but have started happening.

We advise our companies to think they are building houses as if they are going to live in them! People will come to buy the house at the right price if it is built right!

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We do Cross-Border Investments! Domestic E-Commerce and E-Retail too! Nexus Venture Partners #ThinkInvestor

ThinkInvestor is iSPIRT and ProductNation’s new initiative to serve as a catalyst between Venture Capital firms, Angels, Angel Networks and Entrepreneurs. It is to go beyond brochure ware and dig deeper into the whole life cycle of a typical investment; from introductions, funding, styles of on-going engagement, to exits. And in the process, capture their views on global and local trends, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. ThinkInvestor- NexusVPNexus Venture Partners invest in early and early growth stage companies across sectors in India and US. They are a team of successful entrepreneurs with extensive investing and operating experience, who love to get their hands dirty. They understand the unique challenges faced by entrepreneurs and know that it takes teamwork and exceptional execution capability for a company to succeed. Their partner companies have access to the entire Nexus team in India and Silicon Valley for help in recruiting talent, forging new alliances, opening doors to new customers, shaping strategy and connecting with best-of-breed executives, advisers, co-investors and board members.

ProductNation sat down with Sandeep Singhal, Co-Founder of Nexus Venture Partners for this interview.

sandeep singhalAvinash Raghava of iSPIRT and ProductNation thanked Sandeep for his, and Nexus VP’s outstanding support and encouragement for the upcoming InTech50, a platform where Indian product companies showcase their arrival on the global landscape at the Leela Palace in Bangalore, April 9th  – 10th, 2014! More information on this event is here!

Here’s what we heard in the interview:

Tell us a little bit about Nexus Venture Partners – The size of your fund, stage and focus.

Nexus Venture Partners is a $270M fund. We are on our third fund and our funds are of the typical 10 + 2 years extension lives of venture funds. In each fund, the first half of the ten years is spent finding and funding companies, and the second half is used nurturing and finding additional rounds of financing for them. We raised our third and latest fund in March 2012. We are about halfway through the investment cycle for this fund. We are primarily a Series A investor. $2M to $5M is our sweet spot. We do some seed investments if the market is large enough, and the company still needs to think through its technology or market risk more thoroughly. And we are convinced that it is a company we need to support on a longer term basis. We have been involved in a few Series B investments also. These happen in case we missed out at the Series A stage and they took money from somebody else. Regarding our focus areas, we are primarily interested in cross-border opportunities; India based companies interested in the US market or US based companies interested in the Indian market. We are also interested in the retail space in India that is experiencing exponential growth; e-commerce, e-retail or e-commerce enablement companies. We are interested in Healthcare and Education verticals. Eye Q is a good example of our healthcare investment in the Ophthalmology space. We are interested in Hub and Spoke models, especially in Education.  We are also interested in enterprise technologies, mostly software (open source in particular) and cloud based. We haven’t done anything in hardware.

What’s the best way for an entrepreneur to get in touch with you? What works and what does not?

We are known to be approachable. While it is always best to get an introduction, we do respond to emails also. We ask people to send us a business plan if through email. We get a lot of referrals from our portfolio companies, and their founders. A number of these are already vendors to our portfolio companies. We also do outreach efforts like conferences where we meet entrepreneurs and get to know their companies. A number of entrepreneurs are still learning the ropes in India, and we want to help the ecosystem by being a bit flexible on how they reach us and at any stage of their development. We provide them feedback on how ready they are, or are not, for an investment. Sometimes it works, and sometimes that feedback is ignored!

How long does it take for you to decide on investing? What is your due diligence process?

That’s a very situation-specific timeline. In one case, we had an entrepreneur come to us for investment but 90% of their company revenue was from services and was not suitable for us. They however had a plan to switch their company from a services focus to a product focus and kept in touch with me. They had a clear marketing and sales plan to move to a product focus and when they came to us again, 80% of their revenues were coming from products. This took 2 years but is not typical. In some situations, if the company is very early but have a compelling product there is not much you can glean from numbers at that stage. We made a decision to invest in as little as 1 week in such cases. Typically it takes 2 weeks to a month for business diligence and a month to a month and a half for closure. Overall about 2 to 3 months for the whole process. Our process typically consists of Business and Financial Due Diligence.  For the business part, we are looking at four key things:

1. The Team – How good is the management team, are the members complementary to each other?

2. The Market  – How big is the market? What are the pain points in the market? How is this company addressing them? Will the customer pay for addressing this pain?

3. The Competition – If there are competitors in this market, who are they?

4. Capital Efficiency – When would the next capital event for this company be? How long would raising $2M to $3M last for this company and can they get to the next funding event successfully with enough growth?

These four areas would take about 2 weeks to a month to get a handle on. But as they are talking to us, we introduce them to potential customers and see how they do.  The Financial Due diligence for very early stage companies is not very much since the numbers may not mean much at that stage except looking at things like whether they are incorporated properly. If they have a few customers already, then we make sure that audits have been done properly. In India at least, with $2M to $3M investments, we have been a solo investor for the most part. In the US, it has been a mixed bag with more syndicates with other investors.

 What’s your style of engagement once you have funded a company?

We think of our role as a facilitator once we have funded a company. We have never taken a majority position in any company. We are an Active Investor driven mostly by what the entrepreneur needs from us. In the beginning it has to do with strategy and team building. Do they have the best talent available? If not, can we help them get the best talent? We help our portfolio companies with strategy around how to compete better, and grow faster as needed. Most of our entrepreneurs say that we add value on their boards of directors. We help portfolio companies with partner and customer introductions. We make sure that they are done at the right time, and in the right way. Sometimes the company may not be ready as yet for a customer introduction since the product may not be ready enough.

Do you have any formal meetings of CEOs/CXOs of your portfolio companies?

We have shied away from doing those kinds of meetings since it always inconveniences someone, to be away, and at a particular place. All of our CEOs are at our annual Nexus meeting. We end up doing a lot of things one on one. Every company in our portfolio is welcome to interact, communicate, and ask for help from anybody on the Nexus team, no matter who is on the board. This helps a lot since the chances of getting that help is more, with the entire team.Someone in our team may have seen a similar situation or handled a similar problem recently with one of their companies.

What are some of the exciting companies in your portfolio now? Exciting new business models?

All of our portfolio companies are exciting to us. We have had some exciting investments in e-commerce companies like BigShoeBazaar (BSB). On the product side we have had some exciting companies like Druva, Kaltura and Aryaka. Datagres relocated recently to Silicon Valley. Scalarc is an exciting investment in the cloud computing space. All these companies have already gone through the gauntlet of passing technology risks, having the products in the hands of customers and scaling revenues. Pubmatic had scaled quite a bit.

What are your thoughts on exits for your portfolio companies? Thoughts on recent exits like Little Eye Labs or Redbus?

We have had successful exits with 8 of our portfolio companies. all strategic mergers and acquisitions (M&As). All them were cross borders ones also. The US primary market for M&As is still showing a lot of strength, but not the Indian domestic market. I don’t expect things to improve till the elections are over. When it is over, I expect the demand in India for high growth companies to grow rapidly. Nexus Venture Partners does not build companies for acquisition but for public listing! We have found it useful to advice our portfolio companies to have a 5 to 7 year horizon and plan for revenues that will help them have a successful IPO. In the course of building such companies, successful M&A opportunities may arise and if they do well and good! Companies like Nimble Storage or NetApp were built this way and that’s what we advice our portfolio companies! The Little Eye Labs and the Redbus exits are all good news for the Indian ecosystem even though the former might have been an acqui-hire one. Exits like these make corporate development teams abroad sit up and take notice of Indian start-ups!

What advice do you have for the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in India?

I have four pieces of advice for new entrepreneurs in India:

1. Work on global products – Test your hypothesis globally – Before developing a line of code test out your product hypothesis globally. May be with the help of a friend abroad if need be.

2. Build cross-Border companies from Day One – Focusing only on the India market first and then scaling globally will cost companies 18 to 24 months in time lost. Reduce this time by working with a cross-border co-founder from the start. This is will prove to be highly valuable.

3. Focus on growth and not just surviving – Growth is as important as cash flow. Speed of growth is critical. It takes a lot of confidence to grow quickly even if takes raising more money rather than just focus on cash flow.

4. Be more confident globally – We still see a lack of confidence in Indian companies when considering to go global. No reason to be so!

If someone comes to you from a services company with a product idea what would your advice be?

I would first assess whether this person understands what it takes to build a product and a product company. The services model is very different, The person may be very strong technically. I would still ask them to pair up with a strong product management person that has done proven products for the global marketplace. There needs to be a good marriage between the technical and product management skills. I still see a lot of Indian entrepreneurs come to us with Indian versions of products in the global marketplace, but wanting to compete on lower price. I strongly discourage these kinds of entrepreneurs since the labor arbitrage argument does not take into account the price of on-going innovation. Innovation and differentiation needs to be priced into the equation. You don’t need large teams but you need the best teams. They cost the same whether they are in Silicon Valley or Bangalore! Competing on price makes you compromise on innovation and in the long run does not work!

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Yes! We invested in Little Eye Labs! Lots of interest in Healthcare too! – Ventureast #ThinkInvestor

ThinkInvestor is iSPIRT and ProductNation’s new initiative to serve as a catalyst between Venture Capital firms, Angels, Angel Networks and Entrepreneurs. It is to go beyond brochure ware and dig deeper into the whole life cycle of a typical investment; from introductions, funding, styles of on-going engagement, to exits. And in the process, capture their views on global and local trends, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

ThinkInvestor-VentureEastVentureast is an Indian VC fund manager with close to $300 million under management. They have a history of investing in innovative businesses across multiple sectors, and multiple stages of a business – from seed and early to growth stages.

Guided by the singular credo “We Differentiate, You Win”, Ventureast has enabled over 60 businesses in Technology, Life Sciences and emerging sectors to become leaders in their individual spaces. The company has a proven track record of investments and exits, aided by a strong founding team which has been with Ventureast for over 15 years and who understand the entrepreneurial ecosystem well.

The Ventureast Proactive Fund, Ventureast Life Fund and Ventureast Tenet Fund II feature a wide investor base (Limited Partners) consisting of institutional investors from across the world.

They were in the papers recently when their investment, Little Eye Labs, was acquired by facebook.

ProductNation sat down with Sateesh Andra, Managing Partner, and Dr. Ramesh Byrapaneni, Venture Partner of Ventureast Tenet Fund, for this interview. Here’s what we heard:

 

What kinds of start-ups are you interested in? What’s your stage of investment and typical investment size?

Sateesh AndhraOur fund invests exclusively in IP-enabled companies. We are interested in Internet and Mobility related plays. We are very interested in enterprise focused start-ups among these. We are very interested in Healthcare and Healthcare related Information Technology plays also. We are interested in companies that address inefficiencies in areas such as Education and Finance with technology solutions. The filter that we use is that these companies address global opportunities in South East Asia, Europe and the US. We found a gap in the Indian VC market between what Angels can provide start-up companies with and Series A venture investors. In our current fund, we invest up to $1M a company. In our next fund we are planning to increase this to $1.5M to $2.0M per company.Most of our investments happen at the concept level; they understand the concept well, there is a prototype, and some early revenue validation.

How does an entrepreneur get your attention?  How does an entrepreneur get in touch with you? What’s the initial process like?

Dr. Ramesh ByrapaneniEntrepreneurs get in touch with us in a variety of ways. We are panel sessions in conferences and some get in touch with us there. We also get introduced to entrepreneurs and start-ups are demo days at accelerators. Sometimes investors in incubatees at these places introduce companies to us. Introductions through our professional links and references are always welcome. Look us up in social media like LinkedIn and Twitter. See who we follow there.  We have  also engaged with entrepreneurs and start-ups that have come in with a nice relevant email. They are all good people to introduce you to us. Our big expectation is for you to know us as an investor before you pitch us! Out initial process is quick. After an initial meeting we would let you know in an upfront and candid way, whether we would invest or not. We provide candid feedback on why we are not investing. Entrepreneurs may not like it but these are only the reasons why it does not make sense for us.

Let’s say you are interested in exploring a company further? What happens next? What are your typical due diligence efforts? How long does it take for an investment?

We have a very strong team on our side that can evaluate the Product Market fit for the start-up we are looking at collectively. It is fairly important to us. In early stage start-ups creating the product is easy. Achieving Product-Market fit is tough. From a Product Management/Product Marketing perspective, we look at the value proposition and how they address customer requirements. At an early stage, start-ups may not have a crystal ball but we still need to see 12 month metrics; Profit & Loss and Cash Flow projections. They need to have a decent idea about these. We also dive deeper into distribution channels, feet on the street. The initial team is also critical. The timeline for investment decisions vary. Some take only 2 to 3 weeks if they already have a lot of traction. Some take 6 weeks and some take 8 weeks if there is a lot of financial due diligence to be done. Companies are doing pivots take longer. If there are regulatory frameworks involved as it happens sometimes with healthcare investments, it may take much longer.

How hands-on or hands-off are you with your portfolio company? What’s your style of engagement with a portfolio company?

This is a tricky question! We are not the kind of investor that drives from the back seat. We don’t dictate that this is the way it needs to be. We ensure alignment. In one of our healthcare start-up companies, post-operative care after a stay in the hospital was important. We got involved in that case and helped arrange things.  We do monitor a simple set of metrics depending upon the company. We monitor the number of product releases, beta customers, etc,.We also monitor how our portfolio companies incorporate feedback they receive.  We don’t give the portfolio companies all of the money upfront. They are done in stages and closely track progress they are making. We make introductions, go on cold calls with the portfolio companies once a month. There are quite a few informal meetings along with the formal ones. We engage with quite a few CIOs and do introductions as appropriate. Our style and approaches are different for different companies. There is no single formula.

Let’s talk about your interest in Healthcare and Healthcare IT Companies. Tell us about some recent investments. What kinds of things are you looking for in this area? What excites you in this area?

SmartRX is an investment of ours that serves post-operative care of patients. Usually after operations in hospitals, when patients are leaving for home, prescriptions are gone over and that’s where it ends. It becomes very difficult to make sure that the patients are taking their drugs properly. Doctors find it difficult to communicate after that with patients and vice-versa. SmartRx ensures that periodic messages are sent to the patient; common do’s and don’ts. Patients can also have small consultations back with their doctors through SmartRX. This is focused on the US Healthcare Market and is related to Meaningful Use Stage 1 and 2 of the Healthcare Reform effort going on currently in the US. The founders for this company were with Microsoft in the US, came back and started this company. To us, domain expertise is key, as in Healthcare and Healthcare IT start-ups..

We recently invested in OneBreath, a medical device company. OneBreath makes portable ventilators that have the same functions as  expensive high-end ones but at a tenth of the cost. One of the founders is on the West Coast of the US and this is targeted towards the global market. We help portfolio companies get the CE Marking so that they can target Europe and other markets if we think FDA approval for the US market may take long.

We invested in Seclore, an Information Rights Management company incubated at IIT Mumbai.  Their solution enables organizations to manage information access policies through the cloud. It enables their clients to manage access to documents across computers and tablets. 50% of their customers are in Europe or the US. It is one of the cool companies to watch for.

HealthHero created a device that resided with the patients, monitored vitals such as Glucose, BP levels etc. Patients can input the readings into these devices, doctors and nurses can analyze this data remotely and get back to the patient if necessary. This is now part of Bosch Telehealth.

We are very excited about the use of Smartphones in healthcare – they are the last mile to patients!  They represent a humongous opportunity! The computing power within Android and iOS devices make possible some radical disruptions.

 Now, let’s talk about Exits. What do you see coming in this area?

The Nest Acquisition by Google shows how much they value vision. Our belief is that you need to create value for exits. With a little bit of luck and timing this will happen! Exit multiples are very important to accelerate exits in general.  The macro trends are very positive! We have seen some exciting exits; Portal Player acquisition by NVIDIA, Qontex, a spin-out from Pramati Technologies was acquired by Adobe , Yasu Technologies, a Business Rules Management System company was acquired by SAP. Healthcare, Pharma and Biotech companies are all seeing momentum right now. We are seeing a lot of investments in cloud based Value Added Services companies; distributed applications and globally relevant!

What about some parting thoughts for entrepreneurs?

Just wanted to reiterate what we are looking for in start-up companies; a strong product management team with strong technical skills, ability to look at things from a customer angle, sales and marketing knowledge, excellent people management skills. We are looking primarily for deep understanding of technology, clear understanding of the customer landscape and excellent program /people management skills!

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Want to get our attention? Talk to the founders of our portfolio companies! – Blume Ventures #ThinkInvestor

ThinkInvestor is iSPIRT and ProductNation’s new initiative to serve as a catalyst between Venture Capital firms, Angels, Angel Networks and Entrepreneurs. It is to go beyond brochure ware and dig deeper into the whole life cycle of a typical investment; from introductions, funding, styles of on-going engagement, to exits. And in the process, capture their views on global and local trends, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

ThinkInvestor-BlumeVBlume Ventures is an early-stage seed & pre-series A venture fund based out of Mumbai, India. They provide seed funding in the range of $50K – $300K to early-stage tech-focused and tech-enabled ventures. They are proponents of a collaborative approach and like to co-invest with like-minded angels and seed funds. They then provide follow-on investments to stellar portfolio companies, ranging from $500K – $1.5 million.

ProductNation sat down with Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures for this interview. Here ‘s what we heard:

What made you focus on early stage investing in India? And your observations of this market?

Karthik Reddy - Blume VenturesAdoption of innovative technologies has always been a challenge in India. Early on we realized that growth has to come from other global markets like the US or Europe. We also realized that there was a huge gap in the venture market in India for investments between $150K and $3M. Our intention in our first fund was to bridge these gaps. They proved to be larger than what we thought initially. The venture market at the top of the funnel (late stage) was very wide, the middle had also widened but the lower end offered opportunities for us. But this market has its own problems – bridging the gap between this level of funding and the next stage. Series A funding of companies has been a continuing problem but we have found ways to bridge these gaps. However, with our next fund to be raised next year, we plan to stick to the same strategy, but with a larger fund.

What has been the effect of exits like redBus.In on the Indian ecosystem? Do you think that this improves the outlook for more early stage investing?

Yes. Exits like redBus.in are good for various things in the Indian ecosystem. If not for the individual exit, more examples like redBus are needed sorely. Typically, companies like those take around 8 years to enter, and exit. The public markets are not good options as yet for exits. We do not as yet have a culture of acquisitions within India. Indian companies don’t do them. Companies like Naukri should really consider acquisitions and grow inorganically. Large companies in the US are beginning to take notice of possible acquisitions in India and have started doing some cross-border transactions.  This kind of ecosystem did not exist but things are beginning to change. We still have a huge need for innovative ideas. Ideas that can get built into $40M to $50M companies and get exits are key to putting the ecosystem into higher gear.

How does an entrepreneur get your attention? What kinds of start-ups interest you? How does an entrepreneur get in touch with you?

We are driven by themes. We are not reactive investors. We are interested in Smartphone/Mobile plays and are not interested in web applications. If we see a plan first addressing a web version of an application we are not interested, but those that go straight to a mobile app will get our attention. Our themes are chosen so that they can grow fast and get to a Series A comfortably. The entrepreneur needs to think like a VC and ensure that whatever they are working on is capable of such growth. Founders of our portfolio companies know our themes best. Get in touch with them, see if there is a mapping between what you do, and what we are interested in. Get one of the founders to introduce you to us after this initial filtering. This way, you won’t waste your time and you will get our attention! We do get cold referrals that go through our associates and it will be a long winded process. If you come through the founders of our portfolio companies it will be faster and it can also make sure that there is a mapping between what you are thinking and what our investment themes are. We get 60 to 70% of the introductions like this, with 125+ founders in our portfolio network.

Let’s say there is a mapping between a start-up company and your VC firm. What happens next? What are your typical due diligence efforts? How long does it take for an investment?

We are primarily looking for leadership in these companies that can survive the long haul of entrepreneurship. Can they survive the first year of marriage, primarily between the co-founders? Do they have 2 to 3 layers of leadership in the start-up, not just a single layer with the co-founders! And are the co-founders super-compatible with each other? We have seen too many founder breakups! We are not looking for problem solvers – people who solve a problem with a technical solution. We are looking for business builders. Can they build a business around it? They are not the same! In 1 or 2 meetings (in 2 or 3 weeks) you can get an idea of whether we want to proceed ahead with due diligence or let you know that the fit between our themes and your business is not there. If you can find co-investors on your own is a positive thing in your favor. The ability to excite other investors is key to us. The ability to line up other clients or customers during this period is important to us. We look for some red flags during the due diligence period – like being very casual about relationships or client opportunities. The fastest investments have been made in 4 to 5 months from introductions. The slowest ones have taken 12 to 18 months. The latter ones are usually because of syndicated investments.

Let’s say a start-up gets funded by you. How hands-on or hands-off are you with your portfolio company? What’s your style of engagement with a portfolio company?

Portfolio companies should consider us a Super-Concierge on Demand. They should be comfortable with knowing exactly when we are needed and come to us. In the early stages they come to us with quite a few problems for advice and guidance. Luckily our founder network usually has many of the answers.  We have a Google group for our portfolio company, sort of a private Quora. This helps solve 70 to 80% of the problems our start-ups face. Someone has come across most of the problems any new portfolio company is facing.  Typically these will be questions like whether to incorporate in the US or not. We are more like a platform than a VC firm in that sense, an 18-24 month accelerator program. We are as hands-on or hands-off with companies as needed. We do take a board seat as a seed investor and invariably meet with each portfolio company in person, at least every couple of months.

Let’s talk about going beyond the early stage funding and getting to the next level of funding and growth.

Series A funding  is becoming more difficult with the bar being set higher and higher. There are only 10 to 12 active Series A investors in India doing 1 or 2 investments a year. With such a thin ecosystem for Series A investing, pitching the wrong partner may mean not getting funded. The other problem is making these businesses 10X propositions for Series A (they are not interested in 5X business plans)  that require these companies to become $200M companies. We do bridge rounds that can get start-ups to get the growth necessary to qualify for a Series A funding. We are planning to raise a larger fund next time so that we can make these kinds of deeper investments.

Do you think it is possible to build a $200M company focused on the Indian market?

Yes. There are some promising areas in India that has that potential – travel or taxi services. Technology solutions like Knowlarity, NowFloats, and Exotel have that potential. The Enterprise market in India is too slow but the SME market in India has the potential to build some $200M companies. That market will also explode only when the smartphone/mobile market in India leapfrogs. The SaaS market, especially when built for a global market could grow a few $200M companies.  We are optimistic overall and feel that lots of opportunities are yet to come.

Now, let’s talk about Exits. What do you see coming in this area?

The subject of realistic venture exits is the one that somewhat dictates what the focus of a start-up should have been. Hoping to get acquired by a company in India is somewhat unrealistic. However, there are a number of companies in the US that have started coming to India to acquire Indian companies and grow inorganically. Autodesk is hiring a person in India to look for such companies, They have done a number of acquisitions already. Unfortunately, the Indian arms of Google and Yahoo are not empowered to make acquisitions.There are some companies like WebEngage and OrangeScape that are focused on foreign markets that could make good acquisition targets for companies outside India.

What about some parting advice for entrepreneurs?

Go outside India for markets. You cannot grow fast enough to raise funding and grow focusing on Indian markets currently. This is true especially if you are a technology play. Someone in Silicon Valley could start 2 years later than a company in India and beat them to it if a company is growing only in India. Grow fast and get acquired!

 

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The link between corruption & early stage venture returns in India

As everyone knows, venture returns are determined by building innovative products and services that reach scale. The operative words being INNOVATIVE and SCALE. Stuff that has not been built or tried before, stuff that delivers much greater “value” to the customer. We also know that India early stage returns have not exactly been stellar. I’ll present one framework here which tries to link corruption to the challenge in venture returns.

I think everyone knows that the Indian consumer (and business customer) is very price sensitive. The question is why? I think in order to understand this, one needs to understand the concept of opportunity cost. Let me explain it through a small personal story. We had our first child in San Francisco and very close to our apartment there were good, but slightly more expensive, grocery stores. My wife and I would have to make a choice: should we spend extra 30-45 mins for groceries to get the cheapest price or pay the higher price but get that extra time with our daughter. More often than not we’d choose paying more because time everyday was finite and we wanted to get a lot done at home and at work. In other words, we appreciated “opportunity cost” – that our lives could be a little better by spending some money to get extra time at home. And there were similar examples where we’d spend the money so we could be more productive at work (and an implicit understanding that in the longer run that extra investment had greater returns). This was not always the case; growing up in India we were taught to be extremely price conscious. Pre-1991 reforms if you did not have a family business and worked for a public or private sector company, there was a very high correlation between age and salary. That was the result of a closed, license-raj driven economy. What that told the average worker is that no matter how hard you try your “topline” cannot grow all that much so the logical thing for each person to do was to really focus on cost management in order to get financial security. These behaviors were drilled into the Indian psyche for decades and such behaviors which have achieved scale are very hard to unravel. On the other hand, in an environment where your “topline” can grow rapidly depending on how hard & smart you worked, there is all the incentive to focus time and energy on growing the “topline” rather than cost management.

As the Indian economy opened up & wages rose, we have seen much higher levels of consumer spending. The challenge however has been that the habits of the past have been hard to break. While opportunity costs have risen, the appreciation of opportunity cost by a large percentage of the population will take multiple generations.

But the other big challenge in appreciating opportunity cost is also the quality of the day to day interactions. The reality is that daily interactions are very poor even today and therefore trust is very low. The bribery scandals, the rape cases, the worsening infrastructure, the hassles of dealing with law enforcement, etc all negatively impact a consumer’s trust. All of these in one way or another have roots in the corruption in the system: The roads are poor and not improving fast enough because there is huge wastage of invested capital due to corruption in the system; traffic indiscipline is getting worse because law enforcement is not consistent or reliable – drivers break the rules with impunity … etc. In the end all these examples are rooted in corruption and not having a common set of rules that everyone trusts and abides by. This then has an impact on consumer’s willingness to try something new or pay more for greater value: “will it work?” , “what new hassles will it bring?”, “can I trust this company?” , “I don’t believe this will have the impact promised!”, etc. The default trained mindset is to focus on what you can get today because who really knows what will happen tomorrow. The consumer is just trying to make his/her life better and protect his/her loved ones the best they can; this is not a “cultural” thing, it is a systemic thing and quite frankly the biggest failure in India has been our inability to root out corruption. In other words, extreme price sensitivity is an expression of lack of hope.

With that background let me come back to the topic of this post and connect the dots between corruption and venture returns. Here is how I see it:

corruption in the system -> daily poor experiences -> lack of trust/hope -> lack of appreciation of opportunity cost -> extreme price sensitivity -> no value for high order products/services -> work is primarily dictated by operational complexity (not innovation) which is not very valuable -> poor returns for early stage investors 

What do you think? Valid connection?

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Indian Entrepreneurs & The Happy Confused Stage

Last week, I met Sharad Sharma, an angel investor & the prime mover behind the iSPIRT, a think tank for software product startups. For those who have been into software products, he is a familiar face. We’ve met many times before but this time around, we talked about the dangers of mass entrepreneurship, which I’ll keep for a later post. That’s because I stumbled upon a more pressing issue, particularly painful to the Indian entrepreneur: The Happy Confused Phase. I’ll try and paraphrase some parts of the discussion here with a few additions of my own.

What is the happy confused phase?

The happy confused phase comes after the entrepreneur has discovered his customer and found a product market fit. Ideally, a startup would now be ready for the growth execution phase. But in India, the happy confused phase takes over. In mature markets, after finding the product market fit, an entrepreneur hires a team to execute. In India, you can hardly find the right talent (for various reasons). So then, it is up to the entrepreneur to train the existing team and the transition takes longer than you would imagine. This in-between phase, is called the happy confused phase.

Implications of this stage

“The execution team is hard to find in most cases and you end up retraining existing staff to do execution,” Sharad says. This is time consuming. Unless you cross this happy confused phase, most Indian VCs won’t fund you despite having found the product-market fit. Indian VC’s won’t come into a deal too early because they have their exits which is time bound in nature, to take care of. Running out of money is one of the many things that can go wrong in a startup.

Who can help?

Accelerators can help. But there is another problem here. Accelerators in India are time based. Which means, when they run out of time, they have to send the startup away. This is one reason why you would have started hearing of “accelerator horror stories.” After time runs out, many will promise you support but it is flaky at best.

A four month acceleration period is hardly enough in Indian conditions. There are exceptions to this. However, the general idea is that accelerators, especially the ones that take equity in the company, must be stage based.

Mentors can help. Mentors in the same industry as yours, who can help you with deals, are very valuable. They can also help you find talent and customers. However, as veteran Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla pointed out at his talk in Bangalore, “It can’t be people who are sideline cheerleaders who have never taken risks.”

Focused events like Uncafe or Playbook Round Tables by iSPIRT can also help. These events help speed up learning. Peers and people who have been in your shoes can help you learn faster. The important phrase here is “ experiential learning,” and not “startup event.”

Conclusion

The existence of the happy confused phase is not the only issue that Indian product entrepreneur has to deal with. With Indian startups, the discovery phase is longer than usual as well. An informed product entrepreneur who is aware of these issues can hack his way through these stages better than his uninformed peers.

If you’ve been in a similar situation and have found a clever way out, leave a comment or write a guest post for us.

Reblogged from NextBigWhat – Post Contributed by Jayadevan

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M & A – The most preferred option to grow in uncertain times

It is a typical Monday 9 AM! Ready to kick-start another challenging week! Fine day in Chennai !! Not so hot like a typical Chennai climate. But, for first generation entrepreneurs it is an ordeal to pass thru weekly pressures of Cash flow, Attrition, New business and opportunities etc. etc. This experience is collectively described as “Monday Morning Blues”.

The growth dilemma

There has always been a great dilemma for entrepreneurs during fund raising exercise especially when it comes to taking the company to the next level of growth. The dilemma does not stop by simply raising the money for growth, but it goes on till such time one is able to strike a balance between how much stakes to dilute and the tangible benefits that the venture will get.Then comes the business and revenue models. The previous eras have brought countless innovations in the theory and practice of running businesses. Many are now staples of contemporary management, but others were ephemeral distractions that led companies down the wrong roads. Too often, leaders have sought the appearance of success rather than its reality – size for the sake of size, book-keeping profits as opposed to intrinsic value, earnings growth manipulated to please the stock markets. This era’s changes are already redefining management theory and practice. Raising competitiveness intensity forces a return to basic again. Going down to basics today means first and foremost focusing on how you can create intrinsic or fundamental value for your business. Your ability to create fundamental value rests on how good you are at finding the right balance between your external and internal realities and your financial aspirations; in other words, how skilfully you develop and use your business model. The major reason to focus on the fundamentals is that growth won’t come easily. Organic growth will not often produce the double-digit gains that were routine and even obligatory in the last era.

Leaders who hope to grow their way to success through mergers and acquisitions in the present market scenario are left with umpteen no of options. Needless to mention that M & As promises to increase economies of scale and yield efficiencies from synergy – or at least show the kind of revenue growth that looks like progress. And some players thrive by picking up battlefield causalities on the chips and hammering them to shape. Many people viewed General Electric’s acquisitions in the late 1980s of troubled RCA as a misconceived diversifications ploy. But after selling off RCA’s consumer electronics and aerospace businesses, GE wound up with NBC for a song, turned it around and went on to build it into a network powerhouse. NBC generated significant profits year in and year out, and with the addition of Vivendi Universal’s entertainment assets which greatly helped GE’s future growth.

The courage to change

Many first generation entrepreneurs lack with the intelligence to recognize that they have reached a crossroad but don’t follow through and head down the new path. Their inner core isn’t tough enough to allow them to acknowledge and deal with an unpleasant reality, whether it is closing a loss making division or taking realistic look at the business model and tweaking to market expectations. Many would like to continue in their comfort zone of their familiar managerial routines and protecting their pay checks. They may be afraid: change means taking risks and taking risks raises the possibility of failure. The fear failure occupies most of entrepreneur’s growth dilemma of raising money, divesting their stakes and working under a different management culture.

These entrepreneurs often don’t recognize that failing to make a shift can be riskier than making none. The entrepreneurs who have the appetite for tough actions have the inner strength. They are willing to look at clearly at the business model that has been highly successful and is no longer relevant.

To raise funds for growth or get merged is a difficulty and at times too difficult to get consensus from founder/ promoters. This leaves the emerging organizations with fewer options such as the following:

  1. Tag along with a bigger player and pitch for bigger contracts – on a case-to-case basis
  2. Dilute promoters’ stake heavily and raise money from PEs or VCs at the cost of losing control of the company in your eyes and also not knowing the business outcome after fund infusion
  3. Be a captive IT Partner for a big group and get acquired by them eventually once a decent value is built. The flip-side to this approach is that one does not know the time it will take to realise decent value

The current era of business offers promising option than the usual organic growth for entrepreneurs.

M & A – The most preferred option to grow in uncertain times

While an acquisition may have higher risk of failure than any other expansion strategy, it also provides a much superior return profile in comparison to organic growth strategy. M & As is intrinsically risky and predicting the aftermath of any acquisition is almost impossible. The fact remains that predicting the aftermath of any business plan execution is also an impossible task. But there are learnings from the past that can mitigate the risk of failure. Most M& A s fail due to inadequate articulation of two key enablers of a deal: transaction management, which is all about paying the right value, conducting a thorough due diligence and appointing the right transaction adviser; and integration management, which is about devising a detailed integration strategy ahead of the buy decision to keep the rationale of the acquisition intact. The fact of the matter,however is that any corporate strategy can go bad despite putting safeguards against any possible fallout in future. And so can simple business decisions related to marketing and research and development will lead to unpredictable business outcome.

If there are precedents where shareholders’ wealth has been written off as fallout of ill-planned M & A, there are more than a handful of cases in history through well executed M & A strategy that delivered immense value to share-holders:

  1. IBM’s market value of USD 227 Billion has been created virtually through acquisitions. It has acquired 187 companies since 200 for about USD 200 billion
  2. SAP has made 5 major acquisitions since 2001 for a whopping sum of USD 20 billion to reach its current position of Euro 17 Billion
  3. Cisco built the current sales turnover of USD 47 billion from USD 4 billion in 1996. Cisco has acquired more than 450 companies since its inception. Cisco’s fundamental growth strategy has been M & A
  1. GE has acquired more than 18 companies since 1952 ranging from Aerospace, Process Industry, Financial Services , Healthcare for whopping sum of USD 14 billion to reach its current revenue of USD 150 billion
  2. Exxon Mobile, It is what today on the back of a merger between two energy giants which clearly didn’t happen without the risk of failure in 1999. Exxon Mobile has surpassed Apple’s market cap and reached the USD 385 billion in April 2013.
  3. Maersk has acquired P & O Nedlloyd in 2005 to create one of the largest shipping lines in the world.
  4. P & O and Nedlloyd were merged together in 1996 which was yet another record in the history of shipping lines.

It is all about convincing the company’s management on the risks associated with a strategy like M & A on the back of statistics of successful transactions.

The entrepreneurs who are looking at raising money must do the following reality check and decide whether M & A is an option.

  1. Research and evaluate your competition
  2. Measure share-holders value year-on-year and see whether it is increasing
  3. Your ability to raise funds and offer significant returns within a short period of time e.g. 3 years to 5 years
  4. Ability to devote time on innovation and offer more customer value

The IT/ ITeS industry are moving towards consolidation and better economies of scale and efficiencies.The market is swamped by competition and the technological advancements are determining new way of delivering customer value. Therefore, IT services companies have to seriously consider M & A as their growth strategy to protect investor’s wealth, IP, customers, business.

Guest Post Contributed by Rangarajan Sriraman. The views expressed in this article are personal. The author is a serial entrepreneur, mentor and strategic advisor to start-ups in IT and ITeS segment based in Chennai and has been involved in 2 start-ups so far from the concept to execution stage and later on successfully exiting.

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India’s Need For Entrepreneurs and the MindSet

In 1991, the second Independence of India took place – there was an opening up of the economy that led, in its own tortuous Indian way, to the opening up of the minds of a section of the population. The educated middle class that had till then either left the country for greener pastures or taken up jobs in the government or with the few MNCs operating then started looking around at opportunities that were being created in India. Entrepreneurship still seemed like something only two sections of society ventured into – those with family wealth or traditional business backgrounds or those without any other option namely, the roadside food shop, the barber and the small store owner. Very few consciously chose entrepreneurship as an option. Then, towards the end of that decade, a remarkable thing began to happen. Young educated middle class Indians suddenly started taking an interest in India: a host of environmental factors played a catalytic role in this phenomenon: the rise of Indian entrepreneurship in the US, the emergence of 1st generation educated middle class Indian entrepreneurs, the creation of aspirations in a increasingly mobile workforce and the media, increased availability of capital and the like. India started getting noticed in the West and India’s arrival on the global stage started getting reported in breathless hyperbole. However, all this euphoric talk about India’s growth and success hid the fact that crony socialism had quietly given way to crony capitalism which was as insidious. Governance and policy making took not just the last rows in the stadium that was cheering “India’s arrival” but were not even in the stadium! The penny naturally dropped on the India story.

Today, we’re confronted by the stark realities of India that the breathless comparisons with China and other countries had somehow managed to paper over. The hubris is slowly and painfully giving away to the realization that the parties celebrating India as a super power had begun too soon. And that there was, quite simply, an enormous amount of work to be done.

In 2012, as India enters its 66th year, our first prime minister’s rousing speech “Tryst with Destiny” is yet again worth reading. Are we anywhere close to redeeming the pledge made, has the new star of hope provided succour and whether hope still springs in the hearts and minds of all of us? While very impressive strides have been made in many areas, especially given the desperate condition at the start of our country’s birth, it is important that we keep in mind the fact that 15% of the world lives in India and over 68%  ie about 700million of our people live on less than US$2 a day. Over 17 million people are born (equivalent to the population of The Netherlands), an estimated 40million are unemployed, over 500,000 students graduate each year from various colleges and over  12 million join the workforce each year . The investment required to educate, train, and deploy these large numbers into gainful jobs is in the tens of thousands of crores. And remember, these millions of jobs have to be yet created! Now imagine the public healthcare, water and sanitation, education, travel, housing, electricity, entertainment, banking and financial services that need to be provided to these huge numbers assuming there’re jobs that lead to incomes being generated leading to consumption and investment. Imagine a scenario where tens of millions of young energetic citizens become disillusioned job seekers – the social upheaval possibilities are terribly explosive even to contemplate, particularly in our country.

For far too long, we have been plagued by poverty – of ideas, of ideology and of course economically. Misplaced socialistic policies in the early years of India ensured that poverty was distributed while cronyism ensured that a few made unconscionable amounts of money and enjoyed the trappings of power.

Jobs are created by entrepreneurs. Governments are facilitators and regulators to make sure that everyone’s playing fairly and by the rules that have been created to facilitate the creation of jobs. Wealth is then created by entrepreneurial actions. Only when wealth is created, can there be investments in creating the support infrastructure and services necessary for India to seriously consider redeeming its pledge. And a crucial pre-requisite for this is the need for an entrepreneurial mindset.

Change in every society, in every age, in every sphere of human endeavor has come about because some people, a minority, decided to put their entrepreneurial mindsets to work. And they were able to put their entrepreneurial mindsets to work because they were incredibly passionate about what they believed in. This minority is the entrepreneurial community. And while the term “entrepreneur” is generally used in the context of business and startups, it is important to realize that the entrepreneurial mindset has been, is and will be on display all around us.

Anyone with an entrepreneurial mindset dreams big, is interested in solving problems, seizes opportunities, is unafraid to experiment with new ways of doing things in order to achieve the dream, demonstrates leadership in creating new resources while marshalling existing resources, energizes people to work collectively to executing the dream, is conscious of the need to be fair, is respectful of the laws of the land, realizes the need to act with speed, engages and responds to feedback with a recalibrated approach, is unapologetic about effecting positive change by challenging a prevailing status quo and works incredibly hard. Possibilities of effecting change and making a difference to oneself and to others as against complaining about constraints (“I have no resources, I don’t know too many people, don’t have the knowledge or experience”) is what distinguishes those with the entrepreneurial mindset from the others. They spend positive energy in figuring out ways to create, seek and aggregate resources (team members, finances, networks) to make the possibilities come true. They are not afraid of failure but instead as Vinod Khosla says, “My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed”. In other words, keep shooting multiple arrows at the target.

What is it that drove Andrew Wiles for 30 long frustrating and difficult years to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem – ever since he first came face to face with it at the age of 10 – that had confounded mathematicians for over 350 years? What is it that makes a Reinhold Messner, the greatest mountaineer of all time, climb mountains on every continent, losing several of his fingers and toes and putting himself through extreme life threatening hardships such as climbing Mount Everest without oxygen? Surely, it wasn’t the money! What is it that made a significantly deaf, unschooled child grow up to become Thomas Edison, one of the most prolific inventors of all time with over a 1000 patents? Well before IPL, the stuffy establishment of cricket was changed forever in 1978 when Kerry Packer an Australian media baron challenged status quo by signing up 51 of the world’s top cricketers and introduced limited overs cricket under flood lights, with fielding restrictions, with coloured clothing, cheer leaders and the like. How come no one else thought of this before Packer? Would there have been a Nano if not for a Ratan Tata daring to think of a $2000 car for the middle class Indian?

The mightiest empire the world has ever known was shaken to its very foundations by the incredible demonstration of the entrepreneurial mindset by Mahatma Gandhi. For example, he had this to say about Swaraj “we must have a proper picture of what we want before we can have something approaching it”. Landing in India in 1915 as a 46 year old without any real understanding of India and without any mass following, but shaped by his South African experiences on the need for social justice, driven only by a set of passionate beliefs about the need for freedom for India, developed his concept of Satyagraha and energised people through his own unique blend of non-violent politics, lifestyle and use of symbols like the Dandi March.

We all have heard of Amul. It is India’s largest branded impact making organization Amul today impacts over 3 million milk producers and generates over $2 billion in revenues. It is world’s largest vegetarian cheese brand, India’s largest food brand and the largest pouched milk brand. It would be hard to imagine that an Amul could have been created without the entrepreneurial mindset and leadership of Dr Verghese Kurien, who led Amul as it innovated across the value chain. Amul incidentally was founded in 1946 before India’s independence!

From the few less than obvious examples cited above, it is clear that the manifestations of an entrepreneurial mindset are visible across very many areas of human endeavor.  As we contemplate an India that can  redeem its tryst with destiny, where jobs create economic security for hundreds of millions, we absolutely cannot ignore the seemingly intractable problems that confront us all as citizens. I have long believed that change in India will gain irreversible momentum when the generation born after 1991 enters the work-force. This is the generation that is confident, knowledgeable, technology savvy, is aware, well traveled and is impatient. Fortunately, India is the home to the largest number of such people anywhere in the world.

Resolving these problems requires the energizing of the entrepreneurial mindset that’s latent in each of us. Each of us can make a difference if only we dare to think differently. Changes in the way things are done in government, in politics, in society, in business, in education, healthcare are all eminently possible through entrepreneurial thinking with job creation and facilitation as the important outcome.

Here, therefore, is a question for us to ponder over:

Is it possible for us to imagine that each of us, in our lifetimes, creates – either directly or indirectly – a 100 jobs? Are there not 100,000 people – educated, experienced, entrepreneurial and energetic – who can each take up this challenge? Ten million jobs can be created by this group, indirectly benefiting 50 million.

If it is possible, it is do-able!

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishada has this to say:

“You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.”

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How to Become a Super Associate

Being an Associate in a Venture Capital firm is a dead-end job*, that you can’t leap without entrepreneurial experience. And, entrepreneurs hate you for your pesky, clueless mails. Here’s hoping to help you out – and help ourselves.

Dear Associate / Analyst,

I know I took a big stab at you [1] and went public with it. I know you are trying to do your job, but the way you are going about it right now sucks big time. If you are wasting the time of an entrepreneur – and especially one in my fold and care [2] – well, you can expect more coming your way.

That said, I know its pointless to be critical instead of being helpful. So here are some tips to be awesome at what you do:

1. Introduce yourself with your title

You represent the firm, but what you do there will set expectations right with the entrepreneurs. Most Firms have a lousy habit of not even updating their current website and partner list, so an Introduction that says “Hi, I am So-and-so, an Associate with XYZ firm and I work closely with Partner Mr. X on Deals related to a,b,c sectors” would make it a better intro.

2. Be Clear

Please do not make claims about funding and all – Try very very hard not to set false hopes. We know the power you have is only to get names in a pipeline. Not even the principals have power to make that claim [3], so be very clear why you are reaching out to a startup – “To get the startup in your list of startups to watch” aka the dealflow pipeline. Entrepreneurs are racing against all the odds set against them, letting them know that this is a relationship building excercise, not a funding excercise, will also give them the opportunity to prioritize accordingly.

3. Think twice, thrice before asking teams to work on a document

I have met startups who sit and slog making market projections and research – well, thats kinda your job, isnt it? – and in trying to make business plans with five year projections.

Hint: the startup still doesn’t have a product, they don’t have a customer and they don’t know who might pay for it. That’s a hell of a lot of variables, and what you are asking them to produce is nothing short of writing fiction. Let us do more realism and less fiction, please?

4. Be hands on.

And by that we mean, be useful. If you love tech, what we really really lack in India (and globally) are guys who can look at a product and give feedback. If you sign up, give the product a try, recommend it to a few users, get them to try and send the team an email with genuine usability, functionality and customer feedback, guess what? its two birds in one stone – you don’t have to ask questions about who uses the product anymore because tada! you yourself know, and you also get on the good side of startups and the advisors / accelerators who are helping them.

5. Can you get them customers?

If you are talking to a startup that has its beta / product launched, can you push it internally within your team and your portfolio and get them to adopt it? You might have to build a system where your portfolio entrepreneurs get a single point/vote in the companies you are looking at (Tell them Y Combinator does stuff like that, internally to sell it) – which helps in two ways;

a) You get an entrepreneur’s perspective that can really help startups and

b) if they are solving a real problem, they might get paying customers.

6. Add Meaningful Value.

You know that there are only four defined roles in a VC firm, and you are at a dead end job if you are not an entrepreneur because its not easy becoming a partner, climbing up the associate route. You know what will put you up there? Proving that you can work with entrepreneurs and can be the second mind (head). So be selfish. I have been blown away by the value add some of the associates and principals like Anshoo of Lightspeed, Anand Daniel of Accel do for companies (in India) – so much so that I ask teams to talk to them. See, how it works?

All of this gets you on the good books of entrepreneurs, startups and folks like me. If you are an awesome associate/analyst, I’d love to meet you sometime and lets do this work together. We are all on the same side of the table. [4]

Do Entrepreneurs really Care? Here’s a requote of a quote from Kris Nair’s blogpost [5], of Sampad from Instamojo [6]:

I hardly see an investor saying that:

Hey, I used your product and it’s awesome / awful / sucked etc and I think you can do this or that from his/her experience which can help the founder achieve little bit more on reach, retention or revenue metric of the company.

You know where to start to build moat – almost always it starts with what most others wouldn’t care doing or looking at. Be an awesome associate – don’t suck.

————————————————————————————————
[1] http://www.vijayanand.name/2013/06/darn-the-associates/
[2] http://www.thestartupcentre.com
[3] http://www.vijayanand.name/2013/05/ask-vijay-what-goes-on-inside-a-vc-firm/
[4] http://www.vijayanand.name/2013/05/the-same-side-of-the-table/
[5] http://krisnair.com/post/34818850722/vc-associates
[6] http://www.instamojo.com/

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How Much is your Company Worth? – A Valuation Toolkit for Software Product Startups

When you see Yahoo offer $1.1B in cash for Tumblr or it pays $30M for Summly, the reactions around the world range from kudos to the founders and initial investors, to “I’ll have some of what they are smoking”! But most of the time, there is some sanity behind all that madness but there have been times when it has been more of insanity as at the peak of the Dot.com boom, in the early 2000’s. The question is a confounding, personal one, whether it’s your start-up company that you are trying to value, or considering investing in one. Company valuations are usually a science when it is a mature company with products already in the market, with revenues and profits. It moves more to the Art side of the continuum, the more early stage, the start-up is. It is different if you are consumer or enterprise focused, pre-revenue or post, traditional software model or SaaS based.  It is better to be armed with a toolkit of various valuation approaches, picking and choosing what may apply in a specific situation. Typically valuations could be arrived at as a cumulative of various components all added up together as appropriate. Some of the approaches that make up this toolkit, when and where they may be applicable, are:

a. Asset Valuation: If the company has a product and is making revenues already, the current contracts, and those close to signing, may have their own value and these need to be added up to the revenues and hence, the value of the company.  The cost to replace existing assets can also be used to add to the valuation, especially in acqui-hire kinds of situations – where a company buys another company for its engineers and talent, rather than the products themselves. This may be of special interest in start-ups based in India. How much time and effort would it take for another company to assemble the talent and experiences the employees of your company may represent? In the simplest case you can add up all the recruitment expenses for assembling the talent you have over the years adding a premium for the time-value of the whole thing!

b. Similar Company Comparisons: There is nothing like comparables with recent valuations of companies similar to yours, in business model and stage of development. Other companies that have received funding recently may be good justifications for your own valuations. This is why networking not just with VCs and Angels but also fellow startup company founders and chief executives is important. They should feel comfortable enough with you to share this kind of highly confidential information with you! Think about it!

c. Market Size and Growth Potential:  For those that think “why should Tumblr be valued at $1.1B”, have you looked at the first year revenues of Google and Facebook? In no other industry would you see companies go from $0 to $1B in as short a time as some of these companies with just ad revenues! Traditional brick and mortar companies would take decades to reach this level of revenues! According to Yahoo!’s May 20 letter to shareholders, Tumblr site has 300 million active monthly users, meaning, Yahoo! is paying around $3 per user, while Facebook paid around $30 per Instagram user; apparently Yahoo! is doing a good deal. So as this article on The Motley Fool says, it’s all about traffic, stupid!  Eyeballs may not be dead if you can make it work still, although it will be harder these days! This is where we may want to think about the advantages of going global vs going for the Indian market alone! The Indian Smartphone Market has grown from 4% growth to 6% growth from 2012  to 2013! So it may may still make sense to focus on the Global consumer smartphone market instead of the Indian market alone if you want to grow fast! But the SMB market in India seems to be large already and growing at a reasonable rate! So if your startup is focusing on the Indian SMB market, market, more power to you!

d. Intellectual Property, Barriers to Entry and Ecosystem Building Potential:   Think about Microsoft SQL server or The Oracle Database Management system.  Think about the millions of people around the globe that make a living out of these ecosystems – providing skills in these products, skills in the applications built around these products, having jobs around the globe with companies that use these products and applications built around them. Those are ecosystems! These are worth trillions of dollars just around the ecosystem building potential of these! Google and facebook are in the process of building their own ecosystems now. If your Intellectual Property is anything like this, you may want to increase your valuations proportionately. What barriers to entry have you built around your technology? What prevents any tom, dick and harry from replicating what you do? If that’s solid, it’s worth a lot of money and you can confidently reflect that in your valuation and articulate the same to your investors. Here’s a link that explains different kinds of ecosystems you can build!

e. Income Valuation Approaches: If your start-up already has revenues and profits, the Income Valuation approach may be used  to arrive at the income component of the valuation. The usual methods used are Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) methods. At their essential simplicity, they are estimating future revenues and profits and arriving at the Discounted Present Value of those profits given an interest rate. For example, if you are projecting profits of $100, $150 and $300 at the end of years 3, 4 and 5, what are their current values? What amounts today if invested at say 8% would  yield incomes of $100, $150 and $300 in years 3,4 and 5?, You add those profit values as of today and calculate valuations based on those! Usually Earnings Before Interest, Depreciation and Taxes (EBITDA) are used instead of Net Profits since EBITDA reflects much more accurately the exact earnings potential of your startup! You can also use some rough rules of thumb for valuations based on sales –  Horizontal Software between 1.35x and 2.1x. Vertical Software from 1.4x to 2.1x.  Consumer Software a bit lower, 0.5x to a just under 1x sales.  Infrastructure  – 1.5x to 2.5x sales.  Internet and Software is 2.19x to 2.7x.  IT Services, which is people intensive, is lower, 0.6x to 0.74x.  The actual numbers don’t matter as much as the difference in how different kinds of startup companies are valued, in relation to each other and why.

f. Scarcity Premiums: The basic principles of Economics – Demand and Supply may apply to startup company valuations, just as well. If too many investors are chasing after a limited number of  shares available in a start-up company, the valuation goes up! This is the reason you need to create an imbalance between investors interested in your company and the number of investors and the money you are willing to take in – creating a scarcity! This is also the reason you need to start build as big a network of investors way before you need them to invest in you! You expand your demand way ahead of time! However, Scarcity Premiums can come back to bite you in your next round of investments if you have oversold your value and cannot meet your revenue, profit or product development goals before the next round. Down rounds are no fun! If you raise this round at a high valuation and the next round is a down round, your company may be perceived as a failure. That’s why you need to be careful about taking money at higher valuations, even if you could!

h. Insanity Premiums:  There have been times like the Dot.Com boom when insane valuations prevailed and entrepreneurs took full advantage of them. Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo.com for $5.7B . This is acknowledged as one of the worst acquisitions in history! Mark Cuban was not the worse off from this deal since he cashed out and moved on to other investments on his own. If it’s not a total exit, the same caveat about subsequent down rounds still may apply!

As a start up company, you owe it to yourself to take a systematic approach to valuing your own company and conveying your logic to your investors if they ask for it. In the worst case, experienced investors may choose the methodology that gives you the worst valuation and you can be ready with your own bargaining position with careful, considered logic and a better valuation!

 Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. – Warren Buffett

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It’s time to open the gates wider

There is a growing nervousness among foreign investors putting their money in India. The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index 2012 revealed that India, Asia’s third-largest economy, ranked 74th out of 79 countries, making it an unviable country to start a business. There is a growing nervousness among foreign investors putting their money in India.

Fewer than 150 start-ups are promoted by venture capital or angel investors annually in India compared to over 60,000 angel investments in the US. In 2011, Indian angels, constrained by regulations that make both investing and exits cumbersome, invested only about Rs.100 crore in around 50 deals compared with Rs.2,000 crore angels invested in Canada.

These figures don’t surprise Indian product software start-ups. India has produced few of the world’s leading software products, has 3,400 software product start-ups, and adds 400 every year. But it needs the right environment and incentives to build a world-leading industry.

For several decades, the Indian ownership laws and the investment and business environment have not allowed a conducive setting for the brightest of minds, many of whom have migrated to California. The new Indian entrepreneurs spend significant time on product development to build patentable products with a global market. However, as soon as the product gains traction, venture investors and professionals advise entrepreneurs to move the holding structure, if not the entire business, outside India. The main reasons are as follows:

Financing:

In today’s world talent and ideas are mobile. Singapore, Hong Kong, Chile and the UK are offering attractive financing (debt and equity) to Indian companies to relocate their business. They are also offering tax benefits. This is starting to result in real migration of promising companies out of India.

Maze of rules:

In India, we have foreign direct investment, VCI (venture capital investment), foreign institutional investors, Reserve Bank of India, fair valuations and draconian consequences for inadvertent slip-ups, while in most major economies there are no restrictions.

Taxation:

Capital gains (20%) as well as dividends (dividend distribution tax of 12.5%) even for foreign investors. In most major economies, foreign investors are not taxed on their capital gains and dividend income on their investments and owned businesses. India’s tax policy does not help a product business to attract the right kind of investors and acquirers, and is a hurdle for those interested in foreign acquisition in a stock deal as Indian paper is not an attractive currency. In the UK, for example, investors can write off any investment losses against income, and this significantly reduces their cost of failures.

Open economy:

India does not treat foreign investors on par with local investors, unlike the US, the UK, Europe, Singapore and Hong Kong, which have no restriction on ownership and company structures, and for the most part, regulatory filings (except some strategic and security related issues).

India needs to build an attractive regime to retain the software products business and its intellectual property, which is highly mobile. Incentives and special regimes for businesses that create IP and file for patents will give the industry a big boost. Among the solutions are the liberalized ownership rules with exemptions from regulatory filings and specific regimes (FDI/VCI/FII, etc.), specific exemptions from capital gains and dividend taxes for investors and tax exemption on foreign income of Indian software product companies. Why not go even further and build a fully liberalized virtual special economic zone for ownership and operation of software product companies, with India signing an iron-clad double-taxation avoidance agreement the virtual SEZ.

India needs to proactively grab opportunities, or risk driving the whole industry abroad. We have the potential to create multi-billion dollar global product companies every year, and the benefits could run into trillions of dollars over a decade or two.

This article first appeared in the LiveMint