The Desi VC with Akash Bhat

Sandeep Patil is a partner at QED Investors, and heads the fund’s investments in Asia. Founded in 2007, QED Investors has invested in more than 180+ companies, including 27 unicorns, and has more than $5 billion under management. Notable investments include Nubank, SoFi, Credit Karma, Klarna, GreenSky, Avant, Flywire, Remitly, QuintoAndar, Creditas, ClearScore, and Konfio.He has extensive consumer internet experience and is a global banking and financial services industry veteran. Over the course of his career, he has helped launch consumer and SME lending businesses at Flipkart, as well as contributed to the company's fundraising and eventual sale to Walmart. He was also the Managing Director and CEO for India at Truecaller, where he oversaw the Adtech, Payments, FinTech, SME/Enterprise, and Developer businesses, doubling revenue and achieving net income profitability despite the pandemic.Sandeep brings extensive consumer credit experience from Capital One in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as experience serving global investors, banks, and insurers at McKinsey & Company.Sandeep holds a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and an MBA from the London Business School (LBS).In this episode, we will cover:1. How and why did Sandeep become a venture capitalist? (3:03)2. What are the parallels and differences between the 2007/08 crisis and the post-pandemic economic slowdown? (14:56)3. QED's assessment of the current market and its implications for venture investing (24:15)4. What is the balance between founder-market-fit and investor-founder-fit? (31: 37)5. Consumer vs. enterprise in Indian fintech: where is the opportunity? (40:00)6. From where will the winners in Indian fintech emerge? (46:55)7. How easy is it to keep an eye on Asian markets from the UK? (51:15)

Abhishek Goenka is the Head & CIO at RPSG Capital Ventures, a corporate venture fund backed by the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group. The fund primarily invests in early-stage consumer brands in India including F&B, CPG, personal care and lifestyle goods. Abhishek brings two decades of experience across investments and M&A having spent time being part of the investments team at True North and JP Morgan. He is a Chartered Accountant and Chartered Financial Analyst by qualification. In this episode, we will cover:1. Lessons learned over the last two years investing in India (3:53)2. How does RPSG Capital Ventures plan to invest in the second half of the year? (12:46)3. What aspect of the Indian consumer story drew Abhishek in? (20:33)4. Addressing and tackling the middle India opportunity (26:26)5. What factors does RSPG Capital Ventures consider when investing in startups in the early stages? (32:40)6. Tips for constructing your cap-table (44:30)7. Advice for today's entrepreneurs and those who will start businesses tomorrow (51:20)8. Where will RSPG invest in the coming year? (56:48)

Madhu Shalini Iyer is a Partner at Rocketship VC. Previously, she was the Chief Data Officer of Gojek and helped grow the business into a $1 billion unicorn. She was on the board and started the Singapore office. Prior to Gojek, Madhu was an operating partner at a 150M private equity fund building startups across South East Asia. She was part of the founding team of Intuit’s Quickbooks Lending Platform where she helped grow the platform to $300 million and holds 3 patents in the areas of user data augmented algorithms for financial inclusion.In this episode, we will cover:1. Madhu's journey from Intuit and GoJek operator to board member and investor (3:00)2. What aspect of the operator journey makes investing more pleasurable? (10:45)3. How does Rocketship VC use data science to assist in the selection of startups for investment? (18:21)4. How does data science influence Rocketship's thesis? (22:41)5. Portfolio construction constraints with a heavily data-driven model (25:32)6. Where does Rocketship stand on gut and human instinct versus data science? (30:20)7. How did Rocketship's data science-focused fund model attract LPs? (34:05)8. How does data and the Rocketship model adapt to macroeconomic trends? (42:27)9. Can data be used to assess the impact of an investment on a portfolio? (46:15)10. Why is investing so personal for Shalini (50:41)11. Advice to founders and investors (59:25)

Viral Jani has been the driving force behind several challenging projects in Consumer Tech, Television Broadcasting, Digital, Social Media and Media Planning. Armed with more than 15 years of experience in media and technology, Viral plays a key role in spearheading Investment Operations at Times Bridge.A post graduate in Communications Management, Media & Brand Management from MICA, in his previous avatar, Viral has led strategy, television and entertainment partnerships for Twitter across India and worked with key strategic partners across sectors to drive innovation and monetization.Prior to Twitter, he was the Head of Strategy and Social Media for Times Television Network. Viral has also been associated with several other major media houses in India like NDTV, Disney, Viacom and Mindshare.In this episode we will cover:1. Times Bridge and its unique structure (3:12)2. When does a company approach Times Bridge (14:50)3. How does the deal flow at Times Bridge work? (18:57)4. Measuring success with Times Bridge business model (25:10)5. How does Times Bridge view competition in its portfolio? (31:30)6. The impact of the macroeconomic environment on today's investments (35:02)7. Learnings from the Times Bridge portfolio and the impact of macro trends on their Indian businesses (40:21)8. The hardest aspect about being an investor (42:42)9. Managing relationships with portfolio startups and working on the India expansion story (47:18)10. What should companies considering expanding into India know and be aware of before entering the market? (51:40)11. words of wisdom for his younger self (56:16)

Mohit Kumar is the Co-founder and CEO of Ultrahuman, a metabolic health tracking platform that provides intelligent nudges based on glucose biomarkers and aims to improve users’ exercise, sleep and nutrition based on deep insights from the platform. Ultrahuman was founded by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal who were also co-founders at Runnr which later merged with India’s largest food delivery service Zomato.Ultrahuman has raised over $25m to date from Alpha Wave, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and iSeed fund, and a range of other angel investors including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer.In this episode, we will cover:1. Impact of the last two years on Ultrahuman (2:50)2. How did the founding team come up with the idea for Ultrahuman (7:33)3. How did the Ultrahuman team perceive the TAM? (17:25)4. How does Ultrahuman raise public awareness about food, diet, nutrition, and lifestyle? (23:30)5. Breaking down data for customers who are not data savvy (30:15)6. The Science of Metabolic Score (35:20)7. What has Ultrahuman team learned from the pandemic user data? (39:10)8. How can men and women understand their bodies better through Ultrahuman (44:46)9. What is Ultrahuman’s vision for the future (52:38)10. How does Ultrahuman intend to democratize data access? (1:09:25)11. How do investors perceive Ultrahuman? (1:11:05)

Vinay Singh is a Partner at Fireside Ventures, a fund specializing in early stage and seed investments in the Indian consumer space. With 7+ years at Hindustan Unilever as Marketing Manager for a multi-crore brand, extensive expertise in digital marketing at McKinsey & Co., and Bankbazaar.com, Vinay has a unique perspective on the intersection between consumer brands and technology. He has also been an entrepreneur, as the founder and CEO of Stepni.com, which was acquired by Quikr.In this episode, we will cover:1. Vinay’s take on the market right now (3:00)2. Does abundant dry powder allow funds to modify their thesis? (8:33)3. How does a venture capitalist look at ‘brand building’? (14:30)4. How can you build a global D2C brand from India? (21:08)5. Does a startup’s mission really matter to investors? (28:45)6. How does a founder find purpose in their idea / business? (37:46)7. How important is operating experience for an investor (44:24)8. For founders: How to build rapport with your investors (48:11)9. What does Vinay and Fireside Ventures do REALLY well (53:04)

Ankur Bansal is the Co-founder and Executive Director at BlackSoil Capital, a venture debt firm based in India. He leads the execution efforts across our large corporate clients in strategic discussions, idea origination, M&A execution, investment thesis, and negotiations. Ankur is a CFA and a CA with a large network of venture capitalists, private equity investors, institutional investors, and investment bankers and has extensive investment banking experience with major banks such as JP Morgan, Citi, and JM Morgan Stanley.In this episode we will cover:1. Thoughts on current landscape within India (1:00)2. Valuations, down rounds and how startups survive this tide? (6:17)3. How long will the economic downturn last (11:25)4. Why Ankur prefers startups that are “dhanda” type business (22:50)5. Does timing really matter for a venture debt investor (29:40)6. Are debt investors in India collaborative or competitive by nature? (32:14)7. Could a founder have more than one debt investor on the cap table? (33:24)8. Value add that debt investors bring to the table (36:53)9. How did the Partners at BlackSoil decide the fund structure (44:19)10. Which sectors are debt investors excited about (51:21)11. Tidbit about the fund name - BlackSoil (1:04:01)

Sunil Goyal is the Founder and Managing Director of YourNest, a deep tech and enterprise focused fund in India. Before becoming a full-time, early-stage investor and fund manager, he had gained comprehensive experience of leading complex projects in the areas of M&A, business turnarounds and strategic partnerships. He has spent over two decades working at CXO levels at Bharti group and Dabur. As one of the country’s early angel investors, Sunil has led seed-stage investments and guided companies to successful exits: his investments which reaped healthy returns include ZipDial (9.6x acquired by Twitter), VuClip (4.4x acquired by PCCW) and Mobiquest (1.8x acquired by PayTM). A former member of The Indian Angel Network and Mumbai Angels, Sunil discovered an acumen for spotting high-potential startups and eventually chose to set up YourNest Venture Capital.In this episode we will cover:1. How does Sunil define deep tech (3:05)2. Why did Sunil take a bet on deep tech and enterprise when very people did back in 2011? (6:10)3. Why was early stage investing a big boys game in India back in 2011 (13:52)4. How do you track progress in deep tech and continue to support a company’s growth (21:40)5. Tracking progress in deep tech against the competition (25:54)6. Best time to fundraise for a deep tech startup in India (29:21)7. The importance of bringing on the right set of investors for a deep tech startup (34:28)8. Advice to young first time deep tech founders (38:19)9. The role an early-stage VC plays in building portfolios to reach later-stage (42:50)10. How do we enable more investors to enter the deep tech investing world (45:08)11. The role of the Indian govt in propelling the deep tech ecosystem (48:57)

Sunit Gajbhiye is the Co-Founder, Business Head at Financepeer. Prior to this he was Product Manager at EdgeVerve, Infosys. Sunit is an IIM and VJTI alumnus with 6+ years of experience in Business Operations and Product Management.Financepeer, a Series B fintech startup backed by Aavishkaar Capital, QED Investors, 9Unicorn and Earlsfield Capital. The startup provides the entire year fee collection upfront to the School at the beginning of the year and collects fees from parents in monthly instalments that too at Zero Additional cost. Financepeer is spread across 60+ cities with over 6000+ school/ Institute partnerships. The Startup has so far impacted more than 15 lakh families by providing them no-cost-fee financing.Financepeer's peer-to-peer lending platform connects individual borrowers to lenders digitally. It uses an algorithm that quantifies risk from credit and non-credit bureau channels by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).In this episode we will cover:1. Brief overview of Financepeer2. Structuring the fundraise (2:30)3. How to best leverage the angel network (6:30)4. Thinking through the seed stage fundraise and deployment of capital (8:18)5. Managing relationships with investors (11:05)6. Exit conversations (secondaries) and alignment (20:01)7. When to raise Series A (21:50)8. Why now and how much to raise (26:35)

Swati Khanna is the VP of Human Capital at Sequoia India where she plays a vital role in supporting portfolio startups in attracting and retaining top talent required to build the country’s next big unicorns. Prior to joining Sequoia, Swati founded Meyrahkee, a talent advisory firm focussed on helping companies with talent solutions, and spent four years at Accel as a Talent Partner, helping Accel’s portfolio companies from inception through the growth stage. Swati has a solid reputation for being a top talent recruiter and was recognized as one of India’s Top 40 Social Recruiters in 2017.In this episode, we will cover:1. Human capital in the context of the venture 2. Thinking about talent acquisition at various growth cycles of a startup 3. State of the industry right now with respect to talent acquisition 4. How should founders position themselves and their startups to attract the best talent 5. How to develop culture within a startup 6. How does Sequoia help young founders attract top talent 7. Talent management 8. Addressing diversity in today’s climate 9. What is the day to day of a VP of a Human capital 10. Advice to fund managers who are building out or looking to build human capital 11. How does Sequoia look at human capital with a 5-year lens 12. Productizing human capital