The Ledger, every show

“Everybody said demon was a very bad economic decision. It was a bad, best decision for people like us because it brought everything online. Payments exploded.”

“Krutrim is one of them. So ambitious. You know, it is effectively open AI plus Nvidia plus your Microsoft or AWS all in one, right?”

“They don't want to operate in this five, 10, 20,050 thousand ACV. They have aspirations to do hundreds of thousands or millions in ACV. India has never done that.”

“Generally, we are not the highest price payers... Often what happens is our peer group is paying much more. And then we will tell the founder, we are not in at that price and believe it or not, the price actually comes down. It doesn't come to our price or it …”

“Because investors know India and they have generally mixed to negative views because venture capital has had liquidity issues. Private equity has had high valuation issues. Actually the people who have consistently made money have made money in the public mark…”

“And then by the end of 24, I think it became clear to people or many people took the call that they don't have the patience to stay or think about more investing in China or stay invested in China so that now India is seeing a benefit. Definitely it's seeing a…”

“So far, actually, interestingly, on IRR and multiple, we very easily beat it. All of us, the top five, you said, you know, the five firms or whatever, everybody beats it.”

“And Joe China may eight to 18, Joe us may nine to five to 2010. Well, India has started in 23, 22, and it'll run through because India, we're slowly. So it'll run for another 15 to 20 years.”

“And therefore, I think once this market correction gets over six months, nine months, 12 months, so many companies have filed, you will see a deluge of IPOs, but in a good way.”

“If you look at semiconductors, 90%, I don't know if you know this statistic, 90% of chip design goes through India, including the Chinese trips.”

“I hope again, Indian founders wake up to it because the market cap that was created by Infosys and TCS. Is waiting, and I think TCS must be again, two hundred billion and whatever. That's waiting to be created in this service as a software. And we have an edge…”

“We are never market participants. We are never participants in market rounds. Very, actually never. We are always, so we have this concept of P to P. Okay. There should be only two answers to a deal situation. Preempt or PWC, which is pass with conviction. The…”

“If you look at venture capital, if you look at most businesses, almost everything can be copied in no time. Reputation cannot. Reputation is a moat. Reputation compounds with time.”

“Most of us VCs got started in 2006. I would say first decade was a write-off.”

“So we have one fund, Razorpay, Ola, five-star, off business. Two hundred and fifty million. So that's a, you know, a very strong multiple, but our next one will be even higher multiple than that.”

“24 of many IPOs happened. You know, we had Ola Electric go public. We had Five Star go public in 22. Many LPs saw a lot of liquidity, Swiggy, First Cry. All of these things are great for the market, right? So that changed the narrative that this time India is …”

“India has always been in the single digits at best, maybe 10, 15%. I think, I don't think India will go to 30% because I think people have learned a tough lesson in China.”

“When you look at Tata, Ambani, Birla, Adani, all of these guys, they are in multiple businesses. That's considered a feature. When a tech entrepreneur wants to do multiple businesses, it's considered a bug.”

“Bhavish made his business profitable before he went and did something else. You can't be loss making in one business and start loss making another business, right?”

“I have always felt that the entrepreneurs are ahead of the market in India. This time I feel entrepreneurs are behind the market, right?”

“Every time we have violated that principle, it's our anti-portfolio. Every time we have followed that principle, it's a great hit in our portfolio. So Ola, we didn't believe in the market. We believed in the founder. So we have a line internally when somebody …”

“My bet is that if you feel that you will learn something, you'll give your time. So that's the bar. The founder has to feel that they will learn something, right?”

“And by the way, in our Monday meetings, we discuss people, not deals.”

“When the markets are thin, coverage is a good measure. So, including me, we used to go to IITs, we used to go to conferences, we used to speak at conferences, you know, honestly conferences, you get mobbed later, you are, you know, taking, giving out your card…”

“When you looked at fast forward to today, about 50%. So they are, I think the 500 plus are 150 or whatever similar to the unicorn number because the 500 to one billion is not that many. And more about half are experienced founders.”

“What experienced founders do differently? They generally don't take market risk, right? They will go after deep markets business. It's much easier to build businesses in deep markets. Okay. Having built a company once, they will typically be very profit driven…”

“I mean, that's an easy one. Just Bhavish given all that he has gone through his Ola pretty much shut down during COVID. He fought Uber. I mean, there are so many different examples, but it has to be him.”

“You don't know at the start you, but you typically, my experience has been. 18 to 36 months, mostly 18 to 24 months, one starts getting an idea. Is this a multi-billion dollar outcome or is this a capped out?”

“The time of services is 10 X the time of software.”

“Flipkart in particular, believe it or not, Axel had called me and they said, you know, we are doing this book site. And because you are an e-commerce founder, we want to be involved. I was like, I don't have internet users. So I didn't take the meeting.”

“It takes me about 30 to 40 minutes of my first meeting to figure out if this is a, it may not be fully yes, but that I'm getting excited, right? Then you have to do a lot more work and it has, there are, I would say, 20 to 30% of the time, I'll end up in a sit…”

“Until 2000, 15, 16 they used to get measured on coverage. And you know, we had some review meetings where people would say, how many companies have you met and this, that. So it created what we call a met culture meeting. The quality of the meeting may have be…”

“So actually the number was in 2016, the number of companies worth more than five hundred million, worth 13, and one was from an experienced founder.”

“So when Anil Gotti was starting his second company, he wanted to do U.S. India SaaS, even though the founder market fit was questionable. And we told him, And he said, no, e-commerce, whatever. And was not looking in the direction of getting the product market…”

“Swiggy where, you know, he emailed us proactively, but we already had a competing investment.”