The Ledger, every show

“I think, 50 years from now, we'll not talk about Reliance Starter. We'll probably talk about Dipinder and Harsha. I hope that happens, but they would be the next role model.”

“Then you realize retention curves don't matter, finally you need to make money. You start building business models on top of the retention curves, then you realize the retention curve will drop the moment you put money on top of it.”

“So if you don't generate demand, and if you say, I'll give you a tool, it's an operational improvement tool. Most of the Indian businesses are anyways very tightly run. They're not having large man for, ah, manpower that they will need to cut people. One perso…”

“I think even 10 years is not enough to say that I have done as, done well as a VC.”

“It will only be a FOMO investment if you're writing a check in one week of meeting a guy. It's a FOMO investment which I think is best avoided.”

“So I think probably for a few more months, we'll see this messy sort of situation where VCs are also not sure, Indian founders are also not sure, but a year from now, you'll suddenly find a wave of companies, because as Prateek said, finally Indians are very h…”

“If you have to build a company in AI, it's very difficult to build out of India because you are constantly not sure if you are in the local maxima or the global maxima. Right. Are you at the cutting edge of tech, understanding, implementation? So you have to b…”

“But hopefully two, three of this should happen in the next 10 years, and I'm guessing that one of the Indian companies that are going public, or have gone public, would be the ones leading the charge.”

“Eventually the founder is in the command of the ship. Right? And if there are more than one commanders, you will likely end up Having an accident, so you need to step away, but that's part of, like, my transitioning also to make sure that I'm not stepping into…”

“All your companies, you want them to succeed, but the reality is not all of them will. Three out of those 10 will actually become successful, rest will go through the tough phases.”

“With AI, there is a macro tailwind also on small businesses in India. I've built a company trying to help small retailers, and it was very hard, but now if I have to build the same company again with AI available, it is actually easier, because you can actuall…”

“Failures are many a times very, Quickly apparent. Like, within two, three years, you will know, with reasonable confidence, and not so high confidence, that this is unlikely to be the blockbuster return company in your portfolio.”

“So let's say a fund like us, a hundred twenty million dollars, we don't need multiple blockbusters to generate returns, right?”

“The fund where I'm part of now, actually because we don't do a lot of investments every year, and we take more measured approach to investing, we need four to five weeks. And I think four to five weeks in most deals you will get. Unless you change what we inte…”

“We believe that the best play to venture cap, play the VC business, is to have the right size fund, right, because at the core of a VC, our first job is to be money managers, which is that we take money from someone, and our obligation is to return multiple of…”

“In some spaces, as Prateek mentioned, where it is winner takes all or winner takes most of the market, and thus you need to attract capital, it is a, it is probably the most important spike you need as a founder. Because the reality is you will need to sell th…”

“We were hit on our face by COVID, right, so we had almost 304 hundred people being let go in a week, and so I had to do that on four calls, asking people to go, people who have, I have hired like three months before saying that, You know, we'll make a life-cha…”

“Raising an angel round of three to four crores is far easier now than 10, 12 years ago, there was no concept of an angel round of four crores. You will straight away go to a VC and say, give me 500 K, and you'll take 20% ownership of 500 K.”