pi Ventures

“It has been the, probably the most challenging thing I have done in my career so far. I mean, building Slingbox was easier than fundraising for five inches. And in some way it has also changed me as a person in an irreversible fashion, right? You go through so…”

“In fact, the only way we got momentum in our fund raise is when we actually wrote the first three checks. So that time people got some confidence, okay, there is something in the market.”

“People who are really good, whom you want to back, don't need your help. Whatever help they need, they'll take it from you.”

“In our first fund, we have raised two 25 crores, which is around thirty-three million dollars. We have done 10 investments. We are likely to do four to five more investments from this fund. We typically invest around a million dollar plus minus in the first ch…”

“Out of those 800 companies, around 70% of the companies had AI component in them and 30% for others.”

“And that is what is AI adding to the whole problem solution statement that you are trying to address? And how deeply does it address it? You know, and if I take out AI, what will the impact on that?”

“When we did Nirami investment, we were the first investor in, and because it was a very disruptive startup not many people, they were interested, but not coming sort of forward. So, but when we sort of said, okay, we are going to do this, right, then we saw so…”

“I have not read a single book on AI.”

“There are, in AI, we divide our companies into two buckets. What we call as AI first companies and AI second companies. AI second companies are companies which have a solution without AI, and with AI, it gets many, many fold better. But AI first companies are …”

“To make a deeper impact, especially for product startups, one has to be on either side of the table. Either you got to be an entrepreneur or an investor. As a platform, you sort of become the table, right?”

“Over three years we had seen around 800 companies, over three years. And we had invested in 10, right? On an average week these days, we see seven to 10 companies every week.”

“I am an angel investor in, for example, your nest one, two, your nest one, three five ventures right. A fund, a mixed fund, like Stellaris you know, fund two, which is between consumer and tech, right? The only consumer, large consumer fund where I'm an LP is …”

“Axel has been LP in jungle ventures in ideas from capital and in pie ventures.”