Insight
Most consumer digital markets, including budget hospitality, are not winner-take-all
“Frankly, a lot of these markets are not winner take all markets. And you have to continuously believe that it is not a winner take all market. And there is space for multiple brands to exit. For example, if you think about hotels, do you see only one hotel bra…”
Assertion Supported
India's $10B-$12B real estate transaction revenue is entirely captured by brokers
“If you think about real estate transactions in India, it's about like, 10, twelve billion dollars of revenue pool. Ah, almost entirely captured by brokers.”
Insight
A $10M-$15M startup return doesn't move the needle for a $350M fund
“I think for a fund like ours which is a three fifty million dollar fund we need to make bets on companies that are likely to be very large outcomes because getting Let's say I invest a million dollars in, in a company and get 10, fifteen million dollars out of…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Aug 2022
ShareChat's massive top-of-funnel reach will naturally lead to facilitating financial loans
“Of course. I think it's bound to happen. I would see ShareChat as a top of the funnel play that every day millions of users come to ShareChat and each one of them finds a different use case to use ShareChat. Now let's say a trader comes to share chat to find t…”
Insight
Indian regional content startups cannot rely solely on low-CPM digital ads
“I think the challenge for these content startups would be to find monetization opportunities beyond just advertisements. Because if you think about just ads being your revenue model it's likely to be a small market because CPM rates for these users are likely …”
Insight
B2B tech thrives in India because SME buyers are heavy personal tech consumers
“The reason being that each of these B to B buyers, whether it's SMEs or mid market companies, the buyers themselves are also consumers of technology products. So if you are a consumer of a technology product personally, by nature, you would want to see more te…”
Assertion Supported
Indian startups are increasingly generating $20M to $200M mid-level ecosystem exits
“We are seeing a lot of exits happen, let's say in the 20 to a 100,000,200 million dollars sort of range. But maybe six, seven years back, it used to be either only IPO or nothing. Thankfully that is not the case. And there are some mid-level exits also possibl…”
Disclosure
SAIF fully exited MakeMyTrip and secured secondary liquidity in Paytm and Swiggy
“So we exited all our stake in make my trip some time back. We had some secondary exit in Paytm. We had some in Swiggy.”
Insight
Investors miss massive outcomes by judging startups purely on current market size
“As a, as an investor, you always keep telling yourself, relax the boundary on current market size. If it's a strong need, yes, market will open later. But I still find myself sometimes struggling with that question and saying, ah, it doesn't sound like a big m…”
Disclosure
SAIF backed ShareChat years before the Indian content startup wave hit
“So we had invested in in ShareChat four years back and there was no wave of content startups back then.”
Disclosure
SAIF backed an early Indian TV streaming startup in 2011 that failed
“One of the investments that didn't work well for us in the content space we had invested in a company which was into video streaming of content which was on TV. So it was, You could say a very early version of Hulu, but for Indian content. We had invested in t…”
Disclosure
SAIF backed ShareChat at seed for its vision of a horizontal platform
“When we had invested at the seed stage what had attracted us to ShareChat was the vision of the founders to build a much larger horizontal platform where entertainment and this entertaining content was a hook to get people started.”
Assertion Supported
ShareChat users organically run micro-businesses like apparel sales and astrology consultations
“People are already buying and selling stuff on ShareChat. You would see a lot of women women entrepreneurs selling, let's say, salwar kameez, And maybe blouse designs and those kind of things on ShareChat. There's an astrologer on ShareChat selling his service…”
Assertion Partly supported
Google and Facebook capture over 80% of India's $3B digital ad market
“So it's like about, I think two and a half, 3,000,000,080 percent sitting with Google, Facebook, maybe slightly even more.”
Assertion Supported
Paytm executed a phenomenal pivot from a mobile value-added services business
“Paytm was a mobile VAS company back in the day. I don't know whether to call it a pivot or a natural sort of evolution, but Vijay and Paytm have done this phenomenal, never heard of kind of job of taking a business, which was mobile VAS and getting it ready Fo…”
