Shailesh Ghorpade, Managing Partner and CIO at Exfinity Venture Partners, discusses launching Exfinity's first fund when Indian VC was dominated by consumer tech.
“I think Xfinity was probably the first, you know, true blue focused B to B tech fund, you know, so there were many, many funds, which did B to B investments or enterprise tech investments, but it formed a small portion of their overall corpus. The focus was largely on the consumer tech. But we were here saying that, look, you know, we'll focus only on enterprise tech.”
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More from Shailesh Ghorpade
Opinion
Founders cannot build a viable SaaS business selling only to India
“See in India, unfortunately you can't really build a SaaS business out of India, you know, and it is just our, you know, the Indian, the way Indian enterprises or the small businesses think I don't think they're ready yet to really embrace SaaS in a big way.”
Shailesh GhorpadeDec 28, 2020▶ 38:06Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Disclosure
Ghorpade: All 25+ Exfinity Portfolio Companies Focus on Indo-US Corridor
“All of them because enterprise tech by nature, and we always say that we work in the Indo-US corridor because companies can actually test their products in India. They can actually achieve scale in India. They can maybe learn from Indian corporations. They can…”
Shailesh GhorpadeDec 28, 2020▶ 40:10Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Insight
Big tech enterprise sales experience does not easily translate to startups
“Selling a new age product is, you know, you might have done a lot of selling for companies like, say for example, Infosys or Oracle or whatever, that doesn't mean that you can sell a startup product because at the end of the day, you know you have the backing …”
Shailesh GhorpadeDec 28, 2020▶ 50:52Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Insight
Ghorpade: All SaaS companies essentially operate as workflow management tools
“All SaaS companies really, essentially what they do is workflow management. So their understanding of the client workflows, their pain points has to be of a very, very high order. And unless you really achieve that, and unless you appreciate the issues of that…”
Shailesh GhorpadeDec 28, 2020▶ 21:21Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
AssertionSupported
India has 10,000 SaaS companies compared to 50,000-70,000 globally
“Today, if you look at the SaaS space, right, it is there are some 10,000 SaaS companies in India and maybe 50,070 thousand companies globally.”
Shailesh GhorpadeDec 28, 2020▶ 22:38Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Disclosure
Ghorpade admits Exfinity does not add much value beyond $10M ARR
“Beyond ten million is not something that we add a lot of value to be very candid. Yes, we can provide some inputs on strategy, et cetera, because we know the company, but I think I would imagine that after that we have seen growth funds providing a lot of valu…”
Shailesh GhorpadeDec 28, 2020▶ 30:31Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
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