The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sinha says SaaS businesses are merely support tools, not market changers
“So, so therefore that is also one of the reasons I don't do a lot of software, right? So I don't do SaaS. I don't do enterprise SaaS or I, Don't do B to B SaaS. It's not like I don't like those businesses or they are not, they can't make money. They can make m…”
Lunia: Indian small businesses will adopt self-service SaaS
“Contrary to perception and you know the common consensus between VCs today, we think that People will do self-service SaaS. So Indians have been written off. We believe that nobody will do self-service SaaS. We think these people will do self-service SaaS.”
Lunia: Indian Youth Consumer Spending Reflects Combined Household Income, Not Personal Earnings
“For a investor or an entrepreneur, This is a good audience because this then again, like I said earlier, The expenditure people will do is not restricted by the individual's income. It is about the income of the individual and the parents.”
Lunia: Indian seed funds haven't found unicorns in crowded hype sectors
“None of us, you know seed funds have discovered a unicorn. Ever in these spaces, right? So if you look at you know, our good friends Karthik at Bloom, Orias, Rehan, none of us have so far got a unicorn, right?”
Lunia: In hyper-burn sectors, the most well-funded startup wins over better products
“Like I said, right, I mean, I am simply buying a lottery because I have no ability to move that company, right? The winner is not the smartest guy or the best product. The winner is the most well-funded there.”
Lunia: Seed funds must invest two to three years ahead of consensus
“If I'm not early, I'm not relevant. For me, being early is an existential problem, right? I mean, after the space is discovered. So now everybody knows neobanks, right? People have been investing in new banks even till today, right? Now we've got still getting…”
Lunia: India Quotient passed on MPL due to insufficient ownership allocation
“One of the companies that I really missed was MPL. Sai, we had funded his previous company. This Creo, the hardware phone, smartphone, right? And he came back and he raised a five million round. Now, of course, there was Bnext, there was Sequoia, Sequoia was l…”
Lunia: Lendingkart, Sugar, Oakter, and ShareChat are lined up for IPOs
“So hopefully we'll see Lending Cart and Sugar first. There's a company called Okter. It's a home automation. They build these Paytm sound boxes, the profitable company, electronics outsourcing maybe in 18 months, they'll go a little bit later and maybe in 36 m…”
Singh: India Quotient loaned Sugar Cosmetics capital from management fees
“And then after that, when sugar also ke lihe nobody was ready to give us money, they loaned us. From their management fees.”
Sinha predicts ShareChat will grow at least 3x to 5x further
“So, and if share chat goes at least three to five times from here, Which I believe it will, because most of the investors who have invested in this round, they believe that.”
Conventional fund management applies only to $100M+ mega-funds
“I think fund manager thing only works when you are like managing hundreds of millions of dollars. You have that kind of pedigree where your job is largely doing money management, right? So we are not money management, right? Our job is not money management. Ou…”
Lunia: VC fund modeling requires fixed ownership targets across all investments
“So the lesson learned in fund one for modeling perspective, you have to have high ownership, even ownership, right? You can't have a fluctuating somewhere, two percent, somewhere, 10% model. You decide, okay, my ownership is 10, it's 15 or it's five. Stick to …”
Lunia: India Quotient Fund 2 is marked at 10x, with 6x from ShareChat
“So for example, fund two is marked up at six X, but at 10 X, but six out of that 10 is share chat.”
Lunia: India Quotient will not fund diaspora Silicon Valley Indian startups
“Suddenly I start doing Silicon Valley, quasi Indian, NRI Indian or Indian kids going abroad. I don't want to fund them. I mean, that's, I may fund one or two because I know them so well, but that's not your DNA. No, it won't be. And that my portfolio won't be …”
Lunia: India Quotient Fund 1 returned 5.9x net to LPs
“Let's say, yeah, in Indian rupees equivalent, yes, we've returned six, six, 5.9 X net to the LPs.”
Lunia: D2C brand GIVA does 25-30 crore monthly net revenue
“They're like, Almost some 25, 30 crores of revenue monthly, monthly net revenue, right?”
Mukherjee: India Quotient achieved a 170X return on recent Sugar Cosmetics exit
“I think the last number exit they made, the most recent one, that was a 170 X on their investment.”
India Quotient founders became tech investors despite zero coding experience
“We are full-fledged tech investors, as you can say, with me having zero experience of tech, by the way, I don't code. I don't understand code also, right? So of course I am an engineer, so I understand the logic of technology, but nothing hands-on. Similarly, …”
Sinha predicts India Quotient will achieve a 10x+ return on Fund 2
“But I will only feel happy if I am able to do double digit multiples. I believe that we will do that in a fund too.”
India Quotient used to give upfront checks alongside term sheets
“When we started investing in we had a rule that we would give a term sheet and along with the term sheet, we would Give a check of 10 lakhs or 20 lakhs to get started, right? So we will not say that, okay, now we are given a term sheet and now after two months…”
India Quotient publishes its standard term sheet online without modifications
“In our website, we have put out a term sheet and we don't make a lot of changes in the website when on the term sheet. We don't make a lot of changes in the term sheet when we are investing in a new company. We tell the founder to go and read it on the website…”
India Quotient partners can write first checks without consensus
“As a rule, what we do at India question is that when you are investing for the first time, right? We largely go by the gut of the champion partner over there. So if I am basically leading a deal, And I am very sure about doing the deal. Right. Then my partners…”
India Quotient launched with a strict rule to never syndicate deals
“Our strategy will be deciding the deal. So we will not do a syndicate kind of strategy. So we will we will invest and if the company raise more money, that's okay, but we will, our investment will not be subject to somebody else investment, right? So that was …”
India Quotient did only two or three tranched deals in nine years
“Before starting India question, 60, 70% of the deals I would have done would have been a trans investment. So each investment will be broken into two, three, four steps, and then valuation will be based on certain parameters, so on, so forth. I think in the la…”
India Quotient's first ShareChat check has returned over 500x
“So in share chat, our first check, which we had invested that is already multiplied more than 500 times, right?”
India Quotient holds ~$150M position on $8M invested in ShareChat
“So I think till now we would have invested, I think 10,000,008, eight million dollars or so, right? Eight million dollars. And we would be sitting on, I think. One hundred fifty million dollars or so?”
Lunia: Startups need $1.5M to $2M in seed capital to reach Series A
“More importantly is that the amount of money needed by a company to reach a decent series A, let's say, which is sort of at least, you know, five to eight million dollars series A the amount of money to reach there is sort of becoming like one and a half two m…”
Lunia: Half of India Quotient's portfolio consists of returning founders
“When I started, I didn't have the money for storied founders, but now half of my portfolio is returning founders.”
Lunia targets a 5x gross return to deliver 4x net to LPs
“I target five times gross to return four times net to the investors. I have to return five hundred million dollars.”
Lunia: India Quotient never takes more than 20% equity in deals
“I, we haven't done a single deal where we have taken more than 20. We'd never take. We'll restrict our ownership to teens.”
Lunia: India Quotient partners average three deals annually, capping firm at 10-12
“Each partner, each GP does only three deals a year on an average.
So there are three of us, maybe some of the VPs will pull in a deal or two.
So as a team, we can do 10, 12 deals a year at most.
Usually we do single digit deals in a year.”
First Cheque launched in 2019 to co-invest alongside founder angels
“We decided, okay, let's, let's, you know, try and set up a fund which basically backs founder angels and then let those founder angels pick companies for the fund, and the fund will basically just invest with them wherever they do. So that is how India, that i…”
Chadha: Anicut invested in ShareChat via insider bridge round
“There was an opportunity that they had in an internal bridge round that only insiders were doing and we were able to get some allocation there. So that's about a year ago or just about.”
ShareChat founders launched with a ₹50L check instead of corporate jobs
“If you, even if you take the example of Shared guys in 2015, when they started, all of them had freshly graduated from IIT Kanpur. They could have easily got a job of 10, 20 lakh rupees in good, good companies, right? But they decided not to do that and take a…”
At least half of Sinha's annual investments come from portfolio founders
“And most of the deals which I do, which I, which is like three to four deals every year, I do four deals. Out of that, at least two deals I do, which come from the founders only, right?”
Senpaty: Propelld pitched roughly 100 investors before landing early venture rounds
“This is the first time we raised venture. We've spoken to close to a hundred investors probably during that time. So yeah, both during the IQ and Stellaris time and even before that as well. Together we would have spoken to a hundred.”