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.
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Nexus convinced Gluster to pause sales for nine months to rebuild product
“You know, we had a company many years ago, Gluster, and we invested in the company and it was clear the product was not really, it was good technology, but not a good product. So we told the founder that we are okay if we stop selling the product for that. And…”
Poddar: Outlier VC returns only come from non-consensus investment decisions
“Hardly any good deal has happened where there was complete consensus. So, because outlier outcomes will only come when there's no consensus. So one person has to truly, truly, strongly believe in it, and then of course debate, fight it out, get other people fe…”
Poddar: Real Deals Only Happen After Continuous Founder-VC Engagement
“Real deals only happen after continuous engagement because that's when the founder also knows you. That's the only time. Otherwise it's a FOMO investment.”
Several Indian tech startups will IPO by late 2022
“I think, you know, you will see several companies, several IPOs for companies being built out of India in the coming, you know, let's say, 12 to 24 months.”
Two to three co-founders is the optimal startup founding team size
“I find that, you know, two to three people team are probably the best beyond that it become like one is maybe, maybe too few and beyond three sometimes becomes a challenge.”
Poddar: Traditional TAM Is the Wrong Metric for Evaluating EdTech Companies
“Bookish market size is perhaps the wrong number to look at when you're evaluating education companies”
Verma: Nexus Fund IV looks likely to return over $350M
“We will, it looks very, very, very possible that we will return over three, fifty million dollars of capital from that.”
Verma: My investments have returned the entire fund in every fund I've joined
“Every, every fund that I've been a part of so far, my investments have kind of returned the capital of the entire fund.”
Poddar: Counting out startups because incumbents can compete is a mistake
“I thought that large companies can do a lot And so startups, the startup will fail, that startup will fail, and that was a stupid mistake that I did for many companies. I think large companies move at their own pace, and that's why entrepreneurial energy is im…”
Poddar: Every meeting with a founder can make or break a VC's career
“You know, at every meeting you are having, this could be the career creating meeting.
Or career killing meeting.”
Poddar: Half my backed founders engaged with me before quitting their jobs
“Actually, 50% of the founders that I have invested in, perhaps have been talking before they quit.”
Poddar: Nexus advises cross-border enterprise startups that one founder must move to the US
“Our advice to founders, by the way, who are operating in that India-US corridor and selling to US enterprises, good to start from India, good to build in India to begin with, but one founder has to move to US.”
Poddar: I inspect younger people's phones to spot emerging app trends
“Whenever I meet a younger person, I actually look at his phone, look at his or her phone. I look at everything that the guy that those guys do. Some people hate me for it. But if you like, if I meet your niece or someone like that right now, I'll actually take…”
Sequoia and Lightspeed rejected WhiteHat Jr's seed pitch via LinkedIn messages
“Out of which Sequoia rejected, Matrix and Nexus were very interested. And I think Lightspeed rejected. So out of the five, three rejected, two were very interested and that's it.”
24 venture firms passed on Gluster before Nexus VP invested
“I remember, 24 VCs passed, saying that, you know, I mean, you are smoking, you know, nobody can build storage and software and all that, and we thought totally opposite, and Naren and I invested in the company. That was my first investment, VC investment.”
Software products should deliver tangible user value within 30 minutes
“I think our philosophy is that every product should be self-serve in a way that, you know, if somebody gets, gets handed the product, they should be able to get value of the product in like out of the product in like next 30 minutes. So, so there shouldn't be …”
Nexus VP predicted in 2020 that Druva would IPO by 2022
“Dhruva has grown, grown very big and hopefully like, you know, incoming Coming year or two, we can take the company public.”
Nexus VP invested a $1M seed in Postman pre-incorporation
“We did the first, very first investment when it happened, it was just a seed. In fact, the company was not even incorporated, if I'm not mistaken. Then they, we put in some seed money. They came in to our office, we're in Bangalore, where they started working …”
Nexus VP decided early to avoid investing in IT services companies
“So that's why one thing we decided is that we are not going to invest in any IT services company, which was a very different kind of step and decision compared to any other fund in India at the time, any other fund.”
Gupta reveals Postman is profitable and Druva exceeds $100M in revenue
“Postman is already profitable, and Druva is very large in size, you know, triple digit revenue, growing strongly, very strong customer base, very low, you know, churn.”
Nexus often leads internal rounds to save founders from time-consuming fundraises
“First of all we are very protective of entrepreneurs time. And oftentimes we feel we are at a critical point in the company and going out in the market and spending time raising funding, which is time consuming. And it should be, people are putting their heart…”
Nexus-backed Rancher was acquired for between $500M and $1B
“Rancher, you know, I mean, I think you probably saw that, you might have seen that it got acquired last week. We announced an acquisition last this week, and I mean, between five hundred million to a billion dollar valuation.”
Gupta: Indian enterprise tech firms require a powerful US presence
“To do enterprise technology in India, you're going to need a very powerful US presence.”
Poddar: Nexus Backed WhiteHat Jr at Idea Stage Without a Team or Product
“He had just quit the job and he was iterating on that. Yeah. So there was no product no experiment, no, no team. He was just one person trying to think of an idea.”
Verma: Nexus signed Postman term sheet before company was incorporated
“Without a investment committee meeting or whatever, I had another colleague of mine, Sandeep join in for that meeting and we didn't let him leave without signing up the term sheet. So pretty much, so we hold in and close on that term sheet then and there was, …”
Verma: Postman founder had a $1M–$2M buyout offer before raising VC
“He had a buyout offer from a company. At that point of time, which he was considering, which would have made him very rich. I mean rich. It's a relative term, but he would have made a couple, you know, one or two million dollars as a result for just a side pro…”
Verma: Nexus manages $1.6B across 11 people as India's largest homegrown fund
“We have three people in the Bay Area right now, and we have four people in Mumbai, and four people in, in Bangalore. So it's an 11 member team, very small. We are India's largest homegrown fund, managing about a 1000000000.6.”
Verma: Early-stage VCs tap out beyond multi-billion-dollar scale
“Because we as early stage investors also in some ways tap out in terms of understanding how a company, beyond, let's say a couple of billion dollars will go to the next.”
Poddar: Nexus's Best SaaS Founders Historically Relocated To The US
“And by the way, this was true. Even with SaaS. Ah, this was true even with 10 years back, 15 years back with SaaS. That's right. That the best founders, which we invested in, would eventually go to US, and the follow-on rounds would happen in the US market.”
Poddar: Nexus backed short-video app Mitron before India's TikTok ban
“Mitro was a short mobile video app. We backed the company before TikTok ban happened.”
Poddar: Startup struggles have made me cry in my sleep
“You actually are emotional about every company.
you lose sleep.
like, I have cried in my sleep.
And, ah, and it's painful.”
Eka Software Reached $3.5M–$4M Revenue at 30% EBITDA by 2010
“So by that time, we were three and a half, four million dollars and or 30% EBITDA.”
StepStone has invested in India since pre-2010, starting with Nexus
“So we've been investors in India for a while, going back to pre 2010. I think the first manager we invested with back then was Nexus.”
Jumbotail raised seed funding without a pitch deck or financial model
“And we raised this money without even having a, You know, having a PowerPoint presentation or a model. I mean, it was just, you know, on the back of a conviction about, you know, a business in the way that we believe that it was.”
Bhattacharjee: Postman reached over 12 million users
“Like, when we invested, it was like, you know, tens of thousands of users. At this point, as we talk about, it's twelve million plus users.”
Nexus VP was Postman's sole investor through its 2015 Series A
“20 14 we invested that seed money and that we rolled it into 2015 end of 2015 we led our series a and we are the only investor till that time”
Bhattacharjee: Nexus VP invests in pre-PowerPoint stage startups
“The underlying commonality and the spark that we look for is product first thinking. Like it doesn't mean that somebody we have even invested in companies which are in PowerPoint or sometimes even pre PowerPoint. So it's not that somebody has to have a product…”
Nexus VP's first investment DimDim was a precursor to Zoom
“The first investment that Nexus made was in early in a company called DimDim, which would have been Zoom. Like, if you look at it was exactly Zoom, Zoom prior to Zoom. The idea was, you know, Webex and others didn't have the experience, and this gentleman out …”
Nexus VP evaluates if every prospective investment can reach $1B revenue
“We force ourselves to that, you know, if we are investing in a company, is there an opportunity to build a billion dollar revenue company?”
Postman had near-zero revenue and zero marketing spend in 2018
“Postman is an example of that. We don't do any marketing. And that, that is to me an ultimate kind of a source of success. So rather than measuring Postman revenue two years ago, which was close to zero anyway, or very small I think looking at that promoter sc…”
Nexus explicitly blacklisted twenty sectors at its founding, including real estate
“And we said we will not invest in cross-border services company. We won't invest in real estate. We want those days to invest in manufacturing. There are about 20 areas we came up with where we will not invest.”
Verma: Nexus has returned far more than majority of Fund I capital
“Whether it's Pubmatic or Sadimac in fund one, and when we started out, those are, and we've already returned a majority of, much more than a majority of capital from that fund.”
Verma: Nexus seeded Postman with its first $1M check
“They started off and out of our office in Bangalore. We seated there and wrote them the first million dollar check.”
Verma: Postman had 300K–400K developers before raising institutional capital
“There were early signs, even when I met him that, you know, they would, they had about 304 100,000 developers on their platform using this.”
Verma: Tiger Global outbid Nexus on Freshdesk Series A round
“Like Freshdesk is one. But I was outbid by Tiger to do the round at that point of time, and I just couldn't get the requisite conviction in the authorship to kind of step up on the valuation at the Series A level.”
Verma: 85%–90% of Nexus Investments Are Pre-Revenue and Pre-Product
“Mostly, I would say 85 to 90% of my investments
at Nexus have been in pre-revenue, pre-product companies”