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 1,199 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Sacheti: CaratLane resolved never to raise outside capital again after 2018
“I made it a point that we will not raise money ever again.”
Mundra: Ready to fund a team building decentralized micro-theaters in India
“We are ready to find, we are ready to work upon it, but I feel it's a need of the day by which we can increase, you know, a screen size to 20, 30, 40,000 screens in India over a period of time very quickly and create a robust independent market of viewers”
Balakrishnan Rejected Shark Tank Offer Because 70 Lakhs Was Insufficient
“And I genuinely believe that
You know, 70 lakhs is not enough for, you know, creating this all over again.
Which is why I said no.”
Aadit Palicha intends to IPO early to leave upside for retail investors
“If we are lucky enough to build a business that has got the quality to go public, which I think we are doing, but if we do I would try my best to do it in a way where we can accrue value as a public company, right? Why as a private company?”
Goyal: Stellaris passed on Postman's seed round due to lacking understanding
“Is why I left Postman. In fact, if I may admit, I couldn't even understand what they did at that point in time. I looked at it at the same time as others did in seed stage. One of my colleagues was very keen, actually, that we do it, but I couldn't even unders…”
Druva abandoned $8M in software revenue to rebuild as cloud SaaS
“Even though like if my memory serves me right on the software model, we had hit seven to eight million dollars already, but as I said, it was a complete redo of the entire company. We have to burn that eight to nine million dollars down on the ground and build…”
Sameer: BharatPe will not IPO before reaching P&L profitability
“So, but we would not do a public offer before sort of, ah, turning green on a P&L point of view.”
GrowthSchool Targets a 3:1 First-Purchase AOV-to-CAC Ratio to Break Even
“We have to break even or recover the CAC in the first purchase. And my internal target is CAC to AOV of the first purchase to be a ratio of three, right? AOV to CAC, I mean, right? Not LTV to CAC. I want to do AOV to CAC at three, right?”
Gutgutia: Ferns N Petals will remain debt-free and avoid selling equity
“And I told my company and everybody that will always remain a debt-free company will not take debt in our lives. And we will not let anybody, you know tell us what to do. We'll never sell our equity. Even, even if we do, it will be strategic beyond a certain p…”
Anand: WNS's initial acquisition draft mandated clawbacks for key employee departures
“And the, when we saw the shareholders, the first draft that came from, they was Shardola Merchant, WNS. We kind of had a heart attack, right? Because they had things like, you know, if somebody leaves, then they'll have a claw back and so on. They had identifi…”
Unacademy Operates Like a High-Performance Sports Team, Not a Family
“Another you know, principle that we strongly follow is, you know, we're not a sports, you know, you're not a family, you know, most people by leading a team you know, they say, okay, we're a family. We're going to get together and work. Well, you're not a fami…”
First Cheque invests almost blindly if a venture partner vouches for founders
“If the deal has come through a venture partner, and if the venture partner knows the founder, right, and is watching for the founder, then we will almost blindly invest. Then it doesn't even, like, as long as it's a VC fundable space, we'll go ahead and invest…”
First Cheque will invest in competing startups if venture partners vouch
“If a venture partner knows the founder, then we'll still do the deal, even if it's a competing company, because as I said, we are investing at pre-seed, right? So the market and team is what is important to us, not the current product.”
Wakefit operates at 40% to 45% gross margins
“After that, we work at about we about 40 to 45% gross margins. I think raw material costs about 60%. So 40% of the money is what is used for logistics, returns, marketing, employees, everything. And GST also.”
Kola: Kalaari Capital's Fund I returned 2.7x; Fund II nearing 4x
“Our first fund, I returned to .7 X. Our second fund, we are returning close to four X. We've already returned to X. And so I know I, we are in the highest performance category. In the top 25, if not the top 10% of fund returns that we have generated from India”
Adam: Reliance priced the Fynd acquisition at 20 percent over previous valuation
“That's correct. I think the numbers, I don't think there was any, nothing wrong in the numbers. The way they went about doing the deal was whatever is your previous round. We will give an 18 or 20% bump because anyway, that money is going to go to the investor…”
Singh: Early friends funded Pratilipi via personal debt, rejecting equity
“I gave them actually three options. I gave them an option of just buying equity either at a fixed price or at a 50% discount or next round. Nobody took it. Then I offered people to kind of give debt to company and with a small equity upside, nobody again took …”
Singh: Pratilipi sets no individual performance targets or OKRs
“So Prathlibis culture has always been that like, there are no individual targets or OPRs or goals. People decide what they want to work on. People decide how they define if it is going to be successful or not.”
Pratilipi refused to give growth forecasts to investors before Series B
“I think till about our series B, we never ever gave forecasts. That, like, what are we going to do in the next six months or one year or whatever? People who basically said that they want to have forecasts or targets, we essentially said that we are probably n…”
Singh: Pratilipi avoids negotiating deal terms in fundraising and partnerships
“Now, for example, I just don't negotiate. Like these are the key terms. If we agree on these, let's handshake and move ahead. Otherwise that's fine. Like I'll just find a different part. It's not just what fundraise. It's about everything else.”
Rastogi: Locus operates an expense process without any expense policy
“We have Locus as an expense process that you should know what email ID to send your invoice to. But we actually don't have an expense policy. We trust every individual to judge themselves what should be filable. If you file it, we will expense it.”
Rastogi: Locus links OKRs directly to performance appraisals
“That book on the Google, it mentions that in the Google, they don't link OKRs with appraisals, because that impacts ambitious goals. We haven't done it that way. Right now, we have linked it, and we are more like, you know, it's fine if you reach 70, 80% but w…”
Asokan: Mad Street Den completely refuses to employ pure people managers
“We don't do this whole people manager thing at MSD at all. We only do people who are very actively producers of whatever, you know, and are responsible as independent contributors as well, right?”
Kapoor: Sistema passed on Ninjacart due to high operational intensity
“Two companies that come to mind that we will, you know, we really liked, but for whatever reason ended up invest missing them at Sistema.
one is, you know, Ninja Cart. I think they're doing something exceptional in the Agritech space.
The supply chain that th…”
Maheshwari: 75% of advisors warned me against joining Flipkart in 2009
“The VCs and advisors I had spoken to before joining Flipkart and 75% of them had advised against it believe that Indian consumers would probably not be able to trust online commerce.”
Gulati: ITI Fund refuses to co-invest with angel groups or smaller investors
“We don't partner with you know, angel groups or, you know, smaller investors. We only partner with marquee people who add more value to that particular business.”
LocalBanya burned a ₹200 crore ad budget but lost to BigBasket
“I mean, you know, even for us at Local Banya, we had 200 crores of ad expense from Times of India. Big Basket didn't have that. But we couldn't beat them, because they were just a better product.”
Domkundwar: Better Capital prioritizes market opportunity over founder teams
“So we are a very market first investor. And that's not to say that I think we are not team first investor. I think the teams have to all clear a certain bar. Before, ah, you know, they qualify, ah, for something that would be interesting for us. But we are ver…”
Lunia personally backed Faasos's 2010 angel round after Seedfund hesitated
“In 2010 we raised our fund too, and one of the first companies that we tried to invest in was a company called Fasos, Rebel Foods. It just so happened that Fasos was very young, and Jaideep had just returned from McKinsey in London. The partnership felt that, …”
Kapoor: Fosun RZ Capital avoids investing in single-founder startups
“We don't typically invest in a one founder one founder, you know, company, because I think it takes a lot of effort to build the company.”
Khattar: AdvantEdge targets $150M exits rather than waiting for unicorn status
“Being an early stage investor, we're coming in at, you know, sub million to two million dollar valuation. So we really don't want to be as part of the journey to build these companies into billion dollar companies. We are more than happy to exit at the one fif…”
Khattar: 30% to 40% of AdvantEdge's Portfolio Are 'Failed Founders'
“I would say almost 30% of our 30 to 40% of our portfolio company consists of failed founders.”
Reddy: Purplle is Blume's only surviving vertical commerce bet
“The other thing I would argue where we failed quite a bit was trying to do vertical product commerce. Got onto the cycle too late. That entire commerce engine works as a herd mentality. Either everybody's making bets or nobody's making bets. And then you would…”
Reddy: Blume opposes secondary exits before companies hit $1B valuation
“Philosophically, I don't believe in it. So until a company kind of reaches a billion dollars in valuation, and then I've lost track of why the hell they're raising more money or why they're mindlessly raising more money.”
Reddy: I saw no carried interest or extra savings for eight years
“I still don't have, I've not seen a rupee of carry. I've not had extra savings for like eight years.”
Reddy: Blume Sets KRA to Bring Exited Founders Back as LPs
“The KRA is that if you can't get your exited founders back as LPs, then we've screwed up somewhere.”
Shivani: A leadership coach holds the only veto power on YourNest's IC
“Sanjay who's you know, who I told you was an executive coach and leadership development guy is the only guy who sits on the IC who has a veto power. So we will actually walk away from opportunities which Sanjay says are not, you know, people are not with banki…”
Ajay Hattangdi: Alteria targets slightly above 20% returns on venture debt
“And the expectation is that we will make a slightly upwards of 20% kind of returns in this business to compensate us for the risk we take.”
Hattangdi: Alteria underwrites 12-to-15 month refinancing risk, not five-year winners
“For us on the debt side it's not so important to be able to see, look out five years and pick the winners. That's not how we would underwrite. How we would underwrite is we need to necessarily be more short term in how we think about the next round coming toge…”
Prashant Pansare prefers investing in teams with at least two co-founders
“So there is no fixed number of founders that we look for, but definitely a single founder I have seen, it's a little bit of challenge predominantly because from my own entrepreneurship journey, I've learned that a founder always needs another shoulder to cry o…”
Tandon: Commure runs daily pricing bake-offs across AI model providers
“And we're in pricing bake-offs with all the models every day. Like we pick the best model for the job and we're extracting every last bit of, you know, margin from them as we can.”
Kompalli: upGrad prematurely expanded into 20 international markets in year one
“We were too ambitious in terms of trying to say, let's scale this across 20 markets, right? While the product was there, while the partnerships were there, I think the local nuance of regulation, of GTM, of all of those things that are important to succeed, we…”
Krishna Mehra: Elevation indexes heavily on pedigree over thesis at pre-seed
“We are by nature a very selective fund. So what that means is oftentimes we look for both the found, the team's pedigree as well as the thesis and our conviction around all of it to truly drive conviction far more at obviously series A where you have more proo…”
Jain: I am running Observe AI in a wartime founder mode
“I'm almost running Observe and because it's Observe two point O in like a hard founder and a wartime mode, and also I would almost say like a seed to series A company. I'm not running this like a 250 people company or a series C mature scaled company.”
Jain: Observe AI spent 18 months replatforming into autonomous AI agents
“Now everyone is 2.2. We've been on the journey for a bit now. Right. So everybody is now observe 2.2. We took the older product, right. That we built completely replatformized it. It's now all agents and whatever new builds all agents anyway, sellers are all a…”
Goel: Cartesia Built Custom Inference Engine for Real-Time Models
“So as an example, we've built our own inference engine. It's pretty important because we think that these interactive real-time models are going to need to run in a pretty different way. So having the ability to have your own engine that is not designed for LL…”
Goel: Cartesia Will Unify Listening, Thinking, and Responding Into One Model
“So ultimately our ambition is, again, how do we bring together listening, thinking, and response into a single model and just do that continuously. And that's the next phase.”
Goel: Cartesia Focuses Strictly on Real-Time Voice Over Other Audio Use Cases
“For us, the mission was always about building interactive AI and closing the gap between AI and humans in terms of how smart and how interactive these models are. So we are always super focused on real time interaction. And that means also, for example, we nev…”