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 28 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
Somani: Recent graduates should not enter venture capital without operating experience
“I don't think young people should get into VC, especially of the, you know, just coming out of IIT, can I come join, you know, Neon or Prime or whatever. Because I think, and certainly the way we practice the boutique art, right, form here at different, you kn…”
Somani: Marginal product improvements favor incumbents; startups must be 10x better
“A lot of companies and products which are 20, 30, 50% better. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's bettering the state of the art, but that's better for an incumbent. That's better for somebody who already has distribution, already has cash flow, already …”
Somani: Founder pedigree like IIT/IIM is strictly second and third order
“So we actually don't have any preconceived notions on whether you're a first time founder, you're an older founder, you're an IIT, non-IIM, it doesn't matter. If you have a deep understanding of the market, If you have deep customer empathy, if you have, you k…”
Somani: 90% to 95% of 100x startups address express demand, not new widgets
“All that said, 90, 95% of New startups, even the ones that are successful and go scale up a hundred X are often even an express demand, which is not identified early enough, right? So you don't need a proxy. I mean, you have that thing that people are trying t…”
Somani: Founders do not need sustainable 100-hour workweeks to succeed
“I'm actually not a believer in the, you know, Jack Ma, nine, nine, six philosophy. Yes, you should work hard. You have to work hard as an entrepreneur, right? But I don't think you need to you know, put in a hundred hours a week sustainably for, you know, two,…”
Somani: Mid-career professionals in their forties are increasingly launching startups in India
“A lot more people are even at mid-career wanting to start up now because we have so many successful role models. So many, you know, folks even in their forties are beginning to start up, which was very rare, ah, earlier, right.”
Somani: India Will Become the World's Third-Largest Economy in 10 Years
“We'll be the third largest in the next 10 years, right? That's another seven trillion dollars of GDP, let alone market cap, right?”
Somani: Early-Stage LPs Must Take a 15-Year Fund-Family View
“For early stage, I think, you know, you, the LP coming in or whatever, they have to take like a 15 year view. It's not of a fund, but of a fund family.”
Somani: Founders fail to test customer willingness to pay early enough
“I think people don't do enough of this willingness to pay experimentation early on, right? In terms of what will it take to get to it.”
Somani: Producing a podcast requires a product management mindset and distribution rigor
“And what we learned is it is almost like doing a product, like in product management. There's a lot that goes into the podcast. It's not just like you said, audio recording shared on a G drive or LinkedIn. It's about the, you know, the cadence of the podcast, …”
Somani: Prime Ventures Podcast Has Led to Zero Investment Deals
“I can tell you for a fact that this has led to zero deals or transactions at prime, but it has led to a lot of interesting conversations, lots of learnings and lots of people being grateful.”
Somani: Prime saw only one failure across its first 23 investments
“Invested in 23 companies one didn't work out, and that was in the early days of twenty-twelve, twenty-thirteen. By and large, all the other companies have done well.”
Somani: Prime avoids ops-heavy, feet-on-the-street businesses due to lack of expertise
“We have traditionally focused much more on digital tech oriented businesses rather than things that require heavy duty on the ground, feet on street ops. Sales, et cetera, right? So that's been either a conscious trade-off in the one hand or an Achilles heel, …”
Somani: 17 of Prime's first 20 portfolio companies raised Series A
“If I had to take the remaining 20, I would say 17 would have raised series A, B or more.
I don't have the exact breakdown between AB or more.
Of the remaining three two are breakeven.
One is handsomely profitable like in the millions of dollars kind of pro…”
Somani: Prime rarely takes business model risk or requires Day 0 revenue
“So we rarely take a business model risk, right? We always have some line of sight to what the business could be. Can this be a viable business? Can there be Some monetization potential in what way and what is the proxy or the validation of that thesis, right? …”
Somani: Prime provides specific, multi-point rejection feedback after extended founder meetings
“For people that we do date and meet several times. We think we are one of the few investors who will actually respond to you with Here are three reasons why we're not investing in your company. It's not a generic, like, Hey, this sector is not of interest to u…”
Somani: Demonetization drove massive adoption for digital bank NiYO
“So they started actually before the demonetization, but demonetization really took them through the roof because Basically everything went to digital for that time, and then these workers started receiving their salaries digitally into their bank accounts and …”
Somani: The best products attract both intense customer love and hate
“As a product management theory, I'm a real big believer that some of the best products which have a lot of customer love will also have a lot of customers that hate that or prospects that hate that.”
Somani: India Added Its Third Trillion in GDP in Five Years
“The first trillion dollars of India is GDP. Happened in about you know, 50, 55 years, right? Maybe 60. The next trillion dollars of increase in GDP happened in about 15 years. The last trillion dollars happened in five years, right?”
Somani: MakeMyTrip Listed on NASDAQ With $60M Revenue and $8M EBITDA
“It was about sixty million in revenue, real revenue. At that time there was no ARR, there was no GMB. We wish we knew GMB. Maybe the company would have been listed at a higher valuation. And about eight million dollars in actual EBITDA, right?”
Somani: SaaS Company Tracxn Generates 70% to 80% of Revenue Abroad
“Even we as Prime had a modest IPO, but of a very successful company called Traction. And that's a completely tech global company, SaaS company. I would suspect 70, 80% of the revenue is abroad and they're still very successfully in India.”
Somani: Kunal Shah and Sanjeev Bhikchandani prefer unprepared, high-intensity interviews
“Many guests like Mr. Bhikchandani or like Kunal Shah, you know, they want to kind of play the first ball as a Yorker incoming at a 145 kilometers an hour, right? They don't want to prepare for it and want to be on that edge.”
Somani: Professionals should take a one-year sabbatical every ten years
“I have this belief that every 10 years people should take a year off on a self-imposed sabbatical or jobbatical and take that time for self-discovery, take that time to find yourself, take that time to learn about what else is happening.”
Somani: Prime prefers investing in complete teams with a validated MVP
“The ideal stage is when you have your team complete and you probably have at least a little bit of an MVP that you've got some early validation. I wouldn't even say traction or metrics, but just so you've got the team, you've got an idea, you know what market …”
Somani: Prime takes two to six weeks from introduction to investment
“So if it's an area that we know about, it can be as quick as two weeks. If it is something that we are absolutely newbies in, that might even take as long as six weeks. So our sweet spot is probably like four weeks, two to six weeks is, is kind of the range.”
Somani: Prime invested in MyGate when it operated in just 20 apartments
“So MyGate, you know, when we invested in it, they were in 20 apartments literally a security system to enter and exit.”