The Ledger
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Why former operators who become VCs must stop thinking like operators
“The role of a VC is the full stop button for even an operator to stop thinking like an operator. And as long as you have the, Empathy to actually think like a founder you can overcome any handicap”
Rahul Chandra says VCs are as clueless as anyone else
“When you actually talk to A VC I think the point I wanted to bring out was they are probably as clueless as anybody else. You know, it's not like you know, they have a crystal ball. They're trying to decipher and learn with you and also take you know, a leap i…”
Walden created the first India-focused venture capital fund in 1996
“Walden was the first VC firm, ah, to actually create, ah, set up a India-focused fund along with Japanese investors Niko, a thirty million dollar fund investing one to two million dollars in Indian companies back in 96.”
Radical transparency is the defining trait of breakout founders
“I think my one word answer to that Siddharth would be transparency. And I think founders who follow an approach of transparency with their employees, with their co-founders, with their investors, I've seen that, that is a reflection of, you know, just honesty …”
The three investment pillars behind Helion's early bet on BigBasket
“So big basket, I think there were three things. One was that the founding team had done two startups before. I think the kind of, ah, challenges in a hard business like grocery, we felt was best handled by a team which had been there, done that, right? So, I m…”
How a $10M Helion bet on a struggling microfinance company reached IPO
“Ten million dollars was a large check from a one forty million dollar fund, And to see it, you know, just disappearing was very painful. Luckily, of course, you know, and again to, you know, kind of give me that learning that, you know, time is very unpredicta…”
Judging early traction in consumer startups requires more judgment than B2B
“So I think that you know, that vagueness in backing consumer startups, unlike a B to B startup where, you know, you absolutely get a fair idea, you know, from an enterprise customer of the, you know, the need and value for that product. I think it's very hard …”
Why top-tier Indian tech products cannot easily adapt to Middle India
“It's very difficult to build a product for top-tier India, and then re-customize it for middle India, because the customer profile is significantly different.”
Time to Series B is shrinking due to better founder execution
“So I think my expectation is that the you know, the time, To a series B is, is shrinking you know, from what it used to be because the execution is superior because people are making fewer mistakes, and doing more right things you know, in shorter time frames.”
WestBridge and ChrysCapital originally started as tech venture capital firms
“Some of them interestingly have, Chosen to become PE firms like Westbridge and Chris, but they did start originally as VC firms taking tech risk”
Helion's first bet on mobile transaction startup JiGrahak failed on timing
“The first bet we took was a very promising company. You know, fundamentally it made a lot of sense. It was called G. Grahag. Great entrepreneur you know, thinking product first, but in an ecosystem which was very hard, ah, to actually roll that product out to …”
How MakeMyTrip succeeded in 2006 by leveraging omnichannel distribution
“And, ah, this, you know, almost at the same time, we backed a company called Make My Trip, which was, ah, you know, I think way ahead of competition even back then. Ah, thankfully, it has retained that, ah, lead And it was making itself widely available throug…”
Helion's early legal outsourcing bet grew at 100% CAGR for six years
“So we invested very early on in a legal services company, LPOs as they were called back then, and again this company was sitting in Gurgaon delivering work around litigation in the US, and it was growing at, you know, a compounded average growth rate of a hund…”
Helion pivoted to vertical commerce after missing India's horizontal e-commerce wave
“At Helion, we chose to go the vertical commerce path. We, Felt we had missed on the horizontal commerce opportunity, and we were backing companies which were specifically focused on fashion or consumer electronics”
Helion was an early VC to have founders evaluate partners via surveys
“So, we were one of the early firms to conduct surveys where the partners would get evaluated by founders. We would take feedback from founders who the partners would have dealt with, and ask them, ah, you know, if the interaction was where they felt like, They…”