Yesterday, I did my 8th continuous weekly review meeting with Artha’s interns, analysts, associates, and heads of departments. I did a similar exercise during my last year at the family office and carried it forward to the first team of analysts at the fund. Due to specific personal and professional commitments, I broke this habit […]
Read More Weekly Review Meetings to Create A High Performance CultureThe first week of 2020 was understandably slow for deal announcements with Yourstory reporting a 73% drop in funding from last week. It was slim pickings for me to choose my funding picks, and I decided to choose just one. Aeron Systems raised ₹2 crores from Bharat Forge What does Aeron Systems do? Copied from […]
Read More My Funding Picks from Last Week (W01)A couple of months ago, I found my jaw hitting the floor during a start-up pitch. The founder of an early-stage B2C startup revealed that he had previously raised a family and friends’ round of the princely sum of 5+ crores (~$900k). That capital was exhausted in less than 18 months; the monthly burn was […]
Read More Family & Friends – Please Save Your Capital!Most funds are winding down their operations in December; therefore, there wasn’t enough funding news from which I could shortlist. Yourstory reports that there were 17 deals in total with less than 50% meeting the criteria of the early-stage deals for this section of this blog. The launch of the first cohort of Sanjay’s 100x.vc […]
Read More My funding picks of the last week (W49)I am back with my favorite funding news of last week! I had shared my purpose in starting this weekly post, and I have received much positive feedback. Therefore, I was eager to dig into the top news from last week to share with you today. Last week was a stellar week for fundraising, with […]
Read More My Funding Picks from Last Week (W48)Waking up to the unearthing of a 2,000 crore scam at Karvy Stock Broking was precisely the sort of news fintech entrepreneurs and investors did not need. Ironically, this news would flash within a few hours of Andreessen Horowitz’s Anish Acharya and Seema Amble publishing a brilliant discussion on Does Zero Fee Trading Pay Off. […]
Read More Is the Karvy scam the knockout punch to the fintech boom?Earlier this week, I wrote an email in which I explained the reasons why I was passing on a deal that my team and I had tracked for more than three months. The eventual reason for letting go of this deal finally dawned on me when I re-did the calculations for the cost it took […]
Read More Discovering the true cost of acquring a new customerMost founders deem that their relationship with their board will be adversarial and combative. I assume that the founders must get sleepless nights before the board meeting. Maybe it provides the founder flashbacks to the nights spent they spent rolling their beds as they tried to present their school report card to their stricter parent, […]
Read More Startup Board Meetings 101No one can doubt that the Indian PE/VC ecosystem is going through a golden run. The amount of money flowing into the ecosystem is breaking records –records set just the previous year! If I narrow the PE/VC down to just “start-ups” then Indian start-ups have raised $11.3 billion this year – up from $10.5 billion […]
Read More Navigating the Indian Seed LandscapeHey founders, today I’m going to address a crucial topic: When to update your investors with bad news. If you’re an entrepreneur and running a business, you will have to give bad news at some point. There are many ways to give bad news. One of them is not to give any news at all, […]
Read More How to deliver bad news to investors