Sramana Mitra: It sounds like when a situation like that arises, your global fund or Silicon Valley fund is bringing in the capital to match the round. Anyway, we don’t need to belabor the point. You were going to talk about Udaan. Hemant Mohapatra: It’s a very India-centric problem. Commerce in India has always been
Sramana Mitra: What is the process of customer acquisition? Where you reaching out to these customers? Were they reaching out to you? What was the inbound and outbound? What was the go-to-market strategy? Matthew Elenjickal: For those early days, it was still outbound. You go through your Rolodex and some of the companies you work
Hemant Mohapatra: We invested $60,000 in Oyo and then worked with the founder and built up a relationship. I saw them through multiple fundraising. They have raised more than a billion dollars now from the likes of SoftBank. We have stayed together with the founder on not just capturing India’s opportunity but also expanding into
Sramana Mitra: You said you did the startup right after your MBA. So did you then bootstrap it to launch this? Whom did you launch it with? Matthew Elenjickal: I started the MBA program fully aware that I wanted to start a company. I was laying the foundation, if you will, when I was doing
Sramana Mitra: So, it’s a $175 million fund. What stage? Is there a comfort zone in terms of investing? Hemant Mohapatra: We come in early. We love series A and seed. Those are the two stages that are the most common. Last year, half of our investments were seed. Our check sizes range from $1
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 445th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, May 23, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a terrific case study of smart execution on a complex domain by an entrepreneurial team. Read on ! Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?
Jose Deustua, Managing Director at UTEC Ventures, talks about Peru’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.