Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar, and a long-time player in the Indian startup ecosystem discusses Exit options for Indian startups and other topics.
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Sramana Mitra: You would invest in somebody who has great talent and great domain knowledge if that person is proposing something in that domain where the problem is identified. Isn’t that a concept stage investment in a very talented person?
Cameron Kramlich: Sure, it would be. Looking at somebody who has a general area they want to work in and has enough neuroplasticity to realize that whatever is on the pitch deck is going to change 15 times. That’s why if it’s just a 10-slide, that’s great. It needs to be more than that. What we’re looking for is people that we can coach and help grow.
>>>Carl Memnon: We have people who have a credit history but have struggled in the past. From talking to users, we’ve discovered that that’s a function of healthcare cost. Hospitalizations, oftentimes, put people in debt. Another is past job loss. That individual now has great cash flow. That user is now looking to repair their credit.
In both circumstances, our users are using it the way they use their credit cards. The credit aspect is almost a byproduct. Users who have that issue come to us. Then the third is a very interesting segment which are people who have great cash flow, great credit scores, and have traditional credit cards.
>>>This feature from The New York Times covers the Korea Blockchain Week held last week with over 120 speakers and 7,000 registered attendees. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.
>>>Sramana Mitra: I’ll give you a bit of my comment. We see a lot of investors and we see a lot of entrepreneurs and their needs. One thing that I really like about what you’re saying is there’s a tremendous bias in the industry against solo entrepreneurs. The truth is a vast majority of entrepreneurs start solo. Along the way, they build teams and products. Even the founder of ServiceNow started as a solo entrepreneur.
I don’t believe that solo entrepreneurship doesn’t work. Of course, you have to bring in all the skills and resources around you, but you can do it step by step. The fact that you are open to working with solo entrepreneurs and building the team around them is actually a very interesting angle.
>>>Sramana Mitra: When you launched on the app store while you were in YC, what was the regulatory status? Did you go through all these individual state-wise regulatory approval processes for all of them?
Carl Memnon: One of the learnings that came out of Arizona was that we don’t need to be the lender on record. In order to get a financial institution to deploy this technology, we needed to get to that point of maturity in terms of the product.
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Sramana Mitra: You said you invest mostly in enterprise software. Can you elaborate more about what is your enterprise software investment thesis? Let’s talk about your enterprise software strategy.
Cameron Kramlich: Our core strategy has to do with the shape of our team. Our deepest background is in software. Software is quite complicated. You have everything from platform plays to applications. When you look at our team, we have a whole bunch of experts that are part of companies of all sizes. We’ll look at a company that needs a good CMO. We’ll take a public company CMO who’s looking for a new project for a couple of months. We’ll put him in that job. We get a company that needs a CTO or an engineer.
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