Deepak Gupta, Founding Partner at WEH Ventures, discusses his fund’s pre-seed and seed funding strategy for Indian startups. Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourself as well as WEH Ventures. Deepak Gupta: I had been part of the venture ecosystem over the last 20 years off and on. In the last six or seven
Sramana Mitra: You said many times that the ecosystem is still immature. Can you underscore the points where you see the Indian ecosystem needing maturity? Dr. Aniruddha Malpani: Sometimes, it’s the unrealistic expectation on the part of entrepreneurs partly because they don’t understand the grind that startups need to go through. A lot of the
Sramana Mitra: It’s wonderful to exchange notes. There are a couple of things you’ve said that I want to underscore. One is the importance of failure. The Indian ecosystem didn’t accept failures for a long time. It’s a cultural change where it’s okay to fail. You’re not penalized. A very long time ago when I
Sramana Mitra: Let’s take those two sectors – SaaS and the fintech sectors. In SaaS, the metric is MRR. Do you have a particular metric that you measure by when you’re doing your SaaS investments? Dr. Aniruddha Malpani: No, numbers can be easily gamed, and they are often not necessarily representative. As long as the
There are now thousands of entrepreneurs in India, and many more Indians are starting their own businesses as we speak. Even with mistakes, disappointments, and setbacks, all things considered, startup founders continue to want to realize their ambitions, no matter what.
Global Impact The other thing to note is the globalization of entrepreneurship aspect of the Freshworks story. Girish has proved “Made in Chennai” is possible. Unlike other Indian CEOs running SaaS companies, he never shifted the center of gravity of Freshworks away from Chennai.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Varun Shoor is the Founder of Kayako, a company offering advanced helpdesk management software. When we spoke in 2014, Varun was steering the overall direction of the company and as customer experience fanatic and lead product architect, taking an active role in the design and development
Sramana Mitra: Do you want to talk about a couple of companies that you’ve invested in that you are particularly excited about? What are they doing? What value proposition are they providing? What are they experiencing in penetrating the market? Rahul Chandra: We are saving some of the new names from Unitary for a formal