Sramana Mitra: Geographically, are we talking about non-major metros now? Rahul Chandra: We are talking about the next 50 towns and cities. Especially if you travel there, you see the change happening. There is certainly a need to change the mindset of a VC while thinking about customers in these parts.
Rahul Chandra: Our thesis, of course, changed in 2011 but it was multi-faceted. We were investing more similarly to a Silicon Valley fund which is consumer enterprise and consumer internet specifically. These are fairly broad terms. Since you know both sides very well, you know that the depth you can get to in a particular
Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Rahul Chandra was recorded on July 2019. Rahul Chandra, Managing Director at Unitary Helion Ventures, provides an excellent overview of the opportunity around India’s next 400 million consumers. Sramana Mitra: Tell us
Paroon Chadha: There is a nuanced point that I’m trying to make here. I love Chris like a brother. He has worked with me for 10 years. I don’t think there will be another person who’ll ever be smarter than him. At the same time, what we needed at that time was not something we
Sramana Mitra: It sounds like when you did the cloud strategy, you almost did it with a different product. Even though the technology was the same, the positioning was quite different. The board technology was for the cloud software. Paroon Chadha: As an organization, we made the jump from being a Windows company to a
Paroon Chadha: If one has to learn a business, you’d rather start out from where your foundation is good. Raising capital and accelerating based on your balance sheet is a thing you can do anytime. If you have a solid core business, it’ll happen. The reverse of that is not possible. If you fund your
Sramana Mitra: This was 150 users through that credit union customer? Paroon Chadha: Yes. Sramana Mitra: You had one anchor customer and you had a software that was receiving feedback from the beginning. Paroon Chadha: Chris was writing code, and I was out selling. We didn’t fear anything at that time. I wish I could
Paroon Chadha: You are never going to be surrounded by so many super smart and super open people in your life. When you’re at school, there are a lot of engineers and computer scientists. There are a lot of people who are good at math. You can pretty much come up with any idea and