1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chandra of Unitary Helion Ventures (Part 2)

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 vertical in terms of the disruptions that are happening and the range of companies that you could get to invest in in the Valley is far deeper.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chandra of Unitary Helion Ventures (Part 1)

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 about yourself and about Unitary Helion. What are you investing in? What is the investment thesis?

VCs Share Views of the Indian Startup Scene in Podcasts

Entrepreneurs working out of India, or with an interest in India, can hear from some key players about their views of the Indian startup scene, India’s venture capital ecosystem and the India – US startup corridor. The following VC investors share their perspectives, investment strategies, and point to emerging trends in 30-minute podcast interviews.

Sandeep Singhal, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners – This firm is a key player in the India-US startup corridor. The discussion spans trends in SaaS, Open Source, and the Indian venture capital market in general. If you are working in the technology startup sector with an interest in India, this is a discussion worth listening to.

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15 Inspiring Indian Entrepreneurs in Podcasts

Whether born and raised in India or of Indian descent, these successful tech entrepreneurs each brought something very special to a problem that led them to build their solutions into some very nice businesses. If you are looking for some inspiration today, especially as an Indian entrepreneur, please have a listen to these stories shared as 30-minute podcast interviews.

Vineet Jain, Founder and CEO of Egnyte – This Unicorn company is in the same space as the much-hyped Box – cloud storage and file sharing. In this discussion, we do a deep-dive on the space and how it is likely to evolve over time, including expanding into data management.
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11 Podcasts with VCs Interested in Indian Startups

Indian entrepreneurs should listen to this set of podcasts to get into the minds of investors who offer invaluable insights.

Naren Gupta, Nexus Ventures – As a co-founder of a firm with an excellent track record of investing in the Silicon Valley – India corridor, but with a global market point of view, Naren shares his insights, nuggets, and interesting wisdom.

Ashish Gupta, Helion Ventures – Co-Founder of one of the key players in India’s venture capital eco-system, Ashish shares his valuable perspectives throughout this crisp and insightful conversation.
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Some Small-scale Startup Ideas for Indian Entrepreneurs

To help inspire Indian entrepreneurs to spot opportunities for startup businesses, I’ve shared several startup ideas with the lens of developing small, bootstrapped businesses this year. Some of these ideas take a second, smaller-scale look at projects that I wrote about back in 2009 in Vision India 2020 and were originally designed to scale to very large numbers, to become billion dollar enterprises. These ideas are specifically written for Indian entrepreneurs, but could also be adapted to other markets as well.

• High Quality Eldercare In India – Back in 2009, one of the projects I had developed was called Care. The premise of the project was that the number of millionaires are increasing in India by leaps and bounds. At the same time, many of these families have need for in-home caregivers to take care of their ill, mentally-ill, or elderly family-members. Care would provide trained in-home caregivers in domains such as Alzheimer’s. And Care would source its staff from among women in disadvantaged situations – battered, abused, abandoned women who needed safe, secure family situations to be part of. I took another look at this project and found the idea to be quite amenable on a smaller scale.

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Startup Ideas Combining Italian Design and Indian Craftsmanship in Fashion

If you’ve read Vision India 2020, you may recall a project called Urja. In it, I explored the idea of creating a fusion brand with Italian designers working with Indian artisans and craftsmen specializing in different domains such as Chikkan from Lucknow, Tasar from Bengal, etc. This project, like all the Vision India 2020 projects, was designed to be a very large company, and hence the distribution and financing strategy was accordingly different.

Now I have a different lens on. I am thinking of small-scale ideas that will stimulate a thousand new brands, each focused on a specific craft, a specific style of customer, and sell through channels that are easily accessible and not very expensive.
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Startup Idea: High Quality Eldercare in India

When I wrote Vision India 2020 back in 2009, one of the projects I had developed for the book was called Care. The premise of the project was that the number of millionaires are increasing in India by leaps and bounds. At the same time, many of these families have need for in-home caregivers to take care of their ill, mentally-ill, or elderly family-members. Care would provide trained in-home caregivers in domains such as Alzheimer’s. And Care would source its staff from among women in disadvantaged situations – battered, abused, abandoned women who needed safe, secure family situations to be part of. [Related reading: High-Quality Eldercare For Families In India]

The project was designed to scale to very large numbers, become a billion dollar enterprise.

I took another look at that project with the lens of developing small, bootstrapped businesses, and found the idea to be quite amenable.
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