1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Utsav Somani of AngelList India (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your structure that is worth discussing that I have not discussed with you yet?

Utsav Somani: I think you’ve pretty much covered everything. There are some really good companies coming out of India.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about them?

Utsav Somani: It’s too early to be disclosing some names. I can talk about the first one which is a middleware company that’s doing Blockchain-based API for companies to quickly deploy Blockchain government systems in

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Utsav Somani of AngelList India (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What direction does the deal flow? Is it the VC’s who are coming to AngelList, or AngelList is chasing these deals?

Utsav Somani: We are the largest tech-enabled cloud platform in the world. We are more of a product company than a service company. Our product are the syndicate products. You go do the work of finding allocations. We’ve seen large institutions bringing their own set of backers but just to clean up the cap table, they pool to one entity. Then we see operator angels. These are people who can’t write large checks. We’ve seen so many personas.

Sramana Mitra: Which of these personas are dominant in India? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Utsav Somani of AngelList India (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to double-click down on a bunch of points you made. You said the angel networks like Mumbai Angels work like glorified VC funds versus AngelList. Elaborate and contrast the fee structures.

Utsav Somani: Everyone is structured in a different way. They help different people. The offline angel networks are places where people like to meet companies and see them pitch in person. They take a longer decision cycle. At AngelList syndicates, we enable people to write lower check sizes, but we pool capital and people make faster decisions. Every coin has two sides.

Sramana Mitra: What about the fee structure though? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Utsav Somani of AngelList India (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 Utsav Somani was recorded in May 2018.

Utsav Somani, Angel Investor at AngelList India, talks about the newly launched AngelList India.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about the investing focus of AngelList in India. How are you operating? How is it structured? How is it different from the mother ship? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you a few questions about the Indian market. What is your analysis of the Indian e-commerce market?

Kanwaljit Singh: There is a large consumer market in India. E-commerce is satisfying several of those requirements for branded products that Indian consumers are not able to consume due to access and sheer logistics complexity. For a large consumer brand, to be able to reach the remote corners of the country is extremely expensive. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to understand to what degree of certainty do you foresee the family offices that are working with you to be able to cover that capital need of going from $5 million to $15 million?

Kanwaljit Singh: The interesting thing is that the private equity investors in India is a very large group. They are very bullish on the consumer brand space. It’s a very interesting funnel for consumer investing in India. The mouth of the funnel is really the angels and individual investors. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In this case study, how many customers were they able to reach in an internet-only mode?

Kanwaljit Singh: I think it’s in the thousands. You can build very interesting businesses, especially in the Indian context if you can reach a core community of consumers. We believe that the lifetime value of the consumer is far more important than just reaching a certain number of consumers. A hundred thousand consumers who are buying our products on a regular basis has the potential. We’ve seen interesting milestones since there aren’t so many brands in India that have grown to $15 million to $20 million size.

Sramana Mitra: How much capital do you need in this model? What is your assessment of how much capital is >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few case studies of your portfolio. We can do three or four of these. Take us through the evolution of these companies. When did they come to you? What did they have? What brought your confidence and what happened as they evolved?

Kanwaljit Singh: Let me a take an example of a company called Mama Earth, which targets the baby and the mom. The company is about two years old. It was founded by a couple when they realized that there was not a good choice of products they could use on their child across various personal care requirements. They decided to start this company for not just themselves but for millions of parents who are looking for safer products for their child. >>>