1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do one example from your rocketship portfolio that illustrates more of what you’re doing today.

Anand Rajaraman: I’ll give you an example from India. We are an investor in Moglix. It’s a company based in Delhi. They are in the B2B e-commerce space.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did Facebook come to you or did you go to them?

Anand Rajaraman: A bit of both. At that point, they already had Peter Thiel’s money. He was the only investor at that time. They had just launched at Harvard and Stanford.

Within those universities, we could see the growth. At that time, Zuckerberg wanted some advice that Venky and I were in a unique place to give him. He connected with us through a mutual acquaintance at that time. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the preferred check size for your fund?

Anand Rajaraman: We write about $2 million to $3 million checks, which means that we could co-lead in the US. In foreign geographies, we might even be the lead. In a B round, we follow.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the fund size of rocketship.vc?

Anand Rajaraman: We are on fund two. It’s $120 million. Fund one was a $40 million fund. That’s fully deployed. We started investing fund one around late 2015. We have about 30 odd companies in the portfolio. We’ve just started deploying fund two.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (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 Anand Rajaraman was recorded in October 2019.

Anand Rajaraman, Founding Partner at rocketship.vc, was an early investor in Facebook. Among other things, we discuss how the quality of startups from India has been improving.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why did they choose to go in that direction? What was the draw for them?

Francisco Jardim: The same thing that drew us. First of all, it’s purpose-driven. It’s a representative part of our economy. At the same time, it’s a sector that is highly exposed and volatile to all these external issues.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the limited partner scenario for AgTech? This $75 million and the rounds before, is there a set of limited partners that are particularly interested in AgTech?

Francisco Jardim: We have two anchors that are very large agriculture multinationals who have been active in the corporate venture sectors. These two guys are our LPs.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about stage. You started off by saying that you like early stage. Define early stage for me. Are we talking seed? Are we talking pre-seed or concept stage?

Francisco Jardim: Now that the AgTech ecosystem in the region is already on its way to maturity, we are given the luxury of becoming much more stage-specific. We do late seed and Series A.