Tag: venture

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Angel Investing Entrepreneurship India Investing InvestStream Video Startups Venture Capital Video

The Rise of Indian Venture Capital

Over the last twenty years, India has seen a tremendous amount of economic activity in the tech arena. The startup and venture capital ecosystems were a bit slow to pick-up, partly due to low Internet penetration until just a few years ago. That, however, didn’t prevent the creation of unicorns like Flipkart, Snapdeal and others. Since 2017, India has seen numerous new venture capital firms being launched with domestic and foreign capital. Japanese and Chinese investors have poured billions of dollars into Indian tech startups and venture capital firms over the last 5 years.

In the next Invest Stream Live, we’re going to chat with Ankita Vashistha, founder of the Saha Fund and Rahul Chandra, founder of Arkam Ventures. Both Ankita and Rahul have been active investors in India and both of them have very unique fund strategies. We will discuss broad trends they are seeing in India right now, what drove them to formulate such unique theses for their respective funds and what they see in store for Indian startups and other VC firms over the next year.

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Angel Investing Business Entrepreneurship Investing InvestStream Video Startups Venture Capital

What is the Difference Between Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors?

What is the difference between venture capitalists and angel investors? In this episode of InvestStream, I discuss the difference between these two types of startup investors. Knowing the difference can be very useful in understanding a particular investor’s motivation for investing or not investing in a startup.

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Advice Angel Investing Business Entrepreneurship InvestStream Video Startups Venture Capital

What makes a startup venture fundable?

There are a multitude of things that help make #startups attractive to #angel #investors & #venturecapitalists. In this video, I shared 3 things that I think are critical to a startup being venture fundable.

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There are a few things that should be on the checklist of any startup before they think of approaching investors other than friends and family.

  1. The first is TAM or “Total Addressable Market”. VCs need big markets to support big companies. A better understanding of VC economics would help explain this a bit better but for the moment, just assume that VCs need big exits otherwise they go out of business. Big exits are usually via IPOs. Rarely does the NYSE or Nasdaq allow listing a company under a $1 billion market cap. In order for a company to list for on a public exchange for a billion dollars, they really need a few hundred million in revenue and lots of growth prospects otherwise, public investors won’t buy into the IPO. After years of rapidly increasing valuations in the space, we’re starting to see some strain in the ride-sharing space after Lyft and Uber’s IPOs. Even Slack has struggled after going public. Unless the market that a startup is targeting is a multi-billion dollar market or growing rapidly, it’s very difficult to convince most VCs to invest.
  2. The quality of the team is critical to the success of a startup and its execution. If the team is solid, investors are more likely to get excited about investing.
  3. Finally, there’s traction. Having traction is critical to an early stage startup looking attractive to angels and VCs. If the traction is strong and there’s a well understood growth plan, investors are more confident that the team can attack the large total addressable market.