Four Years of Mela Ventures

We just completed four years of our journey as investors – investing in and supporting fearless founders. We are very grateful for your support. We felt that four years is a good time to take stock of our experiences and learnings and share it with all of you.

This note is part 1 of 4. In the next three posts, we will discuss our values, team buildout, investment journey, and lessons learned.

Starting Mela Ventures

As we stepped out of Mindtree, which we co-founded and built it into a globally respected $1 billion+ revenue company in 20 years, our thoughts turned to the founding days of Mindtree. Back then, we were a group of passionate professionals bitten by the entrepreneurial bug with the desire to build a world-class technology services firm out of India. Now, we strongly believed that we should work to make other entrepreneurs build scalable, global companies – by distilling and sharing our experiences.

Thus began Mela Ventures.?

Our Differentiation in this Crowded Market

Fearless Founders seek more than just the financial capital. They seek to imagine the future and build category leaders based on their convictions and ideas. They seek intellectual and business capital.

What we, as Mela Ventures, bring to the table – along with the capital is:

#RealWorldGuidance

We bring a principled, operator driven approach and real-world guidance on how to convert an idea into a business – from hiring and technology to Sales Strategy and Operations.?

#Governance

Building a business is more than sales and profits – it is also about doing it the correct way – abiding by the laws of the land, balancing the needs of different stakeholders and instilling this spirit of “doing what is right” from day one. We instil the spirit of good governance in our entrepreneurs.?

#TransparencyinCommunication

Businesses go through cycles of ups and downs, and the same is true with the individual journeys of the founders. As partners in their journey, we encourage the founders to openly share their business challenges, disappointments, and bad news with us. We suspend judgment and assessment while listening. This open approach helps us win the trust of founders, making us their first point of contact for sharing both successes and challenges. This allows us to learn about challenges early on, enabling us to work together in solving them.?

All of this, we believe, constitutes our differentiation in the ecosystem.

In the next post, we will talk about our core values and governing philosophy.