New Beginnings ..

A lot of people over the past 2 months have been asking me a single question albeit in different forms — Why did you move to become a Venture Capitalist? How is it being on the other side of the table? What led you to take this call? Why now in a career that has 20 years+ left?

Whatever the question I realized my answers revolved around the same explanations and ideas that I have carried in my mind for the longest time. Eventually thought it best to pen it down and put it up as my first ever blog post (one of many to come, I hope).

Let me begin by quoting one of my favorite writers, Seth Godin, something that has always stuck a chord with me, on how I have viewed my own professional life:

It’s tempting to enter a field where mastery is assured, where you have a very good shot of being as good at it as everyone else.

It turns out, though, that the most exciting and productive fields are those where there’s a huge gap between those that are perceived to be the very best and everyone else.

The wider the gap, the more it’s worth to push through it.

Looking back on my relatively short but exciting decade long career, of which I spent the first 5 in Banking & Financial Services albeit in very different roles from developing a PMS, Corporate Banking Advisory and Investment Banking with different firms, I always had the urge to create impact around everything I did. Whether it was cracking big accounts for YES Bank or raising capital for Consumer businesses at Elara Capital, my motivation to do everything at a larger scale led to an unending aggression on sales and business development; something reciprocated by good business in India.

Though personal relationships and follow ups help in the B2B space, one realization early on, was that you may be the best sales & operations guy out there but if your product and brand are not in sync, it would always be an uphill task to create impact. This led to the next sojourn in life where I presumed that getting into something in the formative years of product and business creation would be helpful. Jaydeep’s email in 2012 ( read here), was exactly what was needed to compel me to take a step into entrepreneurship with Faasos and dedicate the next 5 years of my journey to the same.

Faasos was the most whirlwind journey of a lifetime packed into a short period. Starting out as CFO, learning the ropes of operational finance, managing a Big 4 auditor whose KRA is to point out as many holes in the systems as possible, raising capital at every juncture when the business needs it and shielding the entire company from the vagaries of the external market sentiment was just the starting point. This was a great period that led to the deepening of relationships with everyone who invested and supported the business and worked towards making Faasos what it is today.

It was by choice ( and a very sound financial decision at that ) that we moved to a mobile first on the demand side and dark kitchen on the supply side model in 2014 end. The only problem that remained to be solved was to ensure that we delivered on the vision by creating a kick ass product ( mobile app ) and market it well to generate the demand for the business. It was tough to get “been there done that” individuals in the market back then and we never were ones to spend a million dollars on a Silicon Valley recruit which led me to hire my replacement for Finance and move to become the CMO for the Company.

It’s hard to imagine how I got through handing over operating finance, while grappling with demand generation with no team and no experience in performance or brand marketing … and so started my next stint in trying to create a consumer facing product (Mobile App), learn to market it well and ensure that all the promises made to ourselves, the board and the shareholders came to pass.

At the end of FY16 we had transformed into a consumer internet business, removed all and any dependency on fixed costs and scaled up rapidly to multiple cities to truly become a scalable internet business. What was still left to figure the best economics at scale so the marginal costs of doing businesses do not increase with revenue growth.

In early 2016 after briefly flirting with a marketplace model, we realized that while the customers loved the variety of multiple cuisines and LTV was much higher with more options on an App, the economics of a marketplace would never hold up in a lower ATV sector like food. The value of the sector would always be captured by the brand to which the consumers were loyal to than the service of ordering or logistics. This led to an experiment to create more brands like Faasos which would cater not only to different tastes and palates but different audiences as well based on their likes and dislikes.

I stepped away from overall Marketing having built the entire team from scratch, to fuel the next journey for the company, building more brands on the same supply platform of 150 kitchens, and 2500 delivery boys with a minimal seed capital and no ability to market. This was the most enthralling phase of my career at Faasos as I was truly going to build an entire business ground up which eventually led to the birth of the largest Biryani brand in the country today — Behrouz Biryani.

Building Behrouz was the true outcome of the survivor-ship bias coupled with hard work and creativity that an entrepreneur comes up with when pushed against the wall with no resources and a mountain to climb. Writing the story of Behrouz, of the long lost Kingdom and it’s recipe of Rice, or the great wars between King Piruz and King Cyrus or the love affair between the Royal Chef’s son and the princess, seen as many as a impractical pursuit, actually gave depth and authenticity to the brand and the legend of Behrouz was born. For those who are still not familiar with the story, please do read it here ( The Story of Behrouz ).

The brand today stands tall, in the midst of incumbents, growing at a breakneck speed and is on course to becoming the first INR 100 Cr. national Biryani Brand in less than 2 years of existence. Building Behrouz as a Biryani only brand, true to its stature, royal and indulgent from packaging to the communication made me believe in the India Consumer story for the long term. After all, if one can target a specific audience and build only for them, they will create your brand for you from fierce loyalty if nothing else.

As I was coming up on 5 years of hard nosed execution and impact creation at Faasos, I was fortunate enough to be nominated for the Economic Times 40 under 40 which led to a lot more exposure on my work over the last decade. In the overall ecosystem, multiple conversations started to emerge on how I could start widening the canvass and one of them was with Vani as to what I wanted to do in the future. Having created some impact in one business I had also started to advise other Consumer Internet firms as an angel / board member / mentor on their marketing, branding, fund raising and overall go to market strategies which was taking up my spare time on weekends. Quite enjoying the same, I realized there was an opportunity for me to do this full time and dedicate myself to working with early stage founders on their business as a partner having done it over the last 5 years. There was a lot of learning osmosis for early stage founders with the experience I had got in the process of taking a business to US$30 mn ARR working across functions and most critically doing what it takes, not sticking to a script

Kstart, the seed fund started in mid 2016 was just picking up traction focusing only on seed stage investments, having a heavy mentor-ship focus for the founders and was sector agnostic. One discussion led to the other and I realized that dedicating some of my best years in widening the scope of work, having the ability to paint on a larger canvass was clearly possible at an early stage fund which had a culture of high touch advisory and backed founders very early in their journey. Having worked in the Indian B2B industry (advisory) for the first 5 years and the B2C space for the next 5, I was hoping that the value I could provide to first time founders would enable them to build better business with most critically lesser capital as they would have the ability to learn from my mistakes than commit their own.

As I look forward to the next 10 years, we are at the cusp of getting a huge change in consumer behavior with the 2% of India who was essentially supporting the consumer internet wave of 2010–2016 now steadily growing to 5% as we head towards 2025 leaving ample room for growth in Consumer brands, new use cases in commerce, content, social media, gaming and various segments of consumer enablement. We can see logistics and transportation getting disrupted across segments as India graduates towards a sub 10% logistics cost as a %age of the final product situation, something very much needed to get growth to continue over the next 10 years. With healthcare as an Industry expected to triple in size over the next 10 years, the Country is going through a massive shift in affordability, access and technologies as sub segments which will drive this growth. Last but not the least, Financial Services, which has been the single constant in-spite of our demographic divide manages to keep reinventing itself with the massive transformation in consumer access, technology for enterprises and most critically inclusion for the masses. We are at the cusp of seeing a significant revolution in the way India has grown over the last 2 decades and one could not ask for a better seat in the house to be a part of it over the next decade.

Yes, the Venture Capital ecosystem has not delivered the best returns in the past. Yes, most businesses have needed more capital than ideal to grow. Yes, India has seen fewer than ideal number of exits. That does not mean we cannot learn from the past and create a better future. To answer the same, if I could quote Seth again ;

“Difficult tasks have a road map. With effort, we can get from here to there. It might surprise you to realize that  difficult is easy once you have the resources and commitment. Paving a road is difficult, so is customer service and fixing software bugs.

But  impossible and  unlikely are where we get hung up.

Unlikely never feels quite the same as difficult, and sometimes it appears impossible. It’s neither. It’s something risky, and something without a map or a guarantee. We hesitate to do it precisely because it might not work, precisely because it’s more than difficult.

Working on an unlikely project takes guts and hubris. It requires us to have the insight to distinguish it from the impossible, and the desire to not merely do the difficult.

What percentage of your time are you spending on the unlikely?”