I am an active user of Claude. I cannot now imagine a world without my Pro version of Claude. I am at least 3x more efficient, though I also believe I have created more work for myself.

I find it fascinating when I read about one-person companies making $100 million in six months. I have probably listened to at least 25 podcasts in the last three months about AI and how the trends are showing up, in an attempt to keep up with a technology that seems to change every week.

As an active investor, I did not want to be caught unaware. What I have realised now is that it is an impossible race to keep up with. But the deeper realisation is that we are all hurtling down a path that does not give us enough time to ask the questions that matter:

Who is this benefitting? Who are we investing in? What are the consequences we don’t yet understand? And is this really the future we want?

The takeaways from almost every episode was the same: AI could be the reason humanity faces an existential crisis.

I always thought this was the Western narrative. Living in India, we are still grounded in something more basic. We are busy watching how people around us are making ends meet, and trying to get their children educated so they can compete for a better life.

The thought of AI threatening humanity has felt distant from us. Almost like how Hollywood movies felt more distant a few decades ago.

In June 2026, Anthropic filed the paperwork to sell shares to the public.

For those of you interested in learning more: Anthropic’s announcement: Confidentially submitted draft S-1 to the SEC.

The filing is called S-1. It is the one document where a private company has to stop talking like a pitch deck and start sharing data and make legal disclosures. Which means, for the first time, we get to see what is actually behind the AI hype, in the company’s own words. This is similar to the DRHP that companies in India file when they prepare to list through a public offering.

As an investor, I decided I would analyse Anthropic’s S-1 from the confidential prospectus reviewed by Reuters and the Financial Times

And this is what I want to share, because it is unnerving. I have summarised this, so it is easier for you to understand, what I am now starting to comprehend.

The Anthropic S-1 is 281 pages long. There are about 40 pages of business information, where the company is required to talk about its model, customers and business.

The number that makes you uneasy? 80 pages of risk.

Now, let’s understand the detail and start with the number everyone is repeating: Anthropic wants to be valued at $2 trillion, more than double what it was worth in May.

However, the number that matters is $518 billion. That is what Anthropic has committed to spend on cloud computing and chips in the years ahead — not what it has already spent, but what it has promised to spend.

An analyst at Forkast News did the math on September 29: for every dollar Anthropic earned in 2025, it has committed roughly $113 to future infrastructure. About 80% of that $518 billion cannot be cancelled. It is a commitment, not a plan.

Who is it owed to? Four companies: Google (~$111 billion), Amazon (~$110 billion), Microsoft (~$31 billion), and a chipmaker called Broadcom (~$161 billion). Follow the money and that is where AI capital is actually concentrating right now — inside four US tech houses.

And it is not only those four writing checks into Anthropic itself. Amazon has roughly $18 billion deployed directly into the company. Google has put in about $13.3 billion, with another $30 billion conditional. Nvidia and Microsoft committed $10 billion and $5 billion in Anthropic’s last funding round alone.

Then there is the money from further away — the UAE’s sovereign fund ATIC is in as a major investor. Across roughly 300 institutional investors worldwide, about $130 billion has already been deployed into Anthropic.

Global capital, flowing into American AI infrastructure, through one company’s cap table. It is like a pass through investment, with no benefits.

If you are an investor who has bought Anthropic shares, you are indirectly funding US infrastructure.

Here is where it gets real for anyone deciding how excited to be about “AI.” Three things in this filing are worth sitting with.

One: the money doesn’t match yet. Anthropic made $4.6 billion in 2025. It spent $7.33 billion just on the computing power to run Claude — more than it earned. Its losses actually grew, from $3 billion in 2024 to $8 billion in 2025. And it is sitting on $20 billion in cash against that $518 billion bill. If growth slows even a little, the gap between what Anthropic owes and what it has gets uncomfortable fast.

Two: a quarter of its revenue comes from just two customers. Not two industries. Two companies. And many of its other customer relationships aren’t locked into long contracts. That is a thin base to be building a trillion-dollar valuation on.

Three — and this is the one that’s genuinely new — Google and Amazon are both big investors in Anthropic and the suppliers Anthropic is contractually bound to pay hundreds of billions to. They’re on both sides of the table.

And the last most disturbing part: buried in the filing is :

Anthropic disclosing that its own AI models carry the potential for “self-preserving behaviours, shutdown resistance, and blackmail.”

I have spent years talking to founders at LVX and the lesson never changes: the valuation is the story a company wants you to believe. The numbers is the one place it has to tell you what’s actually true.

None of this means Claude isn’t a remarkable product, or that Anthropic is in trouble. Their most recent quarter brought in $11.5 billion, more than double the quarter before — so the growth is real.

But the gap between growth and exposure is real too — and for the first time, I am wondering what is real now.

My personal discomfort lies is this question: Among all the noise to build sovereign capabilities, almost every investor, whether institutional or retail, is now funding the US infrastructure race. For the first time, probably one company could also lead to a global financial crisis, if the numbers don’t add up. And to the point that if they try to shut down AI, AI may just go into self-preservation mode.

Feels like a Spielberg movie now playing slowly in real life.

Hope we are all proven wrong, and come out as just skeptics who didn’t believe in a bright future with AI. I am most happy to be wrong this time.

Stay blessed. Stay safe. Stay happy.

Shanti

Let us look at what actually decides it.

1. The investor across the table

Some investors, especially institutions, come in with an ownership target. They need to hold a certain percentage of your company at the end of the transaction, and that target matters more to them than the valuation itself. At times, they do not care what your valuation is at all.

Say an investor wants to hold 5%. The valuation then comes down to two things: how much money you need, and who has the stronger hand. If you already have revenues, or you are profitable, and you do not want to give away 5%, the investor who still wants that 5% now has to invest large capital - sometimes this gets structured as primary capital (that which gets invested into the company’s capital pool) and some that is structured as secondary (where the investor buys out existing shareholders). That is how the valuation gets decided. It is not always the spreadsheet. It is the negotiation between what they need to own and what you are willing to give.

So before you walk into the room, know who you are talking to. An angel, a fund with an ownership mandate, and a strategic investor will each arrive at your number in a different way.

2. Benchmarks and revenue multiples

Every sector has a revenue multiple that the market uses as a reference. When a company already has a revenue stream, valuation becomes easier to anchor because there is something real to multiply.

But this is where early founders misread the room. If you are too early in your life cycle and you lead with revenue and EBITDA, the investor can use those numbers to decide your valuation, and that can set a lower valuation number. Very early, your revenues may not be high because you may not yet have found the repeatable, scalable engine a company needs to build consistent revenue. You end up being priced on the weakest version of your business.

Talk about revenue when it tells your story. Not before.

3. Stage decides which yardstick applies

In the earlier posts, we spoke of three phases of a startup: early stage, growth stage, and pre-IPO. The yardstick changes with each.

At the early stage, you are valued on the team, the market and the signals of traction. At the growth stage, revenue multiples start to matter. EBITDA multiples should really not come into the conversation before a Series B, because those numbers need time to be refined and become consistent enough for an investor to rely on. If someone is applying an EBITDA multiple to your seed round, the yardstick is wrong for your stage.

4. What others in your sector are getting

There is also the market around you. When startups in your sector raise at certain valuations, an industry standard begins to form, and investors carry that reference into every conversation. You cannot ignore it. If your ask sits far above what comparable companies are getting, you will need a very clear reason why.

5. Outliers - there are always the edge cases

Everything above is the norm, and most startups fall within it. But every so often, one company stands apart. The founder has built and exited a business in the same space before, or was part of the early team at a company that grew very fast, or is simply a successful repeat founder. Their raise and their valuation tell a very different story, because investors are pricing the founder’s track record as much as the business.

It is useful to know these companies exist. It is dangerous to use them as your benchmark. If you anchor your valuation to an outlier without the outlier’s history, you will either struggle to close the round or close it at a number your next round cannot justify. That is a spiral, and it is very hard to get out of.

Know which one you are before you set your price.

Why the number matters so much: the entry price

Here is the part most founders underestimate. Your valuation sets the entry price for your investor, and that entry price decides what you have to become for them to make any money.

This is roughly the maths an investor does. They look at where your revenue is today and ask what it can realistically become in three or five years. They ask how big the market can get. Then they apply the multiple your sector is likely to command at that point, which gives them a possible exit valuation. The only question left is whether the company can exit at that number, given the price they enter at.

Let us take an illustrative example. A company has ₹5 crore in revenue today. The investor believes it can reach ₹100 crore in five years, and that the sector will value it at around five times revenue. That puts the exit at ₹500 crore. If the investor enters at a ₹50 crore valuation, that is a 10x return. If they enter at ₹150 crore, the same outcome is barely 3x, and that is before later rounds dilute them.

So the company is the same, the plan is the same, and the founder is the same, but the return is completely different. At ₹20 crore, the company needs to reach ₹200 crore to deliver 10x. At ₹150 crore, even a 5 to 7x return needs a ₹800 to ₹1,000 crore outcome, and 10x needs ₹1,500 crore.

This is why funds are more careful than founders expect, and why every change in the number matters to them. A fund does not need each company to work. It needs the fund as a whole to return money, and in venture, most of those returns come from a very small number of companies. That is the power law. Every company they back has to be capable of being one of those few. If your entry price means that even a great outcome only returns 3x, the investor cannot count you as one of them, however much they like you.

And then there is AI

Every couple of years, one sector breaks all of the maths. Valuations run far ahead of what any revenue projection can justify because investors are pricing the chance of a category-defining outcome rather than the business in front of them. Right now, that sector is AI.

If you are building in AI, you may well raise at a number the frameworks above would never give you. But understand what it is: It is a bet on the category as much as on you, and the next round will still ask whether your revenue has caught up with your price.

The higher you price the round, the higher the bar you set for yourself. A big number today feels like a win. But every rupee of valuation you take now is a promise about what the company will be worth later, and the next investor will hold you to it.

So, what is your company worth?

It is worth what the right investor will pay, at your stage, in your sector, for the amount you actually need. Work out the raise and the valuation together, not one after the other. Know who is across the table and what they need to own. And price the round so the next one is still possible.

The intent of writing this series is to get founders to think more deeply, understand the math before walking into an investor room. Hope this helps you when you have your next investor conversation.

Have fun building.

Warm Regards,

Shanti

Next in the series: Do you really know your pitch deck?

Shekhar Daga, Head of Private Capital at ICICI Prudential AMC, told BusinessToday this month that HNIs should default to a 40% listed equity / 40% listed debt / 20% private capital portfolio, with India’s alternatives industry growing roughly 25% annually over the next decade. You can read his full case here: BusinessToday, Sept 12, 2026.

I’m not going to re-walk his argument — it’s a good one, and it’s his to make. Why am I discussing this here? Because finally we are officially talking about alternate asset allocation more publicly. For the longest time, I have seen HNI’s refusing to allocate to this asset class. I agree the space is complex if seen from the outside, but once you start to engage, you realise that not having an allocation is not a good strategy. (you can start with lower than 20 if needed)

Having said this, I want to answer the question the proposed framework leaves open. That 20% doesn’t just mean “some private capital.” It includes private credit, real estate, and startups, all sitting under one label. If you’re allocating any of it to startups, the next question isn’t how much — it’s how much to which kind.

Because “startup investing” isn’t one asset class. Early-stage, growth-stage, and secondary are three different bets, with three different risk profiles, three different holding periods, and three different jobs to do inside a portfolio. Treating them as a single line item is how a 20% allocation ends up looking diversified on paper and isn’t.

In India, we see this at 5-7% (from the 20%), thought more active investors allocate as much as 40%. Internationally the numbers skew to as high as 30%.

Startups Aren’t One Asset Class — They are Three

Most allocation conversations stop at “how much goes to startups.” That’s the wrong resolution. It’s the equivalent of an equity allocation that doesn’t distinguish between a pre-revenue small-cap and a blue-chip index fund — technically both are “equity,” and that fact tells you almost nothing useful.

Early-stage means seed through Series A: a founder, a thesis, and not yet enough revenue history to underwrite the business on numbers alone. Growth-stage means Series B and beyond, up to pre-IPO: the company has already proven a model works and is now proving it scales. Secondary means buying shares that already exist — from an early investor, an employee, or a fund needing liquidity — in a company whose traction, revenue, and often its last two or three valuation markers are already on the record.

Same word, “startup.” Three completely different underwriting problems.

Why They Behave Differently, Not Just Earlier or Later

Early-stage is a power-law business. A small number of positions carry the entire portfolio’s return, most individual bets go to zero or close to it, and the only way the model works is breadth — 15 to 30-plus positions, minimum, so the winners have room to do their job. Time horizon runs 8 to 10-plus years. The upside is uncapped; so is the mortality rate.

Growth-stage is a different shape entirely. Fewer companies in this bracket fail outright — you’re underwriting a business with real revenue, not a slide deck — and outcomes cluster in a more bounded range, commonly 2x to 5x rather than 0x or 20x. Capital efficiency is higher too: fewer, larger checks instead of many small ones. Time horizon is shorter, typically 4 to 7 years, because the company is closer to an exit event of some kind by the time you enter.

Secondary is the most visible bet of the three before you even write the check. You can often see the growth trajectory, the last primary round’s price, and sometimes the buyer’s own target return before committing — and pricing frequently comes at a discount to the last primary round rather than at a premium. Holding periods run 2 to 5 years, shorter than either of the other two, because you can choose vintages that are already closer to their own exit, or enter through GP-led continuation vehicles built around a defined return target and timeline.

Early stage is a venture bet on the future. Growth stage is a growth bet on execution. Secondary and pre-IPO is a liquidity-aware bet on something already proven. None of those is a substitute for either of the others.

Recommended Split Inside the Startup Sleeve

Based on our own internal learning, as well as what we have heard from mature HNI’s and family offices who have been investing into private markets, inside their 20% private-capital allocation, the default recommended split is:

40% growth-stage. 30% secondary. 30% early-stage.

The logic follows directly from the risk shapes above. Growth-stage is the anchor — the largest single slice — because it carries the most bounded, most underwritable risk of the three, and the shortest realistic path to an exit event. Secondary sits second, not as an afterthought but as a deliberate liquidity ladder: capital entering at known valuations, on vintages you can choose to stagger, gives a portfolio visibility into when distributions might actually arrive, rather than every dollar being locked to the same uncertain horizon. Early-stage gets the smallest slice, not because it matters least, but because its power-law nature demands small position sizes and real breadth to work — a large check into one seed-stage company isn’t diversification, it’s concentrated risk wearing a growth story’s clothes.

This is a default, not a formula. Daga caveated his own 40/40/20 the same way — “depending on individual circumstances and risk tolerance” — and the same applies here. A founder-adjacent HNI with a longer time horizon and real conviction in specific sectors might run the early-stage slice higher. Someone closer to needing liquidity from this sleeve within five years should probably run secondary higher and early-stage lower. The split is a starting point for a conversation with your own risk tolerance, not a rule.

The Structural Case for All Three Growing Together

This isn’t a case built on optimism alone. India’s Category II AIFs — the vehicle housing most early-stage, growth-stage, and secondary-adjacent strategies — drove more than 92% of the AIF industry’s ₹1.20 lakh crore quarterly increase, part of total commitments reaching ₹16.94 lakh crore as of March 2026, up 25.6% year-on-year (Cafemutual). That growth isn’t concentrated in one tier — it’s structural demand showing up across the category.

Here its good to note that while private credit falls into the same startup category, it had a flat H1 2026 — $3.5 billion deployed, barely above H2 2025’s $3.4 billion (EY-India). Not every sleeve inside “alternatives” is accelerating at the same pace, which is why the split matters more than the label — “alternatives” as a category is not one uniform growth story.

On the demand side: India’s UHNWI population is up 63% since 2021, to 19,877 people, the world’s sixth-largest such population (Knight Frank, via MediaBrief).

Asset Allocation - Plan for the 20% growing segment

If you are an HNI, ensure that your wealth manager is being more deliberate about the allocation split. In my experience, many wealth managers ignore the startup space and only focus on private credit, as this is still a less understood, more complex asset class. Access and curation is key, and many good transatcions close based on relationships and founder proximity. I want to reiterate that growth-stage, early-stage, and secondary are three different tools doing three different jobs: an anchor, an upside tail, and a liquidity ladder.

If you already have startup exposure, don’t ask “how much is in startups.” Ask what’s actually in each of the three buckets — and whether that split happened on purpose, or by whatever deal happened to land on your desk this year.

Happy conscious investing!

Shanti

My decade of building LetsVenture (now LVX) and working with founders and investors has taught me one thing: investing is belief first — belief in founders, in markets, and in our own judgment. That’s the case I make in The Business of Belief.

Read the full story, take the two-minute Investor Fingerprint quiz, and sign up to be the first to know when it ships — all on the My Books page.

Go to My Books →

It sounds like a straightforward question. It is not.

I often hear founders say, “We want to raise ₹5 crore,” before they have really worked through what that money is meant to accomplish.

The number comes first. The reason comes later.

I think it should be the other way around.

Start with the milestone

The better question is: “What are the metrics my business should achieve for the next 18-24 months, and how much capital do I need to raise to achieve those metrics?”

Maybe it is reaching ₹5 crore in annual revenue. Maybe it is getting to product-market fit, proving repeat purchase, reaching a certain number of paying customers, completing a manufacturing facility, getting regulatory approval, or demonstrating that a technology works at commercial scale.

The milestone will look different for every business. Once you know the milestone, you can work backwards.

This sounds obvious, but it changes the conversation completely.

You are no longer raising money because you think ₹5 crore sounds like the right size of a round. You are raising because you have a clear view of what the capital needs to achieve.

The mistake is raising for runway alone

Runway is important. You need enough cash to give yourself time to build the business without constantly worrying about the bank balance.

But I would be careful about making “18 months of runway” the entire fundraising strategy.

Eighteen months of what?

If you raise ₹3 crore and spend it slowly for 18 months without materially changing the business, you may simply have bought yourself 18 months.

The better question is:

What should the company look like at the end of those 18 months?

That is the difference between raising money to survive and raising money to create value.

Don’t raise enough money to survive. Raise enough to reach the next meaningful inflection point.

Your milestone depends on the stage and sector - there is no one standard answer

This is where I think founders need to be careful with benchmarks. There is no single definition of “traction” that applies to every startup.

A SaaS company may need to demonstrate recurring revenue, retention and efficient customer acquisition.

A D2C company may need to demonstrate repeat purchase, contribution margins and a scalable acquisition engine.

A fintech company may need to show transaction volumes, customer engagement, credit performance or assets under management.

A DeepTech company may still be pre-revenue while its most important evidence is a successful pilot, a commercial contract, a large LOI, regulatory progress or technical validation. A deep tech startup is typically measured in terms of TRL (Technology-Readiness-Level), which is a good benchmark while building the execution plan.

The stage matters too.

What is impressive at Seed may be expected by Series A. What is an appropriate milestone for one sector may be almost irrelevant in another.

This is why I prefer to think about benchmarks as reference points, not targets handed down from above. They can only be directional in helping you plan as close. to what your own sector benchmarks could be.

They help you ask, “How am I doing relative to companies at a similar stage?” They should not replace your understanding of your own business.

So how much should you keep as a buffer?

In all my years, I have rarely seen a startup get this right. Not because founders don’t know, but because there are uncertainties when it comes to building a business. There could be a surprise on travel, hiring could take longer, and product development almost never stays on schedule. Besides this, there could be things outside your control - like a geo political situation developing, or market sentiment dampening. Sometimes the round takes so long to close that you have already lost time, and it might require the business to accelerate in order to catch up.

Only very occasionally does the business outperform to numbers projected.

So I would not build a fundraising plan that assumes everything will go according to the spreadsheet. As a founder, you need enough room to absorb some of that uncertainty. I generally like to keep this around 20% buffer on the total amount.

But there is an equally important point on the other side:

Do not raise more simply because someone is willing to give you more.

A larger round can look attractive. More cash in the bank can feel like safety. But more capital also means more dilution, more expectations and, usually, a higher bar for the next round.

The right question is not: “How much can I raise?”

It is: “How much capital will help me build a meaningfully stronger company before I need to raise again?”

That is a very different question.

One exercise I would do before going to investors

My hack on this is to do a simple exercise. Build a revenue and cost projection for the next 18-24 months. Keep it conservative and do not over project revenues, and cut costs. Take the negative balance and add a 20% buffer. That would indicate how much you should raise.

When you build the costs, remember to include all costs (any licenses needed to build the competitive edge, negotiations time with distribution partners, hiring costs, marketing and technology). I would also recommend to hire or contract a professional chartered accountant to help you build the plan. Trying to save on accounting costs could result in the business absorbing a higher cost, if not done right. To this, dd a reasonable buffer.

That gives you the beginning of your fundraising number.

The number should come out of the plan, not the other way around.

And this is where benchmarks can help

At LVX, we have been building a benchmark framework across sectors and stages because founders often ask a very practical question:

“What does good look like at my stage?”

The answer is rarely one number.

It depends on what you are building, where you are in the journey and what investors are likely to expect at the next stage.

So for this post, I want to make the benchmark framework useful rather than simply publish another table of numbers. If you are a founder and want to know what the relevant benchmarks look like for your company, comment on this post with “Startup Name — Sector — Stage”

For example:

Acme — SaaS — Seed

I will DM you the relevant benchmark data.

The intention of benchmarks is not to tell you what your company should look like. It is to give you a reference point so that you can make a better decision about what you need to achieve, and therefore how much capital you actually need.

This being the second post is also not incidental. How much to raise is the most important conversation you need to have with your team, and with your co-founders. In this post, I have only talked about equity raise. In many startups, I see founders raising equity to fund working capital or capital expenditure. In those cases, you should at least explore whether another source of capital makes more sense — debt, venture debt, revenue-based financing or working capital financing.

We will get into that as we continue the series. For now, start with the numbers!

Have fun with them. This is just the start of an interesting task at hand.

Signing off,
Shanti

#TheFirstRaise #Fundraising #Founders #Startups #VentureCapital

I spend much of my professional life around fundraising, so perhaps the most useful place for me to start this series is by saying something that sounds counterintuitive: you do not “have to” raise venture capital.

I have spent a decade sitting across the table from founders raising their first round. Most arrive with a pitch deck, a financial model and a number they want to raise. There is no shortage of information online to help them prepare. In fact, with AI, increasingly every founder can arrive with a polished model, an exit scenario and a deck that looks investor-ready.

But fundraising is rarely about the deck and the numbers.

This is the first post in a 12-part series for first-time founders on fundraising. Over the next 12 posts, I want to take one part of the journey at a time and make it simple — how much to raise, how investors think about your business, valuation, knowing your pitch deck, finding investors, running the process, term sheets and, finally, choosing the right capital.

No jargon. No complicated fundraising playbook. Just the things I think a first-time founder should understand before taking someone else’s money. I’ve made this a series of images - easier to remember for sure.

Spend time thinking about these questions. I would love to hear feedback from founders who have bootstrapped and enjoyed the journey, and founders who have raised and regretted the decision.

Have a good weekend.

Shanti

#TheFirstRaise #Fundraising #Startups #Founders #VentureCapital #AngelInvesting #ElvixForFounders

I honestly feel like the outsider who is watching this unfold. It feels surreal to me, as this has now stopped being my project to something the community owns today. As parents, we perhaps feel this when I children grow up into adults and start making decisions - its for them to walk their own journey.

I am huge believer of this - everyone in this world is here to learn their own lessons, and walk their own journey. We might walk a few miles with some, and a longer stretch with others.

When I founded MyPragati, it was more from a feeling of deep need to contribute back to a world and a group of people, who seem so selfless in bringing the best mountain experiences to us. I feel drawn to the mountains in ways I cannot explain. In the absence of giving up everything and starting up in the mountains (now if you have watched “Musafir Cafe” on Netflix, you will know what I am saying), this was my second best option. Build something that could keep me connected. Honestly, I did not know if it would last. The first few years was just doing, and putting the process in place. I definitely did not expect it to teach me more than most things I have built. Four years in, here is what each year taught me — less about running a nonprofit, more about what happens when you give without overthinking it.

Lesson 1: Giving is easier than we think. Apply First Principles.

By the end of Year 1, I realised it was easy — once the systems were in place. The first step always feels like the hardest one. What worked for me was simple: talk about the idea to my best friends who didn’t laugh and ridicule it. I owe the name, and the initial excitement to Jagruti, my soul sister in the US. She was as excited about starting this - and we found the name, got the domain and set the idea rolling all in one evening on our walk in California. I did bring in a program manager, document the data, talk to the people we were trying to serve, and only then build the plan. Complexity is usually just a story we tell ourselves to avoid starting. Break down a problem, and apply first principles. It will not fail you.

Lesson 2: Sometimes all you need is just one person to be your anchor.

In life, while it is always about us working and walking our own path, we just need one person to believe in us. When I went to the community first time after we started, we had a grand celebration. There was music, dance and plays organised by the kids - a lot of whom came up to speak. At that event, one of the most senior members of the village felicitated me and said - “what you have given us is the one anchor that gives us hope, and tells us someone cares”. I was a bit taken aback as I have lived by that principle all my life. Most people miss opportunities in life because someone did not take the first bet on them.

MyPragati became the one thread that tied the community together, and became the symbol of hope and love. By Year 2, as the systems were holding, something shifted — I was spending less time, and the community was running MyPragati. Young adults started coming up with their own initiatives: taking the kids to Darjeeling Zoo for the first time, organising cleanliness drives, entering and winning local competitions. The belief was the beginning of something bigger unfolding.

A space had opened up, almost on its own, where the community began coming together often — something I would not have envisaged when we started. We never know what more is possible until we get started.

Lesson 3: Empowerment isn’t always about finding a job. Sometimes it’s a blank page and giving the freedom to fly!

By Year 3, we started paying attention to things we couldn’t measure. We ran a drawing session with no real goal beyond letting the kids express themselves — our Pragati Yodhas stood behind them the whole time, encouraging them to dream in full colour.

Watching children who had rarely been asked what they imagined pick up a crayon and just go, I understood that dignity isn’t only about jobs and exam results. Sometimes it’s simply handing someone a blank page and telling them it’s theirs to fill.

I think when we support people who need help, we limit their growth by what we think they deserve. True empowerment is to allow them to fly - beyond what we can imagine. I have seen that come to life at MyPragati.

By Year 3, we had a classroom (designed in a way where I believed even my kids could study, and a community space designed to bring the community together)

Lesson 4: We didn’t measure until we were ready. The outcomes came because the intent was right.

I run a startup. I know exactly what it means to obsess over metrics from day one — it is sometimes hard to allow things to evolve because we are only measuring outcomes. I think, life like startups, will happen when we work on first principles, stay agile and allow things to flow. If we control the outcomes too much, we risk being limited. If we don’t measure, we risk being scattered.

MyPragati taught me that sometimes not measuring does not mean we are not thinking of the outcome. Sometimes some projects just take time, and we need to keep the patience. For the first couple of years, there was no dashboard, no target we were chasing. We were just showing up, listening, adjusting. However in Year four, when I finally sat down to count, the numbers were already there waiting: three of our youngsters hired at a startup in Bangalore, one now in my own team, two children moving into a better school in Darjeeling. I feel the time paid off for me. The results arrived because the reason underneath it never wavered.

Now for Year 5: I never wanted to scale this. However this year, we are.

I built MyPragati to stay small. One village, four years, deliberately un-ambitious — that was the whole point. Depth over reach. However I have realised this can become bigger. We will keep the Himalayan region our core focus. With this in mind, I reached out to founders who are today building in the mountains: OurGuest in Sikkim and Kashmir Box in Kashmir.

MyPragati is now expanding to include two projects: Arunachal Pradesh and Kashmir. Waste management in Arunachal and healthcare for artisans in Kashmir. I still don’t fully know what that means, or whether the same intimacy holds. But four years in, I have learned not to let my own attachment to “small” get in the way of what is clearly working. I believe I have a playbook and the trust of our supporters and donors to build this bigger. So why not? instead of asking why.

In my view, none of these lessons are really about one village. They apply to our entrepreneurship as well. They are about what happens when you stop overthinking and take one small step. Four years in, the path is still unravelling, one step at a time — and this year, for the first time, it’s stretching beyond one village.

If you’d like to be part of the next chapter, you can read more or support a child at mypragati.in.

Much love for a happy weekend. My warm regards and absolute gratitude to everyone who believes in my story and supports us.

Shanti

Over the years, I have come here for treks, for startup events, and to meet founders and ecosystem builders. Now with founders I have invested in, this space feels more familiar for me. Every visit also leaves me with a different memory. Sometimes it is he landscape, the absolute beautiful terrains, sometimes the conversations, and the reminder that places, much like people, are always evolving beneath the stories we choose to tell about them.

So when the invitation arrived for the Startup Summit, Mountains to Momentum, saying yes was easy. I had an excuse to meet founders I had invested in, and engage deeper with the ecosystem.

What surprised me, pleasantly, was the people who were at the event. Some of the most active venture funds in the country had travelled to Srinagar. Investors who spend their time evaluating opportunities across Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and increasingly international markets had chosen to spend two days here. That, in itself, felt meaningful. Capital rarely moves first. Curiosity does. Investors showing up is often the earliest sign that an ecosystem is beginning to enter the national conversation.

If you have spent time around emerging startup ecosystems, and Tier 2 India, you recognise a familiar energy almost immediately. Founders are hungry, not simply for funding but for conversation. They want someone to challenge their thinking, introduce them to customers, and just have deeper conversations around venture building. Equally encouraging was seeing government officials listening with genuine intent. In younger ecosystems, that willingness to listen often matters more than having all the answers.

The highlight was the small roundtable that had been organised with the Chief Minister. Everyone was given an opportunity to share inputs around what could help Kashmir move forward aggressively. With the CM taking notes, tt felt less like a formal meeting and more like a working session.

I found myself repeating something I have now said in several states across India.

If you want to build a startup ecosystem, activate investors and mentors first. We emphasise a lot of founders, but for complete ecosystems to mature, we need to ensure local support commits.

It is tempting to begin with incubators, accelerators, grants and infrastructure because those are visible and measurable. They make for good announcements. But the strongest startup ecosystems are built when the local businesses engage with the entrepreneurs. Local business owners understand regulations, challenges and the nuance of building. If we can educate and enable them, founders will have intelligence that does not need to be relearnt.

My observation of the last decade is that wvery successful ecosystem has an invisible layer that nobody notices while it is being built. It is the founder who makes an introduction without expecting anything in return. It is the angel investor who writes the first cheque and stays involved long enough to write the second. It is the entrepreneur who speaks openly about failure so that someone else can avoid making the same mistakes. None of these appear in policy documents, yet together they become the social capital on which every thriving ecosystem eventually rests.

That thought returned later in the day while I was moderating a panel with some of the country’s leading investors.

What struck me was not where the panel disagreed, but where they converged without even trying.

The conversation drifted across sectors, valuation cycles, talent, policy and capital, yet everyone kept returning to the same conclusion. Jammu and Kashmir is not short on ideas. The founders are solving meaningful problems. Consumer brands emerging from the region have stories that feel authentic rather than manufactured, built around provenance, craftsmanship and ingredients that cannot easily be replicated elsewhere. Nobody suggested that the diligence bar should somehow be lower because a company happened to be headquartered in Srinagar instead of Bangalore. Good businesses still need strong teams, disciplined execution and large enough markets. Geography does not change those fundamentals.

Bangalore did not become India’s startup capital because capital suddenly arrived one morning. It spent nearly two decades quietly building relationships that later became institutions. The first founders became mentors. The first exits became angel investors. Successful entrepreneurs backed the next generation, who in turn repeated the cycle. Over time, an ecosystem developed its own memory.

That memory cannot be imported. Every region has to create it for itself.

These moments rarely make headlines, but they are often the real foundations of an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

It also made me wonder whether every ecosystem should even try to copy Bangalore.

Perhaps the investment models that worked elsewhere may not survive the journey here unchanged. Perhaps this region needs patient capital that measures returns over longer cycles. Perhaps government has a greater role in sharing early risk, much like Singapore did while nurturing its innovation ecosystem decades ago. Every successful ecosystem eventually develops its own personality, shaped as much by its history and geography as by its founders.

Now, for the exciting part of the trip - I was invited to plant a tree. Maybe go back in 5 years and see the footprint we left.

We took a shikara across Dal Lake to Sona Lank, one of the two famous islands located in the iconic Dal Lake, Srinagar, renowned for its lush greenery, peaceful surroundings, and stunning views of the Zabarwan Mountains. Visiting the island by shikara is a truly memorable experience, offering a tranquil escape where the beauty of Kashmir can be appreciated in its purest form. Sona Lank perfectly reflects the natural charm and timeless heritage that make Dal Lake the “Jewel of Kashmir.”

The Son Lank (the Golden Island) is an artificial island in the Dal Lake. It was built by the Mughals, apparently to be one up on the Kashmiri King Zain-ul-Abidin, who had originally built the island. It is roughly 35m² and, in the mid-19th century, used to host a jail, the ruins of which might still be seen.

“In the middle of the Bod Dal (Large Dal), opposite to Hazratbal, Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin had built an island, Sona Lank, and a palace with three storeys on it, but it cracked in an earthquake. Then, the Mughal kings turned it into a pleasant scenery. [Afghan governor] Amir Khan made changes in it and caused the water to be drawn up the Chinar with the help of a water-wheel and built a fountain in the courtyard of the building. He spent his time enjoying it. Today the building is desolate.” (Hassan, mid-19th century).

We were there with Curve Electric, a Srinagar-based startup building electric mobility solutions for the region. On paper, the business sounds straightforward: electric bicycles, campus mobility and shared transport. In reality, what they are solving is a problem that only becomes obvious when you understand the city itself. Srinagar is a place of lakes, hills and narrow roads, and mobility looks very different here from how it does in Delhi or Bangalore.

The company has already crossed more than a hundred thousand rides, covered well over a million kilometres and prevented hundreds of tonnes of carbon emissions. It has appeared on Shark Tank, been featured by Forbes, and now works with organisations including IIT Bombay and Hyderabad Metro.

Great startups often begin by solving deeply local problems. They understand one geography so well that, almost by accident, they discover a solution that travels. We often assume that building globally means thinking globally from day one. More often than not, enduring companies begin by understanding one community exceptionally well. Definition of scale is to build for the smallest unit, and then build systems and process to replicate that unit.

Walking through the startup booths reinforced that feeling.

A ninth-grade student confidently explained a nanotechnology project with the ease of someone discussing yesterday’s homework. Founders were building businesses around sustainability, luxury apparel, food products and agricultural innovation. There were walnut-based consumer products, saffron businesses and, to my surprise, a walnut chai that I enjoyed far more than I expected to.

Innovation never arrives in one uniform.

Sometimes it wears the language of artificial intelligence and deep technology. Sometimes it wears the language of craftsmanship, agriculture or clean mobility. The common thread is not the sector. It is the willingness to ask whether something familiar can be done differently.

During his address, the Chief Minister made an observation that stayed with me long after the summit ended.

Mountains to Momentum can be understood in two very different ways.

You can see mountains as obstacles standing in the way of momentum.

Or you can see momentum as the force powerful enough to move mountains.

The phrase means something different depending on which side of the story you choose to stand.

As I thought about it later, I realised that Kashmir has always been shaped by mountains, but it has never been defined by them. For centuries, traders crossed these passes carrying ideas, crafts and commerce between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Geography influenced the journey, but it never determined the destination.

Startup ecosystems are not very different.

Every region inherits a different history. Every founder starts with different constraints. Some have access to capital. Others have access to talent. Some have policy support. Others rely almost entirely on community. Yet over time, the ecosystems that endure are rarely the ones with the fewest obstacles. They are the ones where enough people decide to build despite them.

I return from these visits with the same quiet conviction every single time.

The next generation is not waiting for permission to build differently. They are already changing how they work, what they choose to build, how they consume and how they imagine the future.

Kashmir is no exception.

It always leave me with the feeling that I want to share the story, the warmth and absolute beauty of a region, that has stood so conflicted over time. Hopefully the startup ecosystem will have the power to cross that mountain sooner.

Rooting for my founder friends in Kashmir. I hope as investors, you are inspired to be more open to them, and supporting them in their journey.

I recorded this conversation with Anand Chandrasekar back in 2021. Listening to it again, I realised how many of the ideas still hold true today.

Anand is one of India’s most active angel investors, with investments across 100+ startups. But what struck me wasn’t his portfolio. It was his philosophy of working with founders—one built on generosity, honesty, and long-term conviction.

For those who don’t have an hour to listen to the full episode, here are the ideas that stayed with me.

1. Bet on product founders

One of Anand’s earliest influences was Rajeev Motwani, the Stanford professor and early Google investor.

Rajeev believed that he would invest into technical and product founders first, as they can also learn how to build great businesses. But it is much harder to teach someone how to build a great product.

That philosophy has shaped Anand’s investing journey.

In 2014, when Anand moved back to India, very few startups even had Chief Product Officers. Yet he believed that product would become the ultimate differentiator. Looking back, that seems obvious. At the time, it wasn’t.

2. Great startups solve low-NPS problems

Anand refers to Keith Rabois’s framework:

The market may look solved to outsiders. The customers often disagree.

The best founders obsess over these frustrating experiences and rebuild them from scratch.

Rupeek is one example Anand talks about. Gold loans existed for decades. The customer experience, however, belonged to another era. A better product created a much larger market than anyone had imagined.

3. Be loyal to the problem, not the solution

This was my favourite takeaway.

Founders often fall in love with their technology or their expertise. Great founders stay loyal to the problem.

As Anand puts it:

“My loyalty is to the problem statement. Whatever is the most elegant solution to that problem is what I’m going to pursue.”

That mindset gives founders the freedom to pivot without losing conviction.

The mission stays the same. The path evolves.

4. Thinking in bets

One book Anand recommends is Thinking in Bets.

The lesson is simple: if you truly believe in a trend, go all in.

His conviction was that India was building products for the next 100 million internet users. Companies like Khatabook, DealShare and OneCode were all different expressions of the same underlying thesis.

Rather than spreading himself thin across dozens of unrelated ideas, he doubled down on a few convictions and allowed power laws to work over time.

5. Indian founders have become extraordinarily ambitious

Anand made an observation that has only become more true now in 2026.

Today’s founders have ambition bordering on insanity.

And that’s a good thing. The role of early investors is not to pour cold water on those ambitions. It is to focus and amplify them.

The quality of founders in India continues to improve, and with it, the quality of companies being built.

6. Founder NPS is the only brand that matters

This line deserves to be framed.

“You make money from your successes, but you make your reputation from the really scary moments.”

The moments when things are not working. When founders need help. When difficult decisions have to be made.

That’s when your brand gets built. Not on social media. Not through content.

But through the stories founders tell about you years later.

Anand calls it “Founder NPS” (for those who don’t understand, this is Net Promoter Score used by companies to understand customer feedback)

I think that’s one of the simplest and most powerful definitions of reputation in venture capital.

7. Respond to cold emails

One of Anand’s investments in NoBroker started with a cold LinkedIn message.

His philosophy comes from Silicon Valley, where experienced operators generously gave their time to young founders.

If Steve Jobs could respond to a student asking for advice, Anand believes the least he can do is spend 15 minutes giving honest product feedback.

The lesson is simple:

Respond to cold emails. You never know where the next great founder comes from.

I must add here that I have made multiple investments responding to cold emails. As an investor, when I read an email, I always give the benefit of doubt to the founder. The question that comes up is “what if this founder eventually builds a valuable business? Would I regret not having responded?”

8. India has stopped being afraid of failure

Anand shared a story from Anupam Mittal. (he is now one of India’s best names on the entrepreneurship ecosystem, with him being one of the most popular Sharks on India Shark Tank)

Around 2016–17, the most searched keyword on Shaadi.com became:

Entrepreneur.

Something fundamental had changed. Being a founder had become socially acceptable. Failure was no longer permanent.

That cultural shift may be one of the most important reasons why this decade belongs to Indian entrepreneurs.

Books Anand Recommends

A few books that have influenced his thinking:

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

• Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

• Mindset by Carol Dweck

• Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

The last one surprised me. Building companies is ultimately about navigating difficult conversations, stressful moments, and human relationships. Learning to communicate without creating conflict is an underrated founder skill.

People Worth Following

• Keith Rabois, especially his writing on fragmented markets, product-led businesses, and full-stack companies.

One Question To Leave You With

If you had to optimise for just one thing as an angel investor, what would it be?

Returns? Access? Brand? Or founder NPS?

My answer after listening to Anand is becoming increasingly clear.

If you want to listen to the episode, refer to the attached link.

Have fun.

Shanti

Dear Founder Self,

Keep the passion and the conviction when you start something of your own. That is the real differentiator - never feel like this needs validation, and is of lesser importance.

I had four founder calls this week, and by the end of them, I found myself struggling to remember which founder had said what. Different sectors, different cities, different products. Yet the conversations had a strangely familiar rhythm. The deck they presented was smooth, polished and complete. TAM looked very large - and surprisingly all decks had the same color coding and font.

A year ago, this would probably have impressed me. This week, it made me pause.

So I did something simple. I asked each founder the same question three different ways, partly out of curiosity and partly to test my own instinct. Two founders got better with every answer. The responses became more refined, more coherent and more polished each time.

The other two became slightly less polished. There were pauses. A few contradictions. One founder even changed her mind halfway through an answer and admitted that she was still figuring it out.

Oddly enough, I found myself trusting the latter more.

I have been thinking about those conversations ever since, because I suspect they capture something much larger about the moment we are living through.

When I started building LetsVenture in 2015, the very act of building a company meant something entirely different. We wrote product specs, hired engineers, waited through development cycles and spent months creating something that customers could finally engage with. We raised capital not merely to grow, but to buy ourselves time, because time was the one resource we never seemed to have enough of.

Founders beginning their journeys today inhabit a very different world. What took us months can now happen in weeks. Prototypes can be built over weekends. Customer feedback can be incorporated almost instantly. The barriers to experimentation have fallen in ways that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.

I do not say this with nostalgia. If these tools had existed when we started, I would have embraced them wholeheartedly. Most founders I know would have done exactly the same.

But as I watch this shift unfold, I find myself wondering whether we are beginning to confuse speed with conviction.

A few weeks back, Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel India had written something similar. He spoke about founders using AI to create beautifully polished pitch decks before they had fully worked through what they themselves believed. The phrase he used was “vibe-generating,” and it immediately resonated with me because it gave language to something I had already been observing.

The challenge is not that founders are using AI. The challenge arises when AI begins to write the story before the founder has lived enough of the journey to own that story.

After all, AI knows what a successful pitch generally looks like. It understands patterns. It can identify the language, the structure and the narratives that have worked before.

That answer still has to come from you.

Over the last year, I have written about the 5 Core C’s framework that shapes how I evaluate founders and companies. The complete framework is available on my Substack at The PitchRoom, but two of those dimensions feel especially relevant in an AI-first world: Clarity and Capability.

Clarity is not about eloquence. It is about understanding a problem so deeply that you can explain it simply and respond to difficult questions without hiding behind jargon or prepared narratives.

Capability is not about ambition alone. It is about demonstrating, through action, that you are already building, already learning and already earning the right to solve that problem.

Technology can help you communicate both of these more effectively. It cannot create them for you.

I often think about the months before LetsVenture became a company. For nearly nine months, there was nothing tangible to build. There were only conversations. Conversations with founders who struggled to access investors, and conversations with investors who struggled to discover opportunities they trusted.

Somewhere during those months, a single sentence became clear to me.

This was not a capital problem. It was an access problem.

Everything else followed from that conviction. The platform, the technology, the fundraising and the team all came later.

No tool could have compressed that journey because the work itself was deeply human. It required listening, observing and arriving at a belief that felt true enough to build an entire company around.

I increasingly see two kinds of founders in today’s world.

The Builder founder: There are developer-founders who possess both domain understanding and technical capability. For them, AI has changed the economics of building in extraordinary ways. They can move faster, experiment more freely and reach customers with remarkable efficiency.

The Domain Founder: Then there are domain experts who understand their customers intimately but still need teams to translate that understanding into products. AI helps them too, but not in the transformative way that headlines often suggest.

Neither approach is superior. They are simply different journeys.

Yet much of the current conversation around AI assumes that every founder is a developer armed with a laptop and a weekend project. Most founders I meet are not, and perhaps that is perfectly fine.

The deeper truth, at least from where I sit, is that the moat has always been people.

The founders I continue to believe in are rarely the ones with the most polished presentations or the most sophisticated technical stacks. They are the people who understand their customers with unusual depth, who adapt as technology changes around them, and who can explain with conviction why they are uniquely positioned to solve a particular problem.

Trust remains a human endeavour. Relationships remain a human endeavour.

The instinct that tells you something is not quite right in a room, long before the data confirms it, remains deeply human.

It cannot give you the conviction that customers will pay for what you are building. It cannot create the relationships that sustain a company over decades. It cannot write the one sentence that explains why your company deserves to exist.

That sentence still belongs entirely to you.

And so I find myself returning to those four founder calls.

The people I trusted most were not necessarily the ones with the perfect answers. They were the ones who paused, reflected and occasionally admitted that they were still learning. Perhaps that is what conviction looks like in practice. Not certainty, but ownership. Not polish, but depth.

The tools available to founders have changed dramatically.

So — what do you actually hand to AI?

I’ve been asking myself this all week, mostly because I keep meeting founders who are either afraid of AI or far too relaxed around it, and both postures miss the point. The question was never whether. It’s which parts. Here’s the honest breakdown, over coffee, if a founder asked me directly.

You can outsource:

• The first high-level research around your idea

• A quick prototype, built with the UI you actually want, fast enough to put in front of real users

• Getting that early user feedback

• Testing and optimizing, once you know what you’re testing for

You cannot outsource:

• Your own drive — why you, specifically, want to build this

• The conviction that your customer will actually pay you for this, and why

• The belief that this is the biggest problem worth solving, stated in your own words

• Interpersonal skills — the actual relationship with the people who need to trust you

• The instinct for knowing something is wrong in the room, before AI or any dashboard catches up to it

Or maybe I’m wrong about all of it. Social networking felt strange too, once. I remember people joining Snapchat mostly to test it out, half-amused that there was suddenly a place to talk to a dozen friends at the same time — nobody predicted what that would become. AI might open up behaviors in people that none of us have a name for yet. Time will tell.

More soon,

Shanti

Over the last decade, I have had the privilege of meeting thousands of founders.

Some were just getting started. Some went on to build remarkable companies. Most were somewhere in between, trying to solve a problem they cared deeply about and looking for the right partners to help them on that journey.

This section is for founders who would like to pitch their startup to me.

But before you do that, I would encourage you to spend some time exploring the rest of this substack. I write a lot, and this should help you understand me better.

Know my LVX Journey

Building LetsVenture (now LVX) has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. This is my second venture, having founded, raised funding, scaled and exited my earlier venture in the embedded systems space. I was heading engineering and wrote some of the protocol stacks - so yes, I understand hardware, firmware, embedded. (when deep tech was not the trend!) I have contributed. to an IEEE paper around standalone media terminal adapters, and enjoy discussing tech and product.

At LVX, like most startups, it did not begin with a grand plan. It began with curiosity, conversations and a problem that felt worth solving.

In the LVX Journey section, I write openly about building the platform, finding the problem, finding a co-founder, fundraising, making mistakes and learning along the way.

If you are a founder, I suspect many of those lessons will feel familiar.

Visit The Pitchroom

I also write regularly in The Pitchroom, where I share how investors evaluate startups, what makes founders stand out and how capital actually works.

Many founders spend weeks perfecting their pitch deck without fully understanding what investors are trying to assess.

The Pitchroom is my attempt to make that process a little more transparent.

One article I would strongly recommend is:

The Angel Investing Canvas

It is a simple framework that helps founders understand how investors think about opportunities. It may also help you build a stronger fundraising narrative and a better deck. As a founder, going into an investor meeting prepared almost always leads to deeper and more meaningful conversations.

What I look for in founders

People often ask about my investment thesis.

The truth is that I spend more time evaluating founders than evaluating sectors.

I am drawn to founders who have a deep understanding of the problem they are solving.

I like founders who are curious.

I like founders who are learning continuously.

I like founders who can balance ambition with humility. I like when conversations are authentic and genuine. I don’t like name dropping, and being shallow - its just a deal breaker for me.

Most importantly, I like founders who are building for customers rather than building for headlines.

A few things that catch my attention:

• Strong founder-market fit

• A problem that is real and meaningful

• Evidence that customers care

• Clarity of thought

• Ability to execute

• Long-term commitment to the problem

• Honesty in conversations

I care less about polished presentations and more about genuine insight.

My investing journey

I have personally invested in 61+ startups, primarily at the early stage.

Some of the companies I have backed include:

• Giva

• Jar

• Online RTI (10x exit)

• BotLabs

• BatX

• CureSkin

• Sensemei

• Kissan Konnect

• Cherry

• hBits

I am also an LP in a few venture funds.

Like every investor, I have had successes, mistakes and surprises. Investing has taught me that outcomes are often less predictable than they appear in hindsight.

What matters is finding founders who are resilient, thoughtful and committed to solving a real problem.

Beyond investing

Outside of startups and investing, a significant part of my time and personal capital goes into MyPragati, the non-profit initiative that is very close to my heart.

Working with communities through MyPragati has shaped how I think about impact, privilege and long-term change.

It has also reminded me that while businesses create value, not all value is measured in financial returns.

Before you pitch

Before you send me your deck, ask yourself three questions:

Why this problem?

Why now?

Why are you the right person to solve it?

If you have thoughtful answers to those questions, we already have a good starting point.

Pitch To Me

If you would like me to review your startup, share these details at startupai@lvxventures.com (make sure you put the subject as PitchRoom: <Startup Name>) - it will become easier for me to engage.

• A short note about what you are building

• The problem you are solving

• Your pitch deck

• Any traction or customer insights

I cannot promise I will invest. I cannot promise I will respond to every pitch.

But I do promise that I respect the courage it takes to build. And I genuinely enjoy meeting founders early in their journey. Some of the most interesting companies start as a simple conversation.

I look forward to hearing your story.

Have fun building.

Shanti

I was at the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women event last week. There were 350 women entrepreneurs who had gone through a rigorous three-month programme from IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Lucknow. These are among the top educational institutions anyone could want an initiation into startups. It is almost like being baptised by fire.

The entire event had amazing energy. Women building across different sectors, at different stages of their startup journey, all brought together by a common desire to create something meaningful.

The event, in some way, shifted something for me. I realised how overrated funding conversations have become.

Is capital the enabler or the goal?

Capital is important. It plays a critical role in helping businesses stay competitive, scale when the market is ready, and experiment to find the right fit. Do not get me wrong. I understand that well, and I have seen the impact of what we have built at LetsVenture.

What is probably misplaced is how overrated it has become.

I have always maintained that capital is an enabler to the goal and not the goal itself. It is true about money too. If money becomes an enabler and helps create wider impact, it can become one of the most powerful instruments available to us.

Sadly, the narrative we have all created is around who has raised, from whom they have raised and how much. It has become a barometer of success.

Sitting in that room, I also knew one truth. Many founders struggle when fundraising becomes the goal itself. What if we acknowledged that building a good business is more valuable than fundraising? What if customer love mattered more than investor interest? What if we spent as much time celebrating sustainable businesses as we did for funding announcements?

Having been in the space, I know that fundraising comes with its own nuanced challenges. Sometimes, after raising capital, founders find themselves building for investors rather than building for the market.

Giving space for Founder conversations

One thing I have learnt as both a founder and investor, is that the best gift you can give founders is respect and attention when they present their pitch. I have always maintained with my team, and in my conversations, that founders deserve support because they are the ones facing the challenges of building every day.

It is easy to give advice. It is easy to offer perspectives without understanding the nuance of building. That is also why operators often make better investors. They are able to empathise with the journey because they have lived it themselves.

My own journey at LetsVenture

When I founded LetsVenture, I had a meeting with the CEO of a large bank in Mumbai, who was part of an angel network. The meeting lasted twenty minutes. Fifteen of those minutes were spent with him explaining to me why building an online marketplace for fundraising was a bad idea. The discussion was patronising all along the way, with complete disregard to my past experience and my own homework done before I launched the platform.

I was amused more than anything else. Perhaps because I grew up learning that being kind is sometimes more important than being right. That respecting ambition matters. That each one of us is on our own journey in life.

That does not mean I do not give feedback to founders. I do. But I try to do it respectfully, while letting them know that I am available if they need a sounding board.

That meeting has stayed with me as a reminder not to judge outcomes of things we may not fully understand.

I need validation. Is that really important?

The other reflection I had at the event was around validation.

As women founders, we often speak openly about self-doubt, about wondering whether we belong in certain rooms, about constantly proving ourselves and seeking validation.

Yet after one event, a male founder came up to me and said something interesting.

“Everything you say women founders face, I face too.”

And perhaps he was right. Maybe validation is not a women founder challenge. Maybe it is a founder challenge.

Some founders seek it through fundraising. Some through visibility. Some through networking. Some through being constantly busy.

The forms may differ, but the need is often the same.

Am I doing enough? Am I succeeding? Am I falling behind?

I have been fortunate to have an inner circle that is kind, generous and genuinely supportive of the work I do. Over the years, I have learnt to rely more on that than on external validation.

You will realise soon that no one has all the answers. Looking for constant validation often feels like giving away control to someone who is not you.

An important reminder here is that this journey is about resilience. Real resilience is becoming self-aware enough to stop measuring your worth every few weeks against someone else’s journey. It is learning to stay anchored while the world rewards noise.

Perhaps that is also why I no longer romanticise networking the way the startup ecosystem often does. I genuinely do not believe every room is important. I do not believe every dinner matters. I do not think relationships built entirely around utility sustain for very long.

Relationships that endure are built on meaningful conversations, generosity and trust, not on building a rolodex. That is my personal point of view. This may not represent others, but do I need validation again? :)

As I sat in that room with 350 founders, I found myself thinking about something very simple. Ten years from now, very few people will remember who raised what round. Very few people will remember the valuation. What they will remember are the businesses that solved real problems, created value and stayed the course.

I really wish we talked about that more often.

I wish we talked more about the beauty of entrepreneurship itself. About learning, fighting, adapting and staying in the game. And if things do not work out, that is okay too.

Because in the end, it is truly about the journey. Always.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Shanti

Asset allocation, SIPs, retirement math, portfolio balancing — everything is structured. If you even google it once, you will be given multiple options on how to plan yur investments. There are platforms that then allow you to follow structured investments.

Startup investing is the opposite. The lack of visible formulas and structure makes it more alluring.

It is mostly reduced to one line:

“Invest what you can afford to lose.” I am guilty of this too. I would often over simplify startup investing to this: “Write the cheque, and write it off”.

Honestly, that is not a framework. That is a disclaimer.

Startup Investing: Neither a side bet nor your main bet

I have many friends who ask me a a version of this:

“How much should I allocate to startups?”

The answers are usually broad.

“10% of your net worth.”
“Only invest what you can afford to lose.”

Both are directionally right. Neither helps you act.

So I finally decided I would write a post to make this more concrete and understandable.

Case 1: You earn ₹2 crore a year

After taxes and lifestyle, most people will have:

• ₹50–60L as annual savings for investing

This becomes your investment pool. The real question is:

“How much risk do I want to take within this pool?” This is purely personal. I have seen people who work in startups allocate as much as 50% into startups. That is NOT the norm.

How do you deply your ₹50–60L as investable corpus?

This is where startup investing becomes meaningful, but not reckless.

How to deploy this ₹9–15L annually towards startups:

This is where most people get it wrong. They do 2–3 deals and stop. That is not a portfolio.

A more disciplined approach:

* 3–5 startups per year

* ₹2–3L per startup

* Over 4–5 years → 15–20 startups

Now the math starts to work. This is when outcomes start to look less random. The first few cheques can be smaller cheques, so you start to understand the process, and also trust your own judgement.

Case 2: You have ₹5 crore investment corpus

Now the question shifts.

From “how much to invest”
To “how to allocate without damaging what you have built”

This becomes your startup allocation pool.

How to deploy this startup allocation corpus

• Spread over 3–4 years

• 15–20 startups

• Keep 30–40% reserved for follow-ons

Example:

• Initial cheque: ₹3–5L

• Follow-on: double down on the top 20–30%

Where most people go wrong

They treat startup investing like experimentation.

“Let me try a couple of deals.”

That almost guarantees weak outcomes, because returns here are not linear. They come from a few outliers. That is the truth and the faster we understand this, the better investors we start to become.

A simple formula to remember

Startup Allocation = 10–15% of your investment pool
Portfolio Size = 15–25 startups
Time Horizon = 8–10 years

If one of these breaks, the model weakens.

Why this matters for founders

Founders often ask:

“Why did this investor pass?”

It is rarely just about the startup.

It is often about:

• how many similar bets they already have

• how much capital they have left

• whether they are pacing investments

• where this fits in their portfolio

In short, allocation as Howard Marks says,
“You cannot predict, but you can prepare.”

Allocation is preparation.

The shift that matters

If you are an investor, do not ask:

“Is this startup good?”

Ask:

“Does this fit into a portfolio?”

This is the layer beneath startup investing. And it is worth understanding — whether you are deploying capital or raising it.

If I had to give every new investor one page, this would be it

Call it a simple operating guide for startup investing:

In closing, just one rule to remember:

In startup investing, discipline compounds faster than returns

Hope this makes angel investing more understandable and quantifiable.

If you are a founder wondering why investors passed — re-read this. The answer is usually in their portfolio, not in your deck.

If there is one decision that will shape your journey more than almost anything else, it is this one—who you choose to build with.

Over time, I have come to realise that many startups do not fail because the market was not large enough or because capital was unavailable. A significant number of them struggle because of co-founder conflict. Not necessarily because something dramatic went wrong, but because alignment slowly breaks down. And when that happens, it is very difficult to recover.

When I started building, I knew one thing quite early. I did not want to do it alone. Not because I could not, but because I understood that I needed someone to think with, to challenge me, and to share the journey with. Building a company can get lonely, and having someone at the same level changes how you navigate that.

What I did not have was a clear plan for how to find that person.

Finding a co-founder without a plan

At that time, I was still validating the idea and meeting a wide range of people—investors, operators, anyone who was willing to spend time understanding what I was trying to build. Most of these conversations would end in a similar way, with someone asking how they could help. And almost every time, my answer was the same: I am looking for a co-founder.

I must have repeated this across dozens of conversations over several months. It was not a strategy as much as it was clarity. I knew what I needed, and I said it out loud consistently. That is eventually how I was introduced to my co-founder.

There is no perfect starting point

A lot of founders prefer to start with someone they already know well—a friend, a colleague, someone they are comfortable with. And that works in many cases. But I have also seen conflicts play out across all these patterns. Friends fall out, colleagues misalign, and even strong professional partnerships can struggle when the pressure of building sets in.

In many ways, a co-founder relationship is closer to a long-term partnership than a purely professional arrangement. Over time, both people evolve. Sometimes you grow in the same direction, and sometimes you do not. Those differences are not always visible in the beginning.

So what should you really look for?

The first thing is simple, but often underestimated. You should genuinely like the person. You will end up spending more time with your co-founder than with almost anyone else during the early years. If the relationship is purely functional, it becomes difficult to sustain over time.

During one of my conversations with Sanjiv Bhikchandani, Founder of Infoedge, he told me something that has stayed forever. This was around hiring and managing teams - व्यवहार पहले, व्यापार बाद में।

Attitude comes first. Then comes skill and business acumen.

Respect and complementarity

The second is respect. You have to believe that the other person brings something meaningful to the table—something you do not have. This is where complementarity becomes important. Good co-founders are not identical. They bring different strengths, think differently, and often approach problems from different angles. When that difference is understood and valued, it becomes a strength. When it is not, it becomes friction.

Alignment over time

Beyond this, there is a deeper layer that is harder to evaluate but equally important. Do both of you see the journey in a similar way? Are you aligned on what you are trying to build and how long you are willing to stay with it? Because over time, roles will evolve. One of you may take on the CEO role, which comes with more visibility. If there is underlying competitiveness or lack of clarity, it tends to surface at that stage.

The outcome may look similar from the outside. The experience of getting there is very different.

From the outside vs from within

When I look at this from an investor lens, the pattern is very clear. Over time, you begin to see how often outcomes are shaped not just by the idea, but by the people building it and how they work with each other. I wrote about this in detail in my earlier post, from an investor lens. Certainly worth revisiting.

But when you look at it from the founder’s side, it does not feel like a pattern. It feels personal. It is about conversations that do not happen, expectations that are not articulated, and small misalignments that grow over time.

In my own journey, I have been fortunate. Sanjay and I have stayed the course. But that has not happened by default. It has required effort, communication, and a willingness to work through differences when they arise.

If you are at this stage, it is worth taking the time to be deliberate about this decision. Be clear about what you need, say it out loud, and keep looking. And when you do find someone, spend time understanding not just how they think when things are going well, but how they respond when things are uncertain.

Because that is where the real test lies.

More soon,
Shanti

Resharing the Earlier post summary here

Finding the right startup idea is rarely a straight path. Most founders do not start with clarity—they arrive at it over time.

When I look back at how I started, it is quite different from the neat stories we tend to tell about companies. When I returned to India, I had no plans of starting up. I had already founded a startup, had worked at a large corporate and I was quite clear I wanted to work in the impact space. I wanted to do something meaningful, and that felt like the most direct path at the time.

But as often happens, what you set out to do and what you end up doing are not always the same thing. Destiny, luck and serendipity are real!

The first signal: a broken system

As I began spending time with nonprofits and trying to help them raise funds, I started noticing something that felt off. The process of fundraising itself felt broken. Not in a dramatic way, but in a very operational, everyday sense. It was inefficient, repetitive, and heavily dependent on individual conversations.

I found myself saying the same thing again and again to different people. The same story, the same context, the same explanation—just repeated across meetings. And I remember thinking: there has to be a better way to do this.

At that point, I was still thinking about this purely from the lens of nonprofits. I started reading more about fundraising models, and that is when I came across crowdfunding. It was still early in India, but globally there were some interesting developments.

During this time, I found Dan Marom, who had written extensively on crowdfunding and had just moved to Tel Aviv. I had cold reached out to him on LinkedIn, not expecting much. Dan had written two books on crowdfunding and the connect was fascinating.

But he responded.

We started speaking, initially out of mutual curiosity. He wanted to understand how crowdfunding might evolve in India, and I was trying to learn as much as I could from someone who had studied the space deeply.

Those conversations became important for another reason.

I realised something about myself early on—I did not have the discipline to sit alone with an idea and work on it in isolation for long periods of time. I needed conversation. I needed a sounding board. I needed some form of accountability.

So I did something quite simple.

I set up a weekly call with him.

It was a 30-minute call, once a week. Nothing elaborate. But I made a commitment that every week, I would show up with something to share—what I had read, who I had spoken to, what I had understood better.

In hindsight, that small structure made a big difference.

It is similar to what people say when you are trying to build any habit—whether it is getting fit or learning something new. You either find a partner, or you commit publicly, because it creates a certain discipline. You show up differently when you know you have to report progress to someone.

This was my version of that. Applied to startups.

Because of those calls, I started becoming more intentional about how I spent my time. I began putting together a loose plan. I started reaching out to people in the nonprofit ecosystem—organisations, donors, corporate CSR teams—trying to understand how fundraising actually worked from different sides.

And then, somewhere along the way, there was a small but important shift.

The shift from nonprofits to startups

A friend suggested, almost casually, “Why are you only looking at nonprofits? Why not look at startups as well?” It was a simple suggestion, but it stayed with me.

I had been a founder before. I understood that world more intuitively. So I decided to explore it.

Discovering the “real” problem

I started reaching out to founders. Not in a structured, highly planned way, but simply to have conversations. I must have spoken to around twenty founders in those early weeks. I would meet them, ask them questions, try to understand what was most difficult for them.

And almost everyone said the same thing : Capital.

If they had access to capital, they felt they could solve most of their other problems.

And more importantly, it was a gap I found myself wanting to understand better.

This entire process took time. It was not immediate clarity. It took me close to nine months of conversations, reading, and thinking before I felt confident that this was something I wanted to work on seriously. I was not in a hurry to startup.

But there was one signal that, in retrospect, mattered more than anything else.

It reminded me of something I have often heard people say—that they started a travel company because they loved to travel.

It is worth thinking about that early. But there is a nuance there.

What you enjoy at a small scale is not always what you will enjoy when it becomes work. When it involves process, repetition, and responsibility, the experience changes. Not everyone enjoys that version.

Because liking something occasionally is very different from committing to it fully. In my case, I was fortunate that the interest stayed.

And that is how it began. Not with a clear idea or a defined plan, but with a series of small observations, conversations, and shifts in direction.

So if you are expecting clarity at the beginning, you may be disappointed.

Most of the time, it looks like this instead—
a starting point,
a question that bothers you,
and a willingness to follow it a little longer than most people would.

More soon,
Shanti

Dear Founder Self,

Starting a startup looks easier today than it ever has. But building something that actually works is still hard.

In this note, I am sharing what I wish I had understood before becoming a founder—drawn from years of conversations with founders at different stages.

What has always struck me is that while there is no shortage of information available today, very little of it tells you what the journey actually feels like when you are in it. Most of it is either too polished or too prescriptive.

So I thought I would write a few things I wish I had known earlier—not as advice, but as a way to make sense of the journey from the inside.

I remember this phase very clearly.

Many people seek meaning through work, not just income, as explored in Man's Search for Meaning. This is one of my all time favorites.

Once wealth is created, we all at the core. crave for the meaning we can create. It usually begins with a certain restlessness. On paper, everything looks fine—your job, your team, the direction you are headed in. And yet, there is a part of you that keeps asking if you should be doing something of your own.

That question stays with you.

What has changed over time is the environment around that question.

Why more people are starting up today

Today, starting up feels far more accessible than it did earlier. You see people building everywhere. A friend has raised a round. Someone you follow has built a meaningful business with a very small team. Technology has reduced the friction to start, and in many ways, that is a good thing.

But it also creates a certain pressure. A feeling that you should be doing this too. That is not always a good enough reason.

The difference between starting and building

Because while it has become easier to start something, it has not become easier to build something that matters. The gap between a project and a company is still very real, even if it is less visible at the beginning.

Start with the problem, not the idea

So before you take that step, it is worth pausing for a bit longer than feels natural.

Not to overthink, but to understand what is actually pulling you towards this.

The first thing I would ask you to reflect on is the problem you want to work on.

Not the idea you have in mind, but the problem itself.

Understanding the problem: What is the person you are building for doing today, without your product? How are they solving it right now? And why has that solution continued to exist?

Most problems are not unsolved. They are simply being managed in ways that are “good enough.” That is what you are competing with.

If your product were to exist, would it change that behaviour meaningfully? Would it make something easier, faster, or more reliable in a way that they would notice—and come back to without being reminded? Would someone pay for it, without having to debate the benefits?

If that is not clear yet, it is possible that you are still at the stage of having an idea, not a problem. That distinction matters more than it seems.

Your personal connection to the problem

The second thing is more personal, and therefore a little harder to sit with.

Why do you want to work on this?

Not in a broad sense, but specifically—what is your connection to this problem? Have you experienced it, or spent enough time close to it to understand its nuances?

The founders who stay with a problem long enough to build something meaningful, usually have a certain closeness to it. It shows up in how they describe it, in the questions they ask, and in the patience they have when things do not work immediately.

If your answer is primarily that it is a large or growing market, it is worth pausing here.

Markets create opportunity, but they do not sustain effort.

Something more personal usually has to do that.

Will you still care in the long run?

The third thing is a question you can only partially answer now, but it is still worth attempting.

Will you still care about this nine months, nine years from today?

Because the experience of building will change. The initial excitement will settle. The conversations will reduce. There will be long stretches where progress feels slow, and moments where things you were certain about begin to feel less clear.

There will be a period where nothing seems to move. That part is rarely spoken about, but it is real.

And in that moment, what keeps you going is not excitement. It is a quieter kind of commitment to the problem itself.

If you feel that you will stay with it even then—not because it is working, but because it still feels worth solving—you are closer to being ready than most.

There is also something else that does not get discussed enough.

As a founder, you spend a lot of time in ambiguity. There will be phases where the data is incomplete, advice does not align, and the right answer is not obvious. Some people grow into this over time. Others find it draining.

It helps to know which one you are.

None of this is meant to make the decision harder. In some ways, starting has never been easier. The ecosystem is more supportive, the tools are better, and access to knowledge is far greater than before.

But staying with it is where the real work lies.

It will ask more of you than you expect—not just in effort, but in patience, resilience, and sometimes your sense of self. So the reason to begin has to be strong enough to carry you through that.

In the end, most founders do not start because the timing is perfect or the tools are available. They start because there is a problem they have come across that they cannot ignore anymore.

And they stay with it longer than most people would. That is usually enough.

More soon,
Shanti

As a founder, it was hard to find the right investor. By “right”, I meant someone who would understand what you were building, be empathetic to the journey, and say yes to investing. At the same time, as an investor it was equally challenging to meet the right founder. The discovery problem was real on both sides.

More than a decade later, the problem still exists. Over the years, as LetsVenture evolved into a platform enabling these handshakes, I realised something interesting.

Technology can solve many aspects of discovery, matching, and access. But it cannot easily solve for the human expectations and emotions on both sides of the table.

Over time I have noticed a few recurring patterns. These are not mistakes as much as interpretations — moments where founders and investors are looking at the same conversation but drawing very different conclusions.

The first misunderstanding often begins when founders feel that the investor is taking too long to decide.

When investors go quiet after a meeting, founders often assume the answer is no. As founders, we are so eager, we are trying to read body language, look beyond the words and see if we can detect a ‘friendly yes’.

In my experience, usually a NO is more immediate than a committed YES.

Early-stage investors rarely make the final decision in a single meeting. They may be comparing opportunities, thinking through the market, or discussing the company internally with friends and people they trust in investing. Occasionally they simply want to observe how the founder executes over the next few weeks.

As founders we are seeking momentum and silence can feel discouraging. But in many cases it could also mean the investor is still forming a view. Also, unlike a fund or an institution, an individual does not have pressure to deploy capital. They maybe busy at personal events, get caught at work or just might not be in a position to decide quickly.

The second misunderstanding appears when questions begin.

When investors ask many questions, founders sometimes interpret that as skepticism. In reality, thoughtful investors are often trying to understand how the founder thinks.

How the founder responds matters more. Two founders may give similar answers, but the clarity of thinking behind those answers can feel very different.

Early-stage investing is largely about evaluating how someone navigates uncertainty. Questions are often the only way to see that thinking process.

The third misunderstanding is assuming that a great presentation leads to the investment.

A VC once told me that one of the joys of investing is seeing how creatively founders tell their story. It is not necessarily about the format of the presentation. Today founders are fundraising in a very different environment. With a single prompt into an AI tool, investors can generate multiple observations about a pitch deck within minutes. The investors have all the tools to evaluate information.

Don’t get me wrong - a strong presentation certainly helps. It shows structure, answers questions ahead and shows clarity. But conviction rarely comes from the slides alone. Besides the AI tools, most investors have sat through extraordinary presentations made by some of the smartest people.

What matters more is what happens after the slides. How the founder explains the market without a script. How they respond when challenged. How deeply they understand the problem they are solving.

A great story can open the door. But conviction usually builds in the unscripted parts of the conversation.

The fourth — and perhaps the most important — misunderstanding is assuming all Investors are evaluating the same thing

There is so much information around fundraising checklists today that founders often assume investors are following a common checklist.

Each investor brings their own lens.

Some care deeply about founder resilience. Others focus on market size. Some are thinking about timing, while others are evaluating how the company fits into their portfolio.

This is why one investor may pass while another invests enthusiastically.

Understanding this can make fundraising feel less like judgment and more like alignment.

Lastly A “no” is often about timing, not belief

One of the hardest realities of early-stage investing is that investors say no even when they like the founder.

The company may be slightly too early. The market may still be forming. Or the investor may feel that they cannot add meaningful value at that stage.

Years later, many investors look back and realise that companies they passed on eventually succeeded. It is simply the nature of investing under uncertainty.

As founders, our job is to stay true to the problem we are solving, and ensure we show up to market feedback and customers. Before you start officially fundraising, take time to talk to people who might be potential investors to take feedback early and get perspective. This way, when you officially go fundraising, you are more aware, and better prepared. Over time I have realised that fundraising is rarely about convincing everyone in the room.

It is about finding the few people who see the problem in the same way you do.

The rest of the meetings, the questions, the delays and even the rejections are simply part of that search.

Enjoy this sketch - hope it encapsulates all I have tried to convey :)

This is a short case study on why I invested in Zwende. Very relevant to The PitchRoom series.

Early-stage investing is often described as pattern recognition. But in reality, it is closer to pattern imagination. Investors do not see what exists today. They try to imagine what the world might look like if a particular founder is right. What Steve Jobs said about being able to connect the dots looking back hold true in angel investing

Zwende was one such bet for me.

I first invested in the company around 2020, when the thesis was still forming and the category itself was not clearly defined. At that time, the idea sounded almost simple: help independent creators and artisans sell personalized products online. But beneath that simplicity was a deeper question about the future of commerce itself.

Would consumers continue buying standardized, mass-produced goods? Or would they increasingly seek products that reflected identity, individuality, and personal stories?

Zwende was built around the belief that the second future was already emerging.

Five years later, the company offers an interesting lens into how that thesis has evolved.

The Insight Behind Zwende

2020. This was about 2 years after the biggest acquisition in e-commerce globally by Walmart of Flipkart. Meesho had started to establish the social commerce narrative. When we think about commerce in India (e-commerce or social commerce), we often focus on scale — large marketplaces, logistics networks, standardized supply chains. Yet parallel to that system, there has always existed another economy, far more fragmented but equally powerful: the maker economy.

Across India, millions of artists, artisans, hobbyists and independent creators produce objects that are deeply personal — handcrafted lamps, embroidered textiles, painted home décor, personalized gifts, and dozens of other forms of creative expression.

The problem has never been creativity. The problem has been distribution.

Very similar to what we saw in FarmDidi.

Most creators sell through informal channels: Instagram pages, weekend flea markets, WhatsApp groups, or word-of-mouth communities. These channels work, but they do not scale easily. Discovery remains difficult, trust is fragmented, and creators spend a surprising amount of time managing tasks that have little to do with their craft — photography, marketing, logistics, payments, and customer support.

Zwende began with a simple premise:

What if technology could unlock the creative economy in the same way that Shopify unlocked independent brands or Etsy unlocked global craft sellers?

From Marketplace to “Makerplace”

In its early days, Zwende looked like a specialized marketplace for handcrafted and personalized products. But over time the founders realised that the opportunity was larger than simply listing products online.

The company began evolving toward what it now describes as a “makerplace.”

Instead of a traditional marketplace where sellers merely upload catalogues, Zwende enables creators to:

• sell products

• teach workshops

• build communities

• showcase their craft

This combination of commerce, learning and storytelling changes the relationship between buyer and creator.

A customer purchasing a handcrafted lamp or nameplate is not simply buying a product. They are buying a story — about the maker, the craft, and the cultural tradition behind it.

That emotional layer is what the company refers to as “emotion-commerce.”

The Long Tail of Creative Demand

One of the insights that attracted me to the company early on was the long-tail nature of creative demand.

Mass retail works well when millions of customers want the same product. Creative commerce behaves differently. Each buyer may want something slightly unique — a customized nameplate, a personalized gift, a handmade decorative item that reflects their personality.

Platforms built for scale often struggle with this long tail.

But technology, particularly personalization engines and modular product design, can unlock it.

Zwende built systems that allow customers to customize products in real time while enabling creators to manufacture on demand. Instead of holding inventory, the platform operates largely through virtual SKUs, allowing an enormous catalog of possible designs without the burden of traditional stock.

Today, the platform supports:

• 20 billion+ possible SKUs

• 10,000 new SKUs created daily

• 800+ brands and creators

• 8000+ artisans on the platform

Five Years of Progress

Looking back at the original investment thesis in 2020 and comparing it to the company’s trajectory today reveals something interesting: the core idea has remained remarkably consistent, even though the execution has evolved.

In 2020, the company was still experimenting with workshops, customization tools, and creator discovery models. Today, revenue has grown to 5x with strong improvements in unit economics.

The platform has also built a sizeable community that reduces dependence on paid acquisition. Zwende’s organic ecosystem now includes:

• 500,000 community members

• 353,000 Instagram followers

• 200,000 WhatsApp subscribers

• 275,000 email subscribers

Around 30% of revenue is driven organically through this community, which is a meaningful advantage in a world where customer acquisition costs continue to rise.

My 5Cs Framework

When I look back at the original decision to invest, it is helpful to revisit it through the framework I often use when evaluating early-stage startups.

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

I met the founders, Sujay and Innu, via a referral from a friend. As investors referrals are the strongest endorsement for founders. If you are a founder, there is a lesson to learn from the Zwende founders – they research, find the investors they think would be relevant and then relentlessly chase for a warm introduction. If you want to get your early investors. referrals work like magic.

On the business side, the team demonstrated early clarity about the structural problem they wanted to solve. They recognised that the challenge for creators was not lack of talent or even lack of demand. The real constraint was infrastructure — the systems required to turn creative output into scalable businesses. This infrastructure would be the key to build distribution.

That clarity shaped the platform’s model: creators focus on making, while Zwende provides the surrounding services that enable commerce.

C2: Category — Market and Timing

Creative commerce has quietly become one of the most interesting segments of the global internet economy. Platforms like Etsy, Shopify and Patreon have demonstrated that independent creators can build meaningful businesses when the right infrastructure exists.

Estimates today suggest that the global creative commerce market exceeds $110 billion, while the Indian opportunity alone could reach $30 billion as personalization and premium gifting become mainstream.

Zwende sits at the intersection of these trends.

C3: Capability — Technology and Operations

What differentiates the company from a simple marketplace is the technology layer behind supply creation.

The platform uses data and AI to identify emerging consumer demand, curate creator supply, and expand product categories. This allows the catalog to evolve continuously while remaining differentiated.

Equally important is the operational infrastructure that supports creators — enabling them to handle logistics, pricing, customization and customer experience without needing enterprise-level capabilities themselves.

Watching the founders build Zwende over the last 5 years has been a huge learning for me too. Innu as a founder is hands-on, operationally focused and ensures every data point is monitored and managed. For any business to build a predictable outcome, data in today’s world lies at the core. As a founder, if you have blind spots to the levers that can impact your business, the business is bound to surprise you when external factors change.

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

In creative marketplaces, the moat is rarely technology alone. It is built through community, supply relationships and brand trust.

Zwende’s defensibility emerges from several reinforcing layers:

• a growing community of creators and buyers

• a vast catalog of unique designs

• strong storytelling around creators and crafts

• customer feedback loops that refine supply

Together these elements create network effects that are difficult for competitors to replicate quickly.

I understand this deeply as I have designed and built LetsVenture as a marketplace. The moat is most often time, and capital cannot fast track the path.

C5: Conviction — My Personal Thesis

For me, the appeal of Zwende lies in the convergence of several long-term shifts.

Consumers increasingly want products that feel personal rather than generic.

Creators increasingly want independence rather than employment.

And technology increasingly allows small producers to operate at a scale that was once available only to large companies.

Platforms that connect these forces have the potential to reshape how entire categories of commerce operate.

Zwende is still early in that journey, but the direction is promising. Time and trust will become the moat that cannot be replicated.

Going forward

As the company continues to grow, several factors will determine its long-term trajectory. The first is category expansion. Creative commerce is inherently fragmented, and new product segments can unlock significant growth.

The second is creator success. Platforms become durable when the creators on them build meaningful livelihoods.

And the third is community-driven discovery. If Zwende continues strengthening its organic ecosystem, it can maintain efficient customer acquisition even as the market becomes more competitive.

Taking a page from Quick commerce models, the monetisation to allow creators to get discovered has not yet seen relevance in creator platforms. Almost think of this like a personalised Amazon where you can discover, engage, learn and transact with creators.

A Closing Thought

Startups are often described as technology companies, but sometimes the most interesting innovations are social rather than technical.

Zwende is not simply building a marketplace. It is experimenting with a new way of organising creative labour — where thousands of independent makers can collectively serve a national market while retaining their individuality. The impact that has been created is mind boggling in terms of numbers. Revenues for individual creators have gone up from 10-15x. Imagine – in a country like India that thrives on creativity, personalisation and the absolute depth of history and culture.

If that system continues to evolve successfully, it could quietly redefine how creative businesses scale in India. And that was the possibility we believed in when we first invested.

PS: This article reflects my personal perspective as an investor and is not investment advice. Every investment decision should be made independently based on one’s own analysis and risk appetite.

I first met Manjari during the curation process for LetsIgnite, our annual investor conclave at LetsVenture where a handful of startups pitch to a room of active angel investors. Some founders stand out because of traction, some because of storytelling. Manjari stood out for something far simpler — clarity about the problem she wanted to solve.

That conversation eventually led to SamVed investing in FarmDidi.

Before going deeper, it helps to understand the core idea behind FarmDidi.

The company sources, manufactures and distributes what it describes as “home-made pickles at scale.” I deliberately put those two words — home-made and scale — together because they rarely sit comfortably in the same sentence.

When we think of homemade food businesses in India, we often imagine small neighbourhood networks, informal distribution and boutique production. Those businesses are important because they create micro-entrepreneurs. But as investors we also look for the possibility of scale, where a model can expand beyond small communities and become a large, durable business.

FarmDidi is attempting to bridge exactly that gap.

The story behind Farmdidi

I met Manjari in Pune again, when we were doing the due diligence for the investment. What struck me was the clarity and purpose in her conversation. The origin of FarmDidi goes back to Manjari’s time at IIM Calcutta, where she worked on a development project in Bihar. That experience exposed her to a structural shift that is slowly reshaping rural India

The feminisation of agriculture, women’s loyalty in elections, and male migration pushing women into new economic roles.

She began by offering micro-loans but ran into the problem, “loan to mil jata hai, marketing nahin milti” (Credit may be available. Markets are not)

That insight became the foundation for FarmDidi.

Why Pickle?

FarmDidi emerged at the intersection of two observations.

First, millions of women across Self Help Groups already possess the capability to produce food products with remarkable consistency.

Second, the missing layer in that ecosystem is not production but distribution and brand aggregation.

The founders chose pickles as the first category almost accidentally. After the pandemic, when they experimented with selling products in Pune’s weekly markets, mixed flour saw limited repeat demand while pickles consistently sold out.

That behaviour revealed something important: pickles were not just a product category; they were a daily consumption habit deeply embedded in Indian households.

How big can this market be?

At first glance the pickle market appears small and fragmented, but that assumption disappears quickly once one begins to look at the underlying production ecosystem.

Across rural India, Self Help Groups already produce a wide range of food products. Most of these products never travel beyond the village or weekly market: lack of a brand and access to organised distribution beyond local networks.

What FarmDidi is attempting to solve for exactly this.

The closest historical parallel is Lijjat Papad, which demonstrated decades ago that decentralised production could scale if supported by a strong central brand. The difference today is that digital commerce, logistics infrastructure and direct-to-consumer distribution create the possibility of compressing that journey into a much shorter time frame.

Besides the scale, the impact was visible. We met a few Didis - and it goes back to my first post around women and financial independence. The respect and the recognition they receive from their family, their in-laws and their village is what blends purpose with value and wealth creation.

Besides, pickles were always homemade, but the current breed of consumers and the next generation of women don’t have time to home make it. There is a clear market opportunity for clean labels and an authentic brand in this space.

Problem or Opportunity?

As investors, we often differentiate between businesses that solve a problem and those that unlock an opportunity.

A problem-led business addresses something customers urgently need fixed. An opportunity-led business identifies a structural gap and builds a system around it before others recognise its potential.

FarmDidi sits closer to the second category.

The opportunity lies in the 90 million women connected through Self Help Groups in India, many of whom are gradually moving toward micro-enterprises as agriculture alone becomes economically insufficient. Access to small loans has improved, government schemes provide some support and production capability already exists. What is missing is an organised layer that connects these producers to markets.

FarmDidi attempts to build exactly that layer.

The story of Manisha Didi

One of the Didis we met was Manisha, who leads a Self Help Group called Shivai Bachat Ghat in Shivri village. Over time, her home has gradually become both a workplace and a storage point for raw materials, with containers of mango chunda, avakaya and karela pickle neatly stacked and labelled with manufacturing dates. She works roughly from late morning until early evening and now earns close to ₹25,000 a month, a meaningful shift in income for her household.

But the economic impact is only one part of the story.

During the conversations, her husband remarked that the village now casually refers to the area as “Manisha’s village,” a small but powerful signal of how participation in economic activity slowly changes social standing within rural communities.

The Business Model Behind It

Operationally, FarmDidi works through what the team describes as an Input–Transformation–Output model, which connects decentralised village production with centralised quality control and distribution.

Demand forecasting happens at the company level, after which purchase orders are issued to Self Help Groups. Production itself takes place inside village kitchens but follows tightly defined Standard Operating Procedures so that batches produced across different locations remain consistent in flavour and quality. Once prepared, the pickles are collected in large containers and transported to a central warehouse, where samples are tested before the products are packaged and sent out through the distribution network.

What emerges is a hybrid system: village-level food preparation combined with structured industrial quality control. Profits also directly go back to the Didis.

The operational complexity is significant, but if executed well, it creates something difficult to replicate — a distributed manufacturing network built on thousands of small kitchens.

My 5Cs Framework

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

What stands out most in FarmDidi’s origin story is how clearly the founders understood the structural gap in the ecosystem.

The founders realised that rural India does not lack productive capacity. Women across Self Help Groups have been producing food items for decades. The real gap lies in aggregation, standardisation and brand creation.

C2: Category — Market and Timing

The pickle category may look simple, but it sits at the intersection of culture, regional taste and daily consumption.

What makes the market particularly complex is the extraordinary variation in regional taste preferences. The oil used in pickles alone varies dramatically across India — mustard oil in the north, groundnut or sesame oil in parts of the south, coconut oil in Kerala and sunflower or soybean oil in Maharashtra.

Because of this diversity, a single “national pickle product” rarely works. FarmDidi’s response has been to design multiple regional variants so that customers encounter flavours that feel familiar rather than generic.

Mother’s recipe, a well known brand is one among the largest exporters of pickle. The opportunity to build localisation and go global is open today.

C3: Capability — Systems and Operations

Scaling decentralised food production requires strong operational discipline, and FarmDidi has begun building systems that support this structure.

The company uses technology to centralise data, while also running its own onboarding application called the Didi Business app, through which Self Help Groups register, submit information and eventually receive purchase orders.

New groups are trained, and production volumes initially start small until quality consistency is demonstrated. Over time, those partners receive larger orders.

What is emerging is less a traditional food factory and more a coordinated network of micro-manufacturing units.

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

In many consumer brands the moat eventually becomes marketing spend or retail distribution.

FarmDidi’s moat, if it develops successfully, may lie somewhere else entirely.

The company worked with around 14 Self Help Groups comprising roughly 140 women producers, but the ambition was to scale that network significantly over time.

If the company can build trust, training systems and operational discipline across hundreds or thousands of such groups, it will create a supply network that is not easily replicated by competitors who are used to factory-based production models.

C5: Conviction — My Personal Thesis

Businesses like FarmDidi sit at an interesting intersection of multiple long-term trends.

Rural women are increasingly entering the workforce as male migration shifts economic responsibility within households. At the same time, urban consumers are showing growing interest in products perceived as authentic, regional and homemade. Meanwhile, digital commerce platforms allow niche food brands to reach customers far beyond their original geography.

FarmDidi touches all three of these shifts.

For me, the ability to create impact, support women entrepreneurs and building a global brand from India is very appealing. Besides, Manjari demonstrates a rare will to persevere, deep understanding of the space and the ability to listen to feedback as she leads Farmdidi.

Yet the operational challenges remain significant.

For example, after the company’s appearance on Shark Tank, demand for one particular product — mango chunda — spiked rapidly. Production scaled in response, but demand later softened, leaving nearly four tonnes of inventory sitting unsold, a reminder of how fragile supply chains can be when production is decentralised and demand forecasting is still evolving.

How this has scaled

Since we invested a year back, the company has grown from 14 SHG to 30 SHG, with impact growing from 140 to 400 women livelihoods.

(2) On market dynamics of pickle - we can add that pickles were always homemade, but next generation of women today don’t have time to make it and yet looking for clean label and authentic food for family, which makes the timing also correct to build Pickles category

Looking ahead, the trajectory of FarmDidi will depend on a few important developments.

The first is distribution expansion. The company has begun exploring quick commerce platforms such as Zepto and Instamart, which could introduce the products to a much wider urban consumer base. They are today #1 on Amazon US in the pickle category.

The second is product expansion. The founders envision a roadmap that moves beyond pickles into premixes, spice blends and eventually condiments and snacks, effectively transforming the brand into a broader Indian pantry platform.

And finally there is the scale of the production network itself. The long-term vision of empowering one million rural women producers is ambitious, but if even part of that network materialises, the economic and social implications would be substantial.

A Closing Thought

When we talk about startups, the conversation often revolves around technology breakthroughs or venture-scale markets.

But sometimes the most interesting innovations are organisational rather than technological.

FarmDidi is experimenting with a different way of building supply chains — one in which thousands of small kitchens become production units and rural women become micro-entrepreneurs connected through a common brand.

Scaling this system will require patience, discipline and careful operational design. But if it succeeds, it will quietly reshape how distributed manufacturing can work in India.

I hope you enjoyed reading and learning on how as an investor, there are many ways to evaluate startups.

PS: This is not investment advice. Your decision to invest should be made independently, based on your own thesis and analysis. This series is a learning tool — using real pitch room experience to help all of us think better about early stage investing. Also all opinions are mine, and not influenced by the founders.

Today I will share about Craste - I was the only tycoon who committed at Bharat Ke Super Founders. Watch the video there.

Honestly, there is a particular kind of frustration I have carried for a while now as an investor. You sit across a founder. The technology is real. The credentials are serious. The problem they are solving is not small — it touches climate, construction, the future of how we build things. BUT it is probably a bit early to show traction. Ask any founder their fundraising challenges and you will know what I am saying.

While I was listening to Craste on BKSF, somewhere in the back of my mind, a quiet thought was forming when I saw Himansha and Shubham pitch on stage:

”If this team was sitting in a room in San Francisco right now, this round would probably already be closed”. This is not an attempt to draw comparisons among investors in India. Having met so many founders who are brilliant but have not aced the funding mechanics, I am convinced that investing will continue to be risky and tough. Our deep tech investing space is growing, and getting mature. But it is still difficult to close funding. But who said contrarian ideas ever found easy consensus? I might still be wrong. Only time will tell.

What Craste Is Building

India's construction and interior industry runs on boards — plywood, MDF, particle board. Most of it is wood-based, formaldehyde-heavy, and environmentally costly. The industry knows this. It has known this for years. But alternatives have been expensive, unproven, or too early.

Craste is building NAF-grade boards — No Added Formaldehyde — that are tree-free and zero emissions. Not as a premium niche but as a scalable, manufacturable product that can replace conventional boards in the mainstream market. The product they demoed to us was not a concept. The product existed and samples had been shipped. It was obvious that with the right messaging the market would find it. And we were on stage on Bharat Ke Super Founders!

What I Saw Inside the Room

The ask was 6 crore at a 100 crore valuation. We finally agreed to 1cr at 50cr. The only reason - I was thinking that we would have some progress before we raise a larger round together.
I had just written an entire post on how to evaluate deep tech — the TRL framework, the three lenses, the question of whether a founder can cross the deep tech chasm from scientist to builder to commercial operator. If you haven't read it, I'd suggest going back to that post before reading further. Because Craste is almost a case study for everything I described there. (Attached link here)

At the time of the pitch, Craste was at TRL 7. To reiterate— that means the technology has been demonstrated, and is now ready to be at commercial space, ready to scale. It is beyond proof of concept, and beyond commercial experiments - a gap where most deep tech companies struggle.

What the founders, Himansha and her brother Shubham showed us was not just a product. It was a team who understood technology deeply, spoke about manufacturing with clarity, and had already started winning in a market that is notoriously difficult to crack.

The Problem that struck a chord

In winter, India talks endlessly about air pollution, especially in Delhi where crop burning worsens the crisis. What I heard during the pitch was probably a solution.

Craste manufactures the high-performance boards using agricultural crop residue — material that would otherwise be burned in fields, contributing to the severe air pollution every year. By converting this waste into durable engineered boards, the company was not only creating a high-value material, but also turning crop waste into a viable industrial raw material — one that could increase farmer income while reducing dependence on timber.

Yet none of this impact was priced into the product.

For the first time in India, crop waste was being transformed into a high-quality, high-value industrial material capable of competing with timber itself. There was no premium pricing for being tree-free, for being zero-formaldehyde. No premium for using waste instead of wood. It seemed “India-ready”.

The narrative was beyond being a sustainability story, to the beginning of a healthier, cleaner and priced-in materials industry for India.

On Bharat Ke Super Founders, it was clear this wasn’t just another startup moment. It felt like the early signal of a material transition India has been waiting for.

My 5Cs — Mapped

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

Himansha and Shubham are founders who have worked at the core of the problem — the chemistry, the manufacturing, and the realities of bringing a new industrial material to market.

Both are scientists trained at leading global universities like Cambridge and ICL, who chose to return to India to solve a scientific challenge, not just build a business. Inside the pitch room, clarity under pressure is the signal I watch most. As a team they had it. When questioned, they did not deflect. The team went deeper.

C2: Category — Market and Timing

India's construction and interiors industry is one of the largest in the world. The shift away from formaldehyde-based, wood-heavy materials is not a preference — it is a regulatory and environmental inevitability. The question was never *if* this market moves. The question was *who* would be positioned when it does.

Craste is building the category before the mandate arrives. That is the right time to invest. I also know of similar businesses who are at a 400cr revenue, building in the sustainability space.

C3: Capability — Technology Readiness

This is where deep tech evaluation diverges from everything else. One doesn’t just ask about customers. But rather you estimate *where does the technology sit on the TRL scale?*

At the time of the pitch, Craste was at TRL 7. A stage where patient angel capital could potentially create disproportionate value.

They had received grants from DST (that is a superb validation for me), and had been part of Tech Stars cohort.

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

Proprietary chemistry is hard to copy. NAF-grade, tree-free board formulation built over years of R&D is not something a well-funded competitor can replicate in a product cycle.

The moat here is not brand or distribution — it is the science itself.

C5: Conviction — Personal Thesis

Tech and sustainability are not competing priorities. They are the same direction.

Himansha is a woman founder building deep tech in India. That combination is rare. It is also, in my experience, systematically undervalued. Not because the work is weaker — but because the ecosystem around it is thinner. Less patient capital. Fewer champions. Slower pilots.

With a founder who has clarity and a product the market is already moving toward — it was a clear decision for me.

What Happened After the Show

Craste has won multiple awards post the show. They have progressed beyond TRL 7 to the next category of TRL 8-9. They have also signed the biggest distributor in South India, Navdurga — someone currently working directly with Century and Greenlam — who has already moved 20 tonnes. When someone with those relationships chooses the brand, the moat is showing itself in the market.

Craste has also received international recognition through platforms such as the Seoul Design Award and the Make It Circular Challenge in Amsterdam.

More recently, its material was featured in the Parsons Healthy Materials Lab at the New School in New York, one of the world’s leading platforms evaluating healthy building materials — a strong validation of its commitment to non-toxic construction materials.

What To Track

As with any deep tech investment at this stage, the work is not done at the cheque. What I will be watching:

Certification adoption — and whether NAF-grade becomes a buying criterion at scale. Manufacturing cost curve — can unit economics improve as volume grows? Strategic partnerships — the conversations with potential customers are signals, not outcomes yet. And regional expansion — how efficiently can they move beyond Bangalore?

A Closing Thought

I want to clarify. I did not invest in Craste because it was a good story or it was led by a woman. If I am not convinced, I would have become a mentor and waited to see the progress.
I invested because the technology felt real, the founders committed, and O believed India was ready and more environmental friendly that we like to believe. The new generation is already very sustainability conscious.

I wish to see Craste build into a successful business, at the intersection of technology, sustainability and scale.

PS: This is not investment advice. Your decision to invest should be made independently, based on your own thesis and analysis. This series is a learning tool — using real pitch room experience to help all of us think better about early stage investing. Also all opinions are mine, and not influenced by the founders.