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

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

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.

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 :)

My earliest lessons about money came quietly.

They were not lessons about markets or returns or compounding. They came from watching my parents at home and their relationship to money. I grew up in a modest, yet modern outlook family, in Jamshedpur. In our home, money was never discussed in dramatic ways. There were no conversations about wealth or ambition.

Instead, the words that floated around the dining table were different. Provident fund. Fixed deposits. Insurance policies. Planning.

Even as children, we sensed what money meant in our home. It meant stability. It meant that tomorrow had been thought about. It meant that there was a structure holding things together.

But the real lesson came later.

When my father passed away, my mother was still in her mid-fifties. Until then she had been a homemaker. After he passed away, alongside grief came something else — the need to step into decisions that had once felt distant. My mother could easily have chosen the safest path. She could have relied entirely on fixed deposits and existing savings. No one would have questioned that decision.

Instead, she chose to learn. Slowly, patiently, she began to understand the world of finance. Over time she did something remarkable. She did not just learn finance — she began participating in it. She went on to become a stockbroker. One of the most insightful ones I have known. What started as 7 Lakhs grew to 50 lakhs in 20 years. Watching her transformation taught me something powerful:

Reinvention is always possible, even later in life. Understanding money can change how we see ourselves.

Money, for my mother, became more than something to preserve carefully. It became something she could interpret, question and engage with. I saw her sit across from people who initially underestimated her and slowly command the room through clarity and depth.

Her understanding of money strengthened her confidence.

That stayed with me.

Over the years, I began noticing how women think about money in different ways, often shaped by the lives they have lived. For many women, money represents security. Their goal is not to build wealth but to ensure that the family is protected. Saving carefully is seen as wisdom. Avoiding risk is seen as responsibility.

These women are, in many ways, the silent financial managers of their homes. Yet their financial intelligence is rarely recognised as such.

And then there is a second shift that is slowly emerging.

Among younger working women today, money increasingly represents something else — independence.

For many women in their twenties and thirties, earning money means having choices that earlier generations often did not. It means the ability to support parents, to invest, to build careers, to start companies, or sometimes simply to walk away from situations that are not right.

This shift is still incomplete. The number of women in the workforce in India is still lower than it should be. But the mindset is changing.

Younger women talk openly about investing. They follow markets, use financial apps, and discuss financial independence in ways that were rare even a decade ago.

What fascinates me is how much of this relationship with money begins in childhood. Children absorb the emotional atmosphere around money long before they understand numbers. If money is associated with stability, they grow up feeling secure enough to take risks. If money is associated with anxiety or scarcity, caution often becomes deeply ingrained.

When I think about this, I return to my mother.

Her journey showed me that our relationship with money is not fixed. It can evolve. It can expand. For too long, many women have been taught to treat money with distance. To see it as complicated. Or worse, to see it as something slightly uncomfortable, even morally questionable.

But money itself is neither good nor bad. It is simply a tool. A powerful tool.

This day, maybe the real message of Women’s Day is not just about celebration. It is about resolution.

A quiet commitment that we, as women, will begin to see money differently. That we will treat it with respect. That we will learn about it, talk about it openly, and feel comfortable engaging with it.

Because when women understand money, they do not just change their own lives. They change the possibilities for the generations that follow.

Happy Women’s Day. 🌸

Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

It is a line that feels increasingly true the longer you build. I have lived this in my startup journey. Hindsight has a way of creating coherence. It smooths uncertainty and makes decisions appear more linear than they ever felt at the time.

But when you are actually in the middle of building—or investing—you do not have joined dots. You have a choice. Often, an uncomfortable one.

As investors, decisions are made with incomplete information, limited time, and personal context that rarely makes it into headlines or pitch decks. There is pressure. There is responsibility. There is also fear—of missing out, of getting it wrong, of disappointing people who are counting on you.

This is why I have become cautious about judging decisions purely by outcomes.

Over time, I have found it helpful to separate three things that often get collapsed into one: decision, process, and outcome.

A decision is the choice made at a specific moment.
A process is how that choice was arrived at.
An outcome is how the world responded to that choice.

Only one of these is fully within our control.

A good decision, at the moment it is made, usually has a few things in common. It:

• uses the best information reasonably available at that time

• considers real alternatives, not just the most attractive one

• acknowledges constraints—market conditions, capital, energy

• aligns with where the decision-maker actually is, not where they wish they were

None of this guarantees success.

Outcomes are shaped by many forces that sit outside the decision itself. Markets shift. Timing changes. Execution is uneven. External events intervene. Sometimes, randomness plays a bigger role than we like to admit.

This distinction matters because when things do not work out, the instinct is to ask a single, blunt question: Was the decision wrong?

Often, that is the wrong question.

A more useful one is: What changed after the decision was made?
What did we not anticipate? Which assumptions no longer held?

There is an important difference between a bad outcome caused by a poor process and a bad outcome that followed a thoughtful one.

A bad outcome after a bad process is a signal to improve how decisions are made.
A bad outcome after a good process is an invitation to expand how we understand the world.

One of the more dangerous situations, in my experience, is a good outcome after a weak process. That creates false confidence. It teaches the wrong lessons and makes future decisions more fragile.

Watching founders and investors navigate high-stakes choices has reinforced something for me: good judgment does not eliminate uncertainty. It only helps us live with it more honestly.

Looking back allows us to connect the dots.

In my spiritual practice, I learnt something that has stayed with me: choice creates awareness, not the other way around. That is exactly how life plays out in business as well.

We often assume business and life are two separate threads. They are not. They are deeply intertwined states of our being.

Learning from the notes in the margins of one’s life notebook, in my view, requires slowing down enough to see the trade-offs. Naming what we know and what we do not.
Choosing in a way we can stand by, even if the dots connect differently later.

That, to me, is where real decision-making lives.

More notes in the margin will follow.

Have a thoughtful start to 2026.

2025 has been an interesting year. We launched SamVed, a fund focused on Bharat opportunities. As I met founders building in the space, it was clear - a two market definition of India and Bharat was over generalisation of a much fragmented economy. It worked a decade back — income, access and digital adoption felt like clear dividing lines.

But as India’s digital economy matures, one truth is becoming harder to ignore — the old two-market narrative no longer explains how India behaves. Refer to this blog for reference (written almost 10 years back)

What looked like income variation on the surface was actually something deeper: differences in motivation, confidence, risk appetite, and willingness to pay.
The last definition of India 1 and India 2 started to feel insufficient.

Investors assume:

• India behaves like one market

• A behaviour in metros is repeatable nationwide

• Price elasticity is similar everywhere

• Consumers shift uniformly with income

This is why simply calling India “middle class” or “Bharat” hides more than it reveals. A granular view is essential to understand who actually spends, upgrades, experiments, or avoids risk.

This post is really focused towards founders who want more granularity in defining market size, and investors who want to evaluate for such solutions.

The New Lens: Five Indias

India is not one economy.

India is a mosaic — five India’s coexisting.

People across these India’s may use the same apps, the same payment rails, and the same internet, yet their motivations, spending logic, risk appetite, and willingness to pay are profoundly different.

To understand India today — and especially the next decade of startups — we need to understand:

• who buys

• why they buy

• how they adopt

• and how infrastructure shapes what they consider possible

Why This Segmentation Matters Now

The last decade of Indian startups was powered by access:
Jio brought the internet. UPI built trust in digital money.

Three enablers shaped the first wave:

• Smartphones

• Affordable data

• Instant payments

The next decade will be shaped by:

• Formalisation

• Affordability + value creation

• Aspirational identity formation

• Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)

Scaling in India will depend on which layer of India you build for - and how you cross over between layers.

The Five Indias Framework

This framework was built with data using HCES 2023–24, PRICE ICE360, CMIE income distribution data and platform behaviour signals. I also referred to the latest public reports from Swiggy, Zomato and Nykaa to track some of the consumer behaviour. This emerged as a result — five distinct behaviour-driven markets.

The 5 India segments have been created based on income levels, but income does not explain the consumption story.

How India Works and Consumes

Income segments in India are deeply tied to how households earn, the stability of that income, and how that translates into spending behaviour. Consumption is not just a function of earning power — it is shaped by identity, confidence, risk appetite, and exposure.

The same household can show “value logic” in essentials and “aspirational logic” in lifestyle categories. This variability is not an anomaly — it is a defining feature of how India spends.

What Connects These Five Indias: Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)

Even though they behave differently, these Indias now operate on shared rails:

• Aadhaar

• UPI

• DigiLocker

• Account Aggregator

• ONDC

• ONEST (logistics interoperability)

As the EkStep Foundation described it:

“India Stack helped people transact. ONEST will help businesses operate.”

This matters because rails collapse onboarding friction.
Infrastructure creates markets before brands do. Few countries have built rails before markets — and fewer have built rails that reduce operational friction for both citizens and businesses.

India is now shifting from digital payments infrastructure to digital operating infrastructure.

Where This Goes Next

Three forces will accelerate upward movement:

• Lower friction (DPI)

• Cheaper last-mile logistics

• Better access to structured credit

But one force slows complete convergence:

• Disproportionate income growth

So India isn’t merging into one segment — it is splitting further, but scaling faster.

Conclusion: What Founders Must Ask

India is not one market — it is five parallel economies shaped by income, identity, trust, digital rails and aspiration.

For me, this shift isn’t just academic — it has shaped how we now look at founders, products, and markets. At SamVed, we don’t look at “India” as one uniform demand curve anymore. We look at emerging behaviours across these five Indias — where aspiration is forming, where affordability meets access, and where infrastructure unlocks new categories.

Because the opportunity ahead isn’t in building for a billion consumers.
It’s in understanding which India moves first — and which India follows.

If you are a founder building in India, the real question now is:

This report has been summarised to simplify the messaging to readers. If you are a founder building for one of the Indias and want a more detailed analysis, drop me a comment with what you are looking for. I am happy to share notes.

Wishing all my friends a great start to the new year! We should all collectively pray for a safer, happier and more abundant world for us in 2026.

Signing off with much love for 2026

Why I Built The Canvas

I am a visual person. I like things to be made simple (we have enough complexity in our lives!) especially when it comes to topics like money and investing. Honestly, this journey of breaking down the basics has been immensely rewarding for me. One question I asked - what would it take to now simplify all that we learnt into one place? When I started LVX, I was motivated to create a platform that would simplify information gathering in one place for founders. Back then, I was inspired by the Lean Canvas by Ash Maurya (linked here for those who want to know more). I found the canvas incredibly useful to bring all my thoughts into one page.

This Angel Canvas is inspired by the same methodology. This is the 1-page mental model: The Angel Investing Canvas.

What It Helps You Do

Use it during or after a pitch to break down any early-stage startup into 4 blocks:

Opportunity – Problem clarity, Market size, the first product wedge and competition. How is the solution different, to differentiate itself in the market?
People – Founder’s energy, learnability, and team-building signals
You as an Angel – Your bias, strengths, and the kind of investor role you want to play
Thesis Fit – Does the startup align with your investing lens or just your FOMO?

Watch the video on how to use the canvas

Download the Angel Investing Canvas (PDF)

This is free to download. It’s designed for use on tablets, printouts, or as a fillable format. This is open only to my subscribed members.

Download the Angel Investing Canvas pdf here.

How to Use It

• Fill this during or after a pitch

• Use 1–5 confidence scores in each quadrant

• Track patterns across deals

• Helps you move from feeling right → thinking clearly

✅ Attribution Request
If you use or share this canvas, please credit:
LVXSchool - Angel Investing Canvas
Tag: [@lvxventures] [@shantimohan] or mention us in your decks/posts

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

If I met these founders during their first cheque stage, what would I have needed to confidently invest?

That question led to this post.

Deep tech is becoming one of the most exciting (and misunderstood) parts of India’s startup ecosystem. But evaluating these companies is not the same as evaluating SaaS, fintech, or D2C.

There is no:

• “Ship fast and iterate”

• “Let’s test pricing with a landing page”

• Or “What’s your CAC?”

Instead, you are evaluating:

• An invention

• A researcher or military professional turned founder

• And a market that may exist years later

• Commercial viability of the solution and if this is a better, cheaper replacement to an existing solution

Yet — when it works, deep tech builds companies that power nations, not just apps. Think defence systems, semiconductor design, new materials, climate tech, aerospace, and synthetic biology.

So the real question becomes:

How do you evaluate something still forming — before the world sees its usefulness?

This is the framework I use as an investor.

Deep Tech: What it really means

Deep tech startups build hard technology, not interfaces.

Areas include:

• Robotics and drones

• Climate tech hardware (batteries, carbon removal, thermal storage)

• Advanced materials and semiconductors

• Space tech

• Biotech and synthetic biology

• AI tools built at the infrastructure level, not “app layer”

A common theme: patents, scientific know-how, and engineering execution matter more than branding or distribution.

The Three Lenses to Evaluate

When we look at a deep tech company, we can evaluate it through three simple lenses:

Technology risk → Market early adopters → Team and execution discipline

Lens 1: Will the technology work at scale?

This is the hardest part.
Many founders can show a simulation or lab demo. Very few can manufacture, deploy, and run the product in the real world without funds.

A useful reference here is Technology Readiness Level (TRL) — used by NASA and now widely used by VCs.

The TRL framework helps to clearly understand the stage at which the startup is operating. Based on your thesis, you can decide which stage you want to invest in.

Two questions to always ask:

• Has an independent expert validated the claims?

• What is the largest unsolved technical risk?

If founders can clearly answer both, it’s a strong signal.

Lens 2: Who needs this enough to pay early?

Deep tech markets don’t start broad — they start with a desperate niche buyer.

Instead of TAM slides, good questions to ask:

• Who is the first paying customer profile?

• What is the pain? (cost, regulation, performance, safety)

• Is there a path to design partnerships with industry?

A climate battery startup doesn’t need 10,000 customers in Year 1 — it needs five industrial partners who are willing to experiment.

That is traction in deep tech.

Lens 3: Can this team cross the “deep tech chasm”?

Deep tech founders are often exceptional scientists — but building a business requires more:

• Regulatory navigation

• Reliability and testing discipline

• Manufacturing partnerships

• Commercial understanding and pricing

• Fundraising patience

• Storytelling

  There is one indicator to look for:

  Learning velocity — how fast they turn uncertainty into clarity.

  Not perfection and Not pitch polish. Just the speed of learning.

A Simple Evaluation Flow

If you are a new angel in this space:

Step 1 — The Quick Filter

• Is the problem real and urgent?

• Is the technical hypothesis testable?

• Is the founder uniquely suited to solve it?

Step 2 — Technical Diligence

Find independent reviewers.
This step is NOT optional.

Step 3 — Pilot Validation

Speak to 2–3 potential design or industry partners yourself.

Step 4 — Milestone-based Investing

Deep tech works best with staged capital tied to technical milestones, not runway comfort.

Where To Look: The India Deal Flow Map

India’s deep tech ecosystem is young but accelerating — and finally, institutions and industry are talking to each other.

If you want to learn or source companies, start here:

• IIT Madras Incubation Cell (semiconductors, mobility, materials)

• IIT Guwahati Deep Tech Cell

• IISc Bengaluru + C-CAMP (biotech + hardware)

• IIT Kanpur SIIC

• T-Hub Hyderabad

• NASSCOM Deep Tech Club

• MeitY Startup Hub cohorts

These are India’s early deal pipelines. (This is not an exhaustive list.)

Our biggest gap?

Pilot and procurement velocity — especially in defence, energy, and manufacturing.

This is where public–private collaboration will shape our trajectory.

Investor Lens - From the trenches

While deep tech evaluation seems simple now, I wanted to get more diverse views. So I spoke to a few investors who have been working with founders in this space, to get their views and create a more complete outline.

Meet Krish Kupathil, a successful exit entrepreneur and now Venture Partner at a growth fund Avataar Ventures, focuses on the “commercial viability of the solution”.

Meet Pranav Mahajani, Public Market to Private Market investor, has led the last 10 deep tech transactions on the LVX platform, talks about “ROI for investors after commercial viability and scale”.

Meet Venkat Raju, Entrepreneur, and Investor in the deep tech ecosystem of India for the last decade. He talks about “Technical Risk Is Not the Hazard -- It’s the Advantage”.

A Closing Thought

Deep tech is slow at the beginning and fast at the end.

Most of the work feels invisible and unglamorous — testing, validation, regulatory filings, supply chain setup.

But when it works, it creates defensibility you cannot copy with marketing budgets.

If you’re an investor entering this space, start small, find domain experts you trust, and build pattern recognition around pilot data and founder mindset.

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

Well, traction still follows the same pattern: people return, they tell others, they support you, and you keep learning.

In the past few posts, we have discussed how founders and teams lie at the core of early stage investing. Once we have crossed that metric, how does one evaluate the startup? Beyond TAM and people — it’s Product.

Is it traction? Is it revenue?

Honestly, early-stage traction is rarely about revenue. It is about signals — small, consistent signs that customers love the product and that the founder learns fast. In the investing world, we call it “customer love, and product market fit”.

To help us break this down. I have structured this as 4 pillars, which can also be quantified at the time of evaluation.

1. Repeat Usage = Behavioural Proof(the strongest early signal)

This is quantitative. It answers: Do people keep using it?
You can measure it — frequency, retention, daily actives, reorders.

What are we really evaluating here?
It is : Does the product become a habit or a necessity?

Examples:

• People open WhatsApp every morning → repeat usage.

• 30% of users log workouts daily on a fitness app → repeat usage.

• A B2B tool gets opened by the same team every day → repeat usage.

• D2C skincare brand has 25% reorders → repeat usage.

As an investor while evaluating a startup, ask two simple questions:

• Do people come back?

• Do they do the core action again?

Examples:

• A fitness app where 30 of the first 100 users return daily → strong traction.

• An enterprise tool that 5 teams open every morning → more valuable than 500 signups.

• A D2C brand with 20% early reorders → real pull.

This lies at the core of any business. If users churn out as fast as they arrive, you’re not scaling value — you are refilling a leaking bucket, a revolving door that people come and go. This indicates that the product does not have the ability to create long term value for customers.

That’s where two simple metrics matter:

• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) — how much it costs to get a customer.

• LTV (Lifetime Value) — how much that customer spends before leaving.

Healthy businesses make more from a customer (LTV) than they spend to acquire them (CAC). Repeat usage pushes LTV up and CAC down — it is the most honest growth signal.

Signal: People need the product. Retention improves. Marketing spend drops naturally.

2. Early User Love - The Emotional Proof (small, honest signs of pull)

People show love before they show revenue. Look for:

• unsolicited testimonials

• WhatsApp messages asking for features

• users referring friends without rewards

• users hacking the product creatively

Signal: The product hits a real pain point. There is organic growth through referral and word of mouth.

3. Early Money Signals (even small ones count)

At the seed stage, investors don’t judge how much you earn.
They judge if anyone pays at all.

Even ₹199 can mean a lot if it’s coming from a stranger.

Forms of early money:

• one pilot customer

• trial subscription

• pre-order or deposit

• B2B letter of intent

Examples:

When Groww users linked bank accounts, it wasn’t revenue — but it showed trust. That is intent, and intent always precedes income.

Signal: There is commercial value here. Customers are willing to pay for services offered. Free user growth could also be a red flag when monetisation is turned on.

4. Founder’s Speed of Learning & Shipping (often the real moat)

Traction is not just numbers. It is:
What changed in the product in the last 30 days?

Look for:

• fast iterations

• clear monthly improvements

• quick fixes from customer feedback

• founder talking to users every week

• a product that evolves visibly every month

Examples:

• A founder who ships 10 improvements each month → high-quality execution.

• Zepto’s early speed — doing in 2 weeks what others did in 2 months — was their biggest advantage.

Signal: Fast learners find product–market fit sooner.

A Hidden Signal: Feature-Talk vs Customer-Talk

You can understand a founder’s product maturity in 5 minutes.
Just listen to what they choose to talk about.

When founders talk about features being built: “We built X, Y, Z.”, “We will launch A, B, C next month.”, “We want to add more features to stand out.”

What this signals: Founders are building from assumptions, not customer reality, and are too product focused versus being customer focused. This founder often has output, not traction.

However when the founder talks about customers and customer behaviour, and is obsessed about market feedback:

What this signals is a deep user understanding, real learning loops and a faster path to product–market fit.

This founder often has momentum, even without big numbers.

A Simple guide for New Investors

Features show effort. Feedback shows insight.
Investors should back insight.

How to Validate What the Founder Is Saying

Data may be thin at seed stage — but truth hides in experience.
Before you believe the deck, go live the product.

1. Be the User — Test It Yourself
If it’s a consumer or app-based startup, download and use it. Complete onboarding, make a transaction, even cancel it.
You’ll quickly know if the UX inspires trust or frustration.

• Try a fitness app — does it build habit or fatigue?

• Use a fintech wallet — does KYC finish in one go or need follow-ups?

These micro-experiences reveal readiness better than any chart.

2. Talk to Customers (or Imitate Them)
A good way to validate customer experience is to look at user reviews, reddit forums. If possible, DM a few customers. Ask: What breaks? What delights? Would you pay to use the product?

You’ll separate genuine adoption from founder optimism.

3. Buy Like a Customer
Order the product. Track the delivery, unbox it, experience customer care.

• A D2C skincare brand that follows up with genuine education earns trust.

• A food-tech startup that remembers preferences shows product thinking.

Being a customer always gives us a different lens than a founder.

Why this matters:
Founders who live close to their users design for detail.
As investors, living the product for a day gives you 10× more insight than another demo call.

Making It Real: A Life Example

I think all the talk about how to evaluate product and traction could become overwhelming for a new investor. For a moment, forget apps, dashboards, and growth charts. Let us go back to where we started.

Picture Buddha in 500 BCE — not as a saint, but as the founder of an idea.

He had no ads. No data. What he had was an idea that appealed to people.

What he had was repeat users — people who returned every day because the message worked for them. They found value in what he taught.
They shared it with others — pure word of mouth.
Communities offered him food and shelter — willingness to pay, in the only currency that mattered then: gratitude.
And every time he spoke, he adapted his message to who was listening — feedback turned into iteration.

Two and a half millennia ago, he scaled an idea through clarity, empathy, and listening — the same levers that still build lasting products today.

Real traction, in any century, begins when people return not because they have to — but because they want to.

I hope this helped you get started on how to evaluate traction while talking to a founder.

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

Coming up next:

We will summarise all the frameworks, and build a canvas you can use to evaluate startups next time you meet a founder.

In the last PitchRoom note, I wrote about why venture is the most human form of capital. We are not just betting on markets or technology. We are betting on people — and their ability to learn, adapt, and grow.

A few of you wrote back with a very direct question:

“Okay, but how do you actually evaluate founders beyond the pitch deck?”

This note is my attempt to answer that.

There is no fancy 40-point scorecard, but rather a simple, repeatable lense that could be used as a guiding principle.

Why we need a lens, not a checklist

I don’t believe you can reduce a human being to a spreadsheet. People are layered. Context changes. Markets surprise us.
A rigid checklist can give false comfort — it feels scientific, but you end up box-ticking your way into bad decisions.

What does help is a small set of questions you keep returning to.
Over time, these questions become your pattern recognition.

My own lens has settled into four simple questions.

The four questions I ask beyond the pitch

When I meet a founder, I’m broadly trying to answer four things:

Think of this as a mirror, not a scorecard. For investors, it is a way to observe.
For founders, it is a way to reflect.

1. Why this problem?

Venture is about solving the hard problems - but the key is in understanding the problem in detail.

• Do the founders understand the customer in detail? Have they identified the customer persona well enough, and distinguished between the user and the customer?

• Can they talk about the problem in simple language? How deeply are they connected to solving the problem?

• Is there some lived experience here, or is it just “AI + large TAM + India opportunity”?

Red flag for me:

“India’s market is huge, and this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity”
…followed by no depth on who the customer is and what they are struggling with today.

2. Why you?

This is a more personal question, but it matters a lot.

Somewhere in the founder’s story, I’m looking for their right to win:

• Is there a personal connection to the space?

• Have they worked in this problem area before?

• Does their background give them a real edge in distribution, product, or trust?

In my last piece, I wrote about how our childhood and early experiences shape how we trust, love, lead, and define success.
Those same lenses also shape how we build companies.

When a founder can clearly explain:

“This is the problem, and this is why I am obsessed with solving it”

…it changes how I see the whole pitch.

Red flag: a very generic “I like startups / want to build something big” answer, without a clear link between the person and the problem. Some other red flags - “I have been wanting to startup and I see this as a huge opportunity to solve for”

Combining problem and team is my way of evaluating about founder–market fit.

3. How do you learn from pain?

This is where Ray Dalio’s line comes back:

Pain + Reflection = Progress

Every founder has pain.
Markets move. A co-founder leaves. A key hire quits. A round doesn’t close.

What I’m really listening for is not the drama of the story, but the reflection:

• Can they talk about a mistake without getting defensive?

• What changed in their behaviour after the setback?

• Are they able to name their own blind spots?

Founders who only talk about how the world was unfair is a red flag.
Founders who say, “Here is where I messed up, and here is how I run things differently now,” make one lean in to their narrative.

This is the Progress Mindset at work.

4. How do you show up with people?

Finally, I watch how founders show up with people – not just with me.

This is where behaviour across three moments matters more than any line on the cap table.

Three moments that reveal a founder

Over time, I’ve noticed that founders reveal a lot of who they are in three moments:

1. Before the pitch

2. In the room

3. After the pitch

Moment 1: Before the pitch

How they first reach out already tells a small story.

• Is the email clear, specific, and respectful of time?

• Do they explain why they are reaching out to me, or is it a mass forward? Is it a mailer with all investors in bcc? I typicall never respond to an email when I am in bcc. I also believe that founders who dont have time to research investors before they reach out will demonstrate the same attitude towards their customers.

• Did they find a warm connect and get an intro?

• Do they send a simple deck, or 40 cluttered slides?

Thoughtful outreach usually reflects thoughtful execution.

Moment 2: In the room

During the meeting, it is not what they say, but how they respond.

I like to watch out for defensiveness in response without allowing questions to be completely asked. These are my metrics for conversations.

• Ability to listen and respond is key to long term vision.

• Are they willing to say “I don’t know” and then think aloud?

• Do they light up when they talk about customers and product, or only when they talk about valuation?

• Do they ‘name-throw’ a lot? I had met a founder once who said his right to win was because he was associated with a political party and could get entry into any meeting. For me, that was a deal-breaker.

The room is where you often see whether the ego is bigger than the problem.

Moment 3: After the pitch

The call ends. Sometimes as investors we pass. Sometimes we are unsure. Typically, I dont write a cheque to every founder I meet. But I surely offer help with customer referrals or other intros, if possible. This is where the real founder shows up.

• Do they send a short, clear follow-up?

• Do they close the loop on numbers or info they promised?

• If I say, “Not now,” do they disappear — or do they send a simple update 3–4 months later?

I’ve had founders I did not invest in initially, who kept sending disciplined, honest updates. By the time they were back raising the next round, I had already seen how they handle time, setbacks, and progress.

That behaviour, over time, is often a stronger signal than any single meeting.

For founders: turning the lens inward

If you are a founder reading this, you don’t have to wait for an investor meeting to do this work. Believe in your own story. Investors may not know everything and it is a good practice to listen, engage but drive the businesses based on your own learning.

Here are a few questions you can sit with on your own, or with your co-founder:

• Why this problem, in this decade, for these customers?

• Why you — what in your story, skills, or network actually gives you a right to win?

• What is one painful moment from the last 12 months, and how did you change after it?

• If your team described how you show up in the hardest weeks, what would they say?

You cannot control market cycles. You can control how you show up, how you learn, and how you treat people along the way.

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

Coming up next:

We will summarise all the frameworks, and build a canvas you can use to evaluate startups next time you meet a founder.

When we talk about venture, the conversation almost always ends up being about people.

Venture investing is about finding the smartest people building the smartest solutions — solving problems worth solving, or creating possibilities that make life better. If you look back in history, most inventions happened because someone believed there was a better, more efficient way to live.

The internet, the mobile phone, social media — all had this belief at their core: there must be a better, more connected, more meaningful way to live. That’s what we like to believe.

In venture, we sit at the edge of that transformation. And transformation happens when the human mind can visualize, comprehend, and create something valuable for our daily lives. That is real disruption.

On Cycles and the New World Order

I’ve been following some of the leaders in the financial world — Ray Dalio and Morgan Housel who have deeply shaped how I think about money. Both study history to understand how markets and human behavior move in cycles — how every upcycle inevitably follows a downcycle.

If I draw a parallel, I believe India is entering an upcycle — one that will sharpen over the next decade.

Why People Matter Most

This post, unlike others, is more philosophical. Because no conversation on investing is complete without a conversation on people.

From managing large teams to building LetsVenture, to meeting founders and investors across India and globally, one thing always stands out for me:

Find the right team with the right intent — and magic will happen.

But how do we identify them?

Lessons from the Mountains

A few months ago, I attended a writing workshop in the mountains — mostly to support a friend. I didn’t expect it to change how I think about people.

Listening to fellow writers share their stories, I realized something profound:

Our childhood experiences shape everything — how we trust, love, lead, and define success. These stories become the lenses through which we see the world — and inevitably, how we build companies.

As people, we often glorify struggle. But adversity, at its core, is just a story — one that reveals what a person chooses to hold on to and what they can let go of. Some narrate their struggles in vivid detail, reliving the unfairness of it all. Others process, reflect, and move forward with empathy.

The difference lies in what they learn from pain.

Ray Dalio said it best:

“Progress = Pain + Reflection.”

Becoming aware of pain is one thing. Staying a victim to it is another. The real growth happens when pain leads to reflection — and reflection building into empathy.

The real question for investors is:

Can you identify founders who live by the Progress mindset? As investors, unless we build awareness and the ability to deeply listen, we’ll miss the mindset behind the people we invest in.

Building a Framework for People

As investors, we can build frameworks to understand people — their values, behaviors, and how they respond to change.

The truth is, during fundraising, founders are at their best behavior. Once the money is wired, the real leadership begins. People change — and that’s not always bad. Growth demands change.

But investing in early-stage founders is like picking a chess prodigy in a room full of hopefuls. Everyone wants to be a grandmaster. Only a few stay long enough to become one.

And yet, some founders who tick every box fail.

That’s why venture investing — at its heart — remains the most human form of capital. We’re not just betting on markets or technology. We’re betting on people — and their ability to learn, adapt, and grow. And to demonstrate the “progress mindset”

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

Coming up next:

In the next post in The Pitch Room series, I’ll explore this question further:
Can we build a repeatable framework to evaluate founders beyond the pitch?
A lens that captures not just what they build, but who they are.

I was at IIM Shillong this weekend for a talk at Emerge 25.

First — the mountains have this calming effect. The weather was cloudy, the campus beautiful, and there’s a visible effort to preserve its natural setting. Students either walk 25 minutes to their classrooms or take a bus that takes almost an hour. Perhaps an additional test of their commitment at IIM.

But once the session began, the energy in the room surprised me — thoughtful questions, sharp curiosity, and a genuine desire to understand venture capital.

What stood out most was why so many students wanted to enter VC. I hear this often from applicants too, so I wasn’t surprised — but it reconfirmed something: VC does seem like wonderland from the outside.

Almost everyone said some version of this:

“It gives me the chance to meet founders, network, and write cheques.”

That’s the myth.
The reality, as most people discover, is far less glamorous — and far more interesting.

The Reality Behind the Curtain

Venture capital is not a ticket to power lunches and founder meetings.
It is closer to being a founder yourself — except you don’t control the product, just the probability of success.

Here’s what actually happens inside a fund:

• You raise money from LPs — who are your investors.

• You spend 18–24 months just fundraising for your fund.

• You invest based on judgment, not Excel projections. More so true for early stage investing.

• You wait 7–10 years for exits.

• You realize two of your twenty investments will likely drive all the returns.

It is not glamorous. It is a grind.

Venture investing is about saying no 99 times so you can say yes once — and then waiting years to see if you were right. Saying no is also the hardest part - and I am yet to meet a VC who has never regretted a no.

If founders are defined by optimism, VCs are defined by patience.

The Three Doors In

For all those who asked “How do I get in?”, I tried to be as data specific and actionable, so it helps you plan (without being vague). There are three doors in. (there might be others I did not think of):

1️⃣ Build → Exit → Invest
Founders who have built companies and exited earn their credibility the hard way. They have lived through the zero-to-one chaos. They understand risk, empathy, and timing — things that can’t be taught.

2️⃣ Brand → Insight → Access
People who write and think clearly — who build perspective publicly — earn their way in. The best analysts today aren’t waiting to be hired; they’re already publishing Substack essays, market maps, and founder interviews.

In a world of noise, clarity is currency.

3️⃣ Climb → Learn → Compound
The traditional path — analyst, associate, principal, partner. It’s slow but rewarding. You compound judgment with every founder conversation and every “no” you explain well.

No matter which door you take, the key is not your degree — it is your perspective. Your college brings the networks and the first job- but after this, it is a lot of what you bring to the table.

The Mirror

Venture capital is not magic. It’s a mirror.
You invest in founders the same way LPs invest in you — with belief, not certainty.

And when you see it that way, you realize:
VC isn’t about predicting the future. It is about backing the people brave enough to build it.

Closing Thought

One of the students asked —

“So what does success in VC really look like? have you stayed with your thesis from the time you started investing?”

Maybe success is: being able to stay long enough in the game to let the power law work in your favor.

My thesis has evolved over time — the domains I invest in have changed — but the core belief remains constant: Bet on the smartest people you meet.

I have also attached the deck I presented for anyone who is keen to dive deeper. Hope it helps anyone looking to understand how to plan a career in venture, and understand if this actually excites them.

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

Coming up next: We will tak about some misses from real investors on real startups and why the miss happened.

Vc Wonderland

3.74MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

We talked earlier about idea and intent, and how large markets are often a prerequisite for venture success. Like in most things in investing, there are rules — and there are edge cases. Rules help us build frameworks. But investing, in the end, is also instinct — a mix of pattern recognition, conviction, and reading people.

So what happens when you meet a team that projects its total addressable market — its TAM — as ₹10 crore? Would you still invest at the idea stage?

I am opening up my investing portfolio and playbook because real learning often happens when we look back at our own patterns. Today we will discuss one of my early investments in OnlineRTI and draw some interesting lessons around idea and intent and evaluating TAM.

(If you want a primer on TAM, read my post on the 3 Idiots here)

2014: We had just launched LetsVenture. I was introduced to Pradeep through a friend. He had completed his masters from IIT Bombay, and had quit an MNC job paying 40L per annum (this was 2014!) to found Online RTI. What he wanted to build wasn’t glamorous or “fundable” by conventional standards — he wanted to make it easier for Indians to file Right to Information (RTI) applications online.

For context, in 2014, filing an RTI meant drafting a legal letter, identifying the right government officer, buying a postal order, and sending it by speed post. The process was outdated, bureaucratic, and painful. Millions wanted information from government departments, but very few had the time or knowledge to navigate the process.

When Pradeep and his co-founder Vinoth pitched OnlineRTI, their product was beautifully simple — three steps to file an RTI: draft, pay, and send. The problem was clear, the solution elegant. But the number on the slide made everyone pause: TAM: ₹10 crore.

That was the market size they projected for their business. Ten crore rupees. Not ten billion. No hockey-stick charts, no exaggerated assumptions.

The Case for Clarity and Capability

In my 5 + 2 Framework, the signals — Clarity, Capability — are what I always look for before a cheque is written. OnlineRTI was a perfect example of this.

The founders had clarity. They understood the problem deeply and could explain it in simple language. There was no jargon, no hand-waving. Just a clear articulation of what was broken and how they planned to fix it.

They had capability. Both founders were strong technologists who knew how to build, run operations, and listen to users. They didn’t need to hire expensive talent to get started. They had demonstrated intent by their willingness to be uncomfortable and leave behind a good job.

So yes, the market looked small, but the founders didn’t.

Since LetsVenture was in its early days, I was deeply involved in most transactions. I was deeply involved in the fundraise for Online RTI. Most of the investors who came in were Indians living abroad — professionals who wanted to participate in India’s growth story and cared about impact. Many of them were first-time angels. I remember long conversations explaining what angel investing meant — about conviction and patience.

After the round, I joined their board and stayed close. I helped with interviews, reviewed plans, made intros, and occasionally just listened. The journey was slow, but it was steady. The founders never overpromised. They just kept building.

The key takeaway is as an investor, once invested, it is great to contribute to founders where they ask for help.

Coachability of founders becomes important, and sometimes this trait is difiicult to assess at the time of investing. The only way to assess is by active conversations.

So what happened? Did the TAM grow? Or did the founders expand it?

The Myth of TAM

If you look closely at early-stage investing, you realise something simple but fundamental: TAM is not a verdict. It’s a hypothesis.

At the earliest stage, TAM isn’t about accuracy — it’s about direction. It helps you ask: Is there a clear need, and is the market big enough to care?

The problem begins when investors treat TAM as a limit, rather than a starting point.

When Small Markets Become Big Opportunities

OnlineRTI didn’t invent a new market — they organised an old one.

They took a fragmented, offline process and built a bridge for citizens to access information easily. Most importantly, they listened to what the market was telling them.

A few years in, they started getting requests from companies — not citizens. Businesses wanted access to RTI-based data for verification and compliance. Court records were very fragmented in India and a crime check in one state did not show the details in another state.

With an incident with a woman passenger, Uber reached out, asking if RTI data could be used for background checks of the driver across states.

As a founder, this is when first principles help. If a large customer is asking for information they find challenging to locate - it shows a gap, waiting to be addressed.

The founders realised the real opportunity wasn’t in filing RTIs. It was in the infrastructure they had quietly built — the ability to access and verify public data at scale.

That insight led to the creation of CrimeCheck, a B2B platform offering litigation history reports to lenders and background verification companies — much like credit history reports, but for legal cases. Same DNA, same founders, new direction.

And through all of this, the team never lost the emotional connect to their story. They believed in the problem, they built carefully, and their authenticity made people believe in them.

The Outcome

The pivot worked.
OnlineRTI evolved into CrimeCheck, which went on to be acquired by IDfy, (who was also a customer) one of India’s largest digital verification platforms.
The small civic-tech idea with a ₹10 crore TAM eventually became a company with a 10× exit for its early investors.

No viral moment. No hype. Just quiet progress, clear thinking, and deep execution.

This is why I always say — frameworks matter, but people matter more.
Markets grow, shrink, evolve. But founders — the right founders — expand the boundaries of what’s possible.

Sometimes, the market doesn’t grow. The founders do.

For fun, attached is the deck I had reviewed in 2014. Would you as an investor decide to invest?

Note: I have Pradeep’s permission to share this story. All information shared here has been approved by the founders.

Onlinerti 1stround

297KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

Coming up next:

How do we calculate TAM as an investor?

During the Diwali break, I chose a quiet celebration — no emails, no WhatsApp — just a much-needed reset.
That pause led me to start LVX School, a space to share what I have learnt from my investing journey. One post became eight, written in sequence so anyone curious about startups could follow along. We also launched a small WhatsApp community.
What surprised me was the flood of thoughtful questions — proof that learning is better when done together, not just scrolled past.

We will now have a Q&A after every post. Let’s get started.

The toughest question: Pre-seed and Intent

“How do I get investors to commit when I’m still at idea stage? How do I demonstrate my capability and intent? What is the magic of pre-seed?” Early stage investing discussions are never complete without this question.

My honest answer to investors— don’t commit, unless there is trust or track record.

If you don’t know the founder, or the domain, don’t write a cheque at pre-seed. Spend a few weeks with the founder. If they get frustrated or disengaged during the process, that’s a signal too. Intent shows up in behaviour, not words. There is no way to measure intent otherwise.

Personally, I either spend months working with a founder before investing or co-invest with people whose judgment I deeply trust. Here is when co-investor signal works the strongest. Pre-seed investing is art, not math. This is the hardest category in private market investing and swinging this will not deliver results. Ask the founder - if you were to invest in yourself, would you?

How being a founder shaped me as an investor

Deeply.
Our experiences shape how we think. I’ve seen founders with perfect intent, and funding walk away within three years — because they could not handle the grind. I’ve also seen founders who just don’t quit — who surprise you every time with their resilience.

Founders, like people, change. A decision made today can feel right — until priorities shift. My rule: respect the founder. I may disagree, but I do so kindly. They are the ones taking the risk.

When I was raising funds as a founder, I learned this:

Be authentic. Know your space deeply. Be fully present in every conversation. You have to believe you are building something valuable and solving a real problem. Backing with real data always helps.

A “no” from an investor is not rejection — it is just a mismatch. This is something I like to term as “founder-investor mismatch”. There HAS to be alignment in mission and vision.

I always remind myself that we are building a business where the focus is to build an institution that shapes how private markets in India will look like. And institution building is always a longer journey !

Let’s go deeper into the first signal — Clarity + Capability

I had few questions on the framework. So going deep will help demystify this.

If I had to simplify the 5+2 Framework further and pick just 2 - it would be Clarity and Capability. If a founder lacks these 2 traits, no other signal matters.

Clarity is not about fancy communication. It is about how deeply the founder understands the problem they are solving — and whether they can explain it in 30 seconds. Great founders anticipate challenges before others even spot them. They might not know every answer, but they know where to look.

Think of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone. His clarity of vision, not just his storytelling, created one of the most aspirational products of our time. Storytelling is central to entrepreneurship — with investors, employees, and customers alike. And true storytelling comes only from deep clarity.

Let’s now unbundle Capability:

I have a more detailed post later on how we can evaluate founders. For now, a summary view - As an investor, I often say — the founder card trumps everything.
If a founder can clearly show why they are the best team to win in their space, that’s 75% of my decision. The remaining 25%? It’s alignment — of values, energy, and trust. You can’t quantify it easily, but you can sense it.

Private market investing is high-risk. If I have to risk capital, I’d rather back people I genuinely like and respect.

On Continuity

Someone asked what this means. Simply put, continuity is another way to describe product–market fit. (I want to avoid investing jargon, hence this word to bring clarity) - It’s when customers return naturally, not because you spent marketing dollars to get them back. It is when the process and product can be made repeatable and can deliver the same result over and over again. It is when something just “clicks.”
That’s the first sign of potential magic.

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

Coming up next:

In our next episode, we will break down the myth of TAM further and how we evaluate TAM.

Is this startup worth my money — and how do I know?

In today’s world, every pitch is public — but the outcome stays private.
That’s why the gap between story and signal matters more than ever.

In this post, we go deeper into two contrasting startups from Shark Tank India Season 1 — one that’s scaling, and one that quietly shut down — to understand what signals investors could have spotted early:

• What signs were visible in the pitch?

• What could we have picked up as investors?

• And how do we sharpen our ability to evaluate — one pitch at a time?

It is easy to get excited about charisma, storytelling, or traction slides. But the real work lies in building a consistent lens — one that helps you cut through the narrative and evaluate the business. In this post, we will introduce a simple, practical investor framework — and apply it to two contrasting startups from Shark Tank India Season 1

The PitchRoom Framework: The 5+2 Signal Lenses

Here’s your first practical investor filter. Use this every time you evaluate a pitch:

Case 1: Skippi Ice Pops – Funded and Growing

Deal: ₹1 crore for 15% equity
Sharks: All 5 (joint investment)
HQ at pitch time: Hyderabad
Status today: Active, expanding across India & into exports, Raised a round of 12 cr, with the goal of getting to 100cr revenues in 2025

Watch the pitch here.

What the pitch showed

Skippi didn’t just pitch a product — they pitched clarity.

• First-mover in organising an un-organised market: organized popsicles.

• Strong nostalgic + visual connect, creating emotional connect (key to their success)

• Easy-to-execute branding

• Already manufacturing and selling

• Focused operations in a single city

But what truly stood out?

All 5 Sharks invested — a rare co-investment signal.

Co-investor confidence doesn’t guarantee success, but it signals strong potential and alignment across investor lenses.

(Example: Tanishq was successful as it organised the jewellry market, which continues to be fragmented with large regional players)

Scale Isn’t Wide. It’s Deep.

Here’s what most founders — and many investors — get wrong:

Scale isn’t about how many cities you’re in.
It’s about how well you’ve executed in just one.

Scale is defined as the ability to capture the smallest unit of a business, which can then be replicated across regions. Scale, as many people think, is not going wide.

Skippi was live only in Hyderabad. That wasn’t a red flag — it was a strength.

They were:

• Streamlining supply chain

• Learning customer behaviour

• Getting ops right in one controlled environment

This shows strategic depth, not a lack of ambition.

As investors, this is a key filter:

Is the founder trying to win a market — or just spread thin?

Case 2: Booz Scooters – Funded, but unable to scale

Deal: ₹40 lakh for 15% equity from one shark
Model: Electric scooter rentals in closed campuses
Status: Last reported numbers are about 54L in annual revenue, with OEM partnership with EMotorad announced last year.

Watch the pitch here

What the pitch showed

• Narrow Market, High Complexity: The business operates only in private premises — colleges, business parks, resorts. That instantly caps its market size. Each site requires individual permissions, docking setups, and maintenance — high friction for growth.

  Investors often confuse “niche” with “moat.”
  Booz’s niche wasn’t defensible; it was small.

• Weak Unit Economics: Fleet‑based businesses look appealing until utilisation drops. Scooters that don’t move, don’t make money.
  Maintenance, charging, and staff costs add up fast — and in closed campuses, usage peaks only at certain hours.

• Capital-Heavy and Hard to Scale

• The Illusion of Early Traction: Early traction with lack of repeatablity is tough to scale.

Despite early traction, Booz struggled with operational economics — a reminder that product finding a narrow application won’t scale easily.

Applying the Framework

Jargon Buster - Understanding TAM: What Was the Real Market?

Skippi claimed to tap into a ₹3,000 crore frozen food market. Sounds big — but the real question isn’t “how big is the pie?” It is: “how much of this pie can they actually eat?”

Most founders quote big top-down numbers. Good investors build bottom-up intuition.

Investor Tip: Build Your Own TAM Estimate

When a founder says:

“This is a ₹5,000 crore market…”

Don’t stop there.

Ask:

What part of that is actually addressable — now?

Here are 3 practical ways to start: ( we will dig deeper on the exact methodoly in a later post)

1. Bottom-Up TAM
Estimate customers × annual spend

2. Top-Down Sanity Check
Use Google, ChatGPT, or industry reports to validate assumptions

3. Comparables Method
Find similar startups and extrapolate based on their revenue share

You don’t need perfect numbers — just curiosity and critical thinking.

Want to go deeper? Read this detailed note:
Understanding TAM Beyond the Pitch

Reflection Prompt

The next time you watch a pitch — on Shark Tank, at a demo day, or in your inbox — try this:

• Apply the 5+2 Lenses

• Note which signals felt strong or weak

• Try estimating TAM on your own

• Ask yourself: Would I still invest if the pitch was 50% less exciting?

• Look at parallels in public markets (we will cover this in one of the posts)

• Look at sectors that have tailwinds where a small market could potentially become big.

This is the real work of early-stage investing.

Join The PitchRoom WhatsApp

A private learning space for founders, investors, and the startup curious.
No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

Enter the Pitch Room

Coming up next:

2000cr too small for TAM? We will breakup the TAM for Skippi, and analyse if the numbers reflect the guideline for angel investing.

Welcome to The PitchRoom!

This is a space I have long wanted to create — one that blends storytelling, investing frameworks, and real-world learning.

We are surrounded by startup pitches — in boardrooms, on Zoom, and increasingly, on public platforms like Shark Tank. But instead of watching them like reality TV, what if we turned them into homework? What if every pitch became a real-time case study for learning how to think like an investor?

Introducing The Pitch Room

I am a big fan of learning — learning from books, podcasts, conversations and watching human behaviour. When we are present to anything, there is always something to learn.

At LVX, we realised early that India doesn’t lack capital. What was missing is understanding — of the why, how, and when of startup investing.

Public markets have boomed in the last decade. Most people now understand the compounding effect of financial discipline — SIPs, patience, and staying invested.

Then my question has always been — why does startup investing feel complex?

An investor once told me: LVX has taken investing to the homes of people, Shark Tank has taken entrepreneurship to the living rooms of homes in India.

It’s a powerful compliment — and a reminder that we’re just at the beginning of a long journey.

Now to come to the real question: why are you here?

What We are Building

The PitchRoom is my attempt to demystify angel investing — to understand what really drives decisions, valuations, and founder–investor chemistry. You don’t need to be an investor to learn this. Just like not everyone studies physics to become a scientist, you don’t need to write cheques to understand how value is created.

India today is the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. Every other product we use — from fintech apps to consumer brands — may have once been a startup you could have owned a part of, had you understood the investing mechanics.

Learning this lens changes how you see the world.

Knowing the ways value and wealth creation is enabled should be everyone’s right. It is powerful.

How We Will Learn

The best way to learn is through stories from Shark Tank (India and US). In this season of The PitchRoom, we will learn the basics as we will pick a pitch, break it down, and explore:

a. How to build a framework for investing

b. How to validate TAM

c. How to value companies and

d. What rights we should watch out as an invstor.

We will only discuss startup decks that are publicly available and build frameworks to help us evaluate. This is not entertainment. This is applied learning.

The Spirit of The PitchRoom

As a note, I want to mention this. As the founder of LVX, I am privy to many conversations. None of those pitch decks will ever make it here, unless the founder wants us to use this startup as a case study. At the core, I am a firm believer in privacy, space and respect for what founders are building.

The PitchRoom is my perspectives on investing, having built LVX. I could be wrong - no discussions here should be taken as advice for investing.

So step into The PitchRoom. Let’s decode the world of investing — high risk, high reward — and most importantly, have some fun doing it.

Join the WhatsApp Community

A space for founders, investors & learners to go deeper into startup investing.
Enter the Pitch Room - here

Coming up next:

In our first episode, we will share a framework, and analyse 2 startups against the framework for us to understand how investors decide on an investment.