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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second misunderstanding appears when questions begin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each investor brings their own lens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zwende was one such bet for me.

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

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

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

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

The Insight Behind Zwende

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

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

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

Very similar to what we saw in FarmDidi.

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

Zwende began with a simple premise:

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

From Marketplace to “Makerplace”

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

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

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

• sell products

• teach workshops

• build communities

• showcase their craft

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

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

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

The Long Tail of Creative Demand

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

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

Platforms built for scale often struggle with this long tail.

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

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

Today, the platform supports:

• 20 billion+ possible SKUs

• 10,000 new SKUs created daily

• 800+ brands and creators

• 8000+ artisans on the platform

Five Years of Progress

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

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

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

• 500,000 community members

• 353,000 Instagram followers

• 200,000 WhatsApp subscribers

• 275,000 email subscribers

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

My 5Cs Framework

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

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

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

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

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

C2: Category — Market and Timing

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

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

Zwende sits at the intersection of these trends.

C3: Capability — Technology and Operations

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

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

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

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

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

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

Zwende’s defensibility emerges from several reinforcing layers:

• a growing community of creators and buyers

• a vast catalog of unique designs

• strong storytelling around creators and crafts

• customer feedback loops that refine supply

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

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

C5: Conviction — My Personal Thesis

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

Consumers increasingly want products that feel personal rather than generic.

Creators increasingly want independence rather than employment.

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

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

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

Going forward

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

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

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

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

A Closing Thought

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

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

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

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

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

That conversation eventually led to SamVed investing in FarmDidi.

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

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

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

FarmDidi is attempting to bridge exactly that gap.

The story behind Farmdidi

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

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

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

That insight became the foundation for FarmDidi.

Why Pickle?

FarmDidi emerged at the intersection of two observations.

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

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

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

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

How big can this market be?

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

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

What FarmDidi is attempting to solve for exactly this.

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

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

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

Problem or Opportunity?

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

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

FarmDidi sits closer to the second category.

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

FarmDidi attempts to build exactly that layer.

The story of Manisha Didi

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

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

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

The Business Model Behind It

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

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

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

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

My 5Cs Framework

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

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

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

C2: Category — Market and Timing

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

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

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

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

C3: Capability — Systems and Operations

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

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

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

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

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

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

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

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

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

C5: Conviction — My Personal Thesis

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

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

FarmDidi touches all three of these shifts.

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

Yet the operational challenges remain significant.

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

How this has scaled

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Closing Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Craste Is Building

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

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

What I Saw Inside the Room

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

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

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

The Problem that struck a chord

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

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

Yet none of this impact was priced into the product.

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

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

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

My 5Cs — Mapped

C1: Clarity — Founder and Problem

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

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

C2: Category — Market and Timing

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

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

C3: Capability — Technology Readiness

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

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

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

C4: Cost to Build — Moat

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

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

C5: Conviction — Personal Thesis

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

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

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

What Happened After the Show

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

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

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

What To Track

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

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

A Closing Thought

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

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

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

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. 🌸

The last two months have been busy — the good kind of busy. I was part of Bharat Ke Super Founders (BKSF). With every episode launch, I received messages from friends asking the same question: Why did you invest? How did you decide on the amount and what does the amount and valuation mean?

That is when I realised we now have an unfair advantage.

Earlier, when I wrote for The PitchRoom, I often used Shark Tank examples to explain investment thinking. I was speculating with the limited information I had from the outside. They were useful — but incomplete. What we see publicly is edited storytelling.

During BKSF, I saw the full founder conversation — problem depth, numbers, behaviour under pressure, and conviction. That changes how you evaluate a startup.

This series will use my Angel Canvas to explain exactly why I invested — and why I passed — based on what actually happened inside the pitch room.

Let us start with Digital Labour Chowk.

The Pitch — What I Saw Inside the Room

I had known Chandrashekhar for almost two years. I first met him at a conference when the company was still discovering its core value proposition and understanding what customers truly valued.

The founder who presented during BKSF was different from the early version I had met. He was clear, grounded, and confident — not performative confidence, but the kind that comes from time of building from the inside, deep engagement with customers and a real understanding of the problem.

What I also liked is he represents a true Indian founder - someone who speaks Hindi (beyond the validation we seek in English) and presents his view with confidence. It is easy to watch as investors, but not easy when you are the founder presenting to a room with lights, cameras and investors seated in front. If you watched the pitch - Chandra presented the demo of his product and the growth numbers. The conversation also focused more on behaviour — how daily-wage workers actually find jobs, how contractors make hiring decisions, and where trust breaks down.

The Problem From The Ground

Construction is India’s second-largest employer. Yet most labour operates in an informal, cash-based ecosystem.

Workers struggle with:

• inconsistent income

• no verifiable work history

• no certification

• lack of insurance or access to formal credit

Contractors struggle with:

• discovering reliable labour

• verifying skill levels

• managing project uncertainty

Assignments are project-based, with unclear timelines and locations. Both sides operate with incomplete information. Decisions are inefficient because there is no structured discovery layer.

The Structural Opportunity

Digital Labour Chowk is building infrastructure around:

• worker identity and certification

• job discovery

• trust between workers and contractors

• skill tracking

• access to financial services

In future, a certification layer could help governments deliver benefits accurately and help contractors identify skilled labour more reliably.

The platform could also enable insurance, health checkups, and credit — benefits largely absent in today’s cash-driven system.

There is also a skilling opportunity. The construction ecosystem still operates through informal apprenticeship models — the ustad–shagird structure. A digital platform can formalise and scale this learning pathway.

The Data Shared During The Pitch

What cameras do not show

Inside the room, the most important signals were:

• clarity when questioned on monetisation

• honesty about operational challenges

• deep familiarity with worker behaviour

• comfort discussing failures and pivots

These are signals rarely visible in edited formats. Also what we witnessed was a deep connect to the problem, with some of the tycoons having lived this, and struggled with no access. I think in our busy lives we forget the class of people who are ‘invisible’ to us, and who don’t have systems to enforce equality and labour dignity. This is the India we live in today, even in the 21st century with all the advancements in technology.

Why I Invested

Digital Labour Chowk is Building India’s Labour Backbone 🇮🇳.

Thesis: India wants to be a $55T economy by 2047. But growth depends on the people who build our cities. Construction is India’s second-largest employer.

Yet labour remains informal, invisible, and unverified.

The Problem:
In today’s system, we have the following challenges:

• No verified work history

• No structured discovery

• Cash-based “deehadee” economy

• No benefits

• Contractors struggle to find skilled labour

• Workers struggle to find consistent work

This results in inefficiency on both sides.

My 5 lens mapped: (refer to this post if you want a refresher)

Lens 1: Founder Clarity

This is lived experience. The founder has worked closely with daily-wage workers. The team reflects ground reality — not consulting assumptions. This is not a deck problem.

It is a lived problem.

Lens 2: Category : Fit (India Stack + OCEN)

This is a reflection of market size. India has built digital infrastructure for identity and payments; We see the impact of Aadhar, UPI and the digital infrastructure. Now with new protocols like OCEN, we will see livelihoods as the next layer.India built identity and payments:

DLC adds the missing layer: Identity + Work + Wages + Trust

Lens 3: Capability (Traction)

The platform is beyond proof of concept and there is strong early adoption and engagement. It has 2 lakh+ workers with 93% full profiles, 53% job match rate. They have 12,000+ customers with 5,500+ live jobs and presence across 31 states. This is a reflection of the team’s ability to execute and DLC is clearly beyond POC into product market fit.

This is early product–market fit.

Lens 4: Cost to Build = Trust

I have built LetsVenture and understand marketplaces deeply It is one of the toughest spaces to build in, but once built, very difficult to copy. At the core, marketplaces are build on trust. DLC shows trust through 5.5 lakh+ worker activities with 21% job conversion rate. This means fundamentals are working.

Capital now scales growth.

Lens 5: Scalability + Personal Lens

Jobs are universal. Each new worker strengthens the network.

There was also a personal layer. Growing up around industrial India of Jamshedpur shaped my understanding of labour dignity and economic mobility. While growing up in small towns has the best advantages in terms of the quality of life, it also comes with the challenge of lack of exposure for anyone wanting to be an entrepreneur. That perspective influences how I evaluate such opportunities.

This investment is both economic and deeply personal. I love it when businesses can create impact AND deliver value.

Impact and outcomes can coexist.

Structural Opportunity and TAM

What was missing in the pitch and what was unsaid is the huge structural opportunity that DLC unlocks. There is an opportunity to organise this space and offer worker certification, access to insurance + loans, verified skill tracking, enable government aid targeting, improve contractor quality on jobs.

This is infrastructure for livelihoods.

Why Now?

With the booming growth we are seeing in India’s construction, the country needs skilled labour, verified credentials, transparent discovery and workforce mobility.

Without labour infrastructure, growth slows.

What To Watch Going Forward

While I committed, we need to continue to watch for contractor retention, repeat hiring behaviour, certification adoption, financial services integration and regional expansion efficiency. Thats why building companies is always work-in-progress.

Closing Reflection

This is the first note in my Inside the Pitch series — where I write from the actual founder room, not from edited television narratives.

Angel investing is not about dramatic moments. It is about pattern recognition, behaviour observation, and structured thinking.

The Angel Canvas is how I bring clarity to those decisions. Sharing the summary here. Hopefully the learnings will help us all refine our skills and help us understand risk and investing better.

PS: This should not be considered as investment advice. This should purely be seen as a learning process. Your decision to invest should be made independently, based on your own thesis and analysis.

Signing off. Have a great weekend!

Regards,

Shanti

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”

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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.

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Vc Wonderland

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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

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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.

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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.

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No spam. Just real-world analysis, prompts, and frameworks.

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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.

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A space for founders, investors & learners to go deeper into startup investing.
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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.