The Playground and the Players

Journey of LetsVenture to LVX, and everything in between

A Reminder to Pause

I lost a close friend last week. My trek partner and a friend in everything crazy. Yesterday, was her obituary. There were old photographs everywhere — moments frozen in frames we never think to celebrate while they’re happening. It reminded me again how final an ending can be — and how easily we take time for granted. We keep telling ourselves we will thank people later, pause later, reconnect later. Sometimes there is no later. I am yet to recover from the unreal feeling of loss.

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Why I’m Sharing This

For many of you who know me, you know my journey. You know about LetsVenture. Today, we have rebranded LetsVenture to LVX. There are many reasons for that — but here, for my friends, I’d like to share something more personal. No business numbers, just a few reflections along the way. Motivated by the fact that we need to share stories while we are together. We rarely look back at our own journeys with softness.

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Where It All Began

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” — Walt Disney

When I started LetsVenture in 2013, I wasn’t an investor. I didn’t come from venture capital. I didn’t have all the answers — most days, I was just asking the questions nobody else seemed to be asking back then.

I was a founder, and I knew what it felt like to need that first cheque and not know where to begin. I also knew there were people who wanted to back new ideas but didn’t know how to find them, trust them, or help them grow. LetsVenture began in that gap — the space between founders and investors, between dreams and belief.

In these twelve years, I’ve met the most amazing people — not just the founders who dared to build, or the investors who trusted them when there wasn’t much to trust on paper. I’ve met lawyers who quietly kept deals moving at 2 a.m., finance folks who cared more about getting the numbers right than taking credit, customers who gave new brands a chance, big corporates who opened doors, and so many others who stand at the edges of this ecosystem but hold it up every single day.

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If I look back now, I feel we didn’t just build a product — we built a piece of India’s startup infrastructure. We were never the players in the arena. We built the playground and invited everyone in.

“We didn’t just play, we built the playground.”

And when you’re the playground, you touch thousands of lives in small ways that aren’t always visible. The founders are the ones who are celebrated — as they should be. They take the risks, they do the building. But the quiet joy of building the playground is that you get to watch so many journeys unfold. You hold the space for their stories, even if you’re not the story yourself. Many stories of failures which are never heard. Some stories where failures are magnified so much that it causes people to withdraw. I have also seen founders change when money comes in or when success knocks.

But all this is not unique to startups — that’s just people, everywhere. This world shows you human nature in its rawest form. It teaches you to stay steady, to understand people for who they really are, not just who they say they’ll be.

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Stories don’t build themselves. People do.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African Proverb

Let me tell you about my co-founder Sanjay Jha. He has been one of those quiet anchors through it all. He brings a kind of candour that’s hard to read but impossible to miss once you see it. We are very different people — we played very different roles — but that’s what building needs. It needs people who bring their own truth to the same table. There are so many dear friends who’ve been colleagues, whose belief is what kept this going. There are people who gave the best years of their professional life to this journey. I have tried to capture all this in the pictures here. It does not do justice but helps with sharing a small ion of the journey.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard

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And the story continues

The journey has its highs. It also has it lows. But every piece has shaped me — even the disappointments. The co-founders who left. The partnerships that failed. The trust that didn’t come back the way we hoped.

Looking back, I am grateful — deeply — for what LetsVenture gave me. It gave me this vantage point to see people, not just deals. It gave me friendships and stories I’ll carry for life. It gave me a front-row seat to India’s leap into building — something I still feel lucky to have played even a small part in.

So when we change our name to LVX, it’s not the end of LetsVenture. Its the beginning of a new chapter. It’s the same playground — just bigger. New fences, new slides, maybe new swings — but the same ground underneath.

I have shared some old photos — from a time when none of us knew what would come next but we showed up anyway. Maybe they will remind you, as they remind me, that it’s worth pausing now and then to say thank you, to forgive, to celebrate, to remember that everything ends — but while it’s here, it’s alive because we keep showing up for it.

Thank you for showing up with me. As for me, LVX will continue to be this journey of joy, purpose and commitment.

With much love,

Shanti