Page 41 - Grasshopper Magazine

Intelligence, Saas and last but not the least Tourism. to extend their mentorship and want to go about
Venture Catalysts is now India’s one of the it, then of course we will have to look at their stage
biggest early stage investors with 5,200 startups of advancements and their keenness. But is any
working with it in 9 cities. startup comes to us we always give them an hour
or half an hour whatever we have to guide them.
What is your total entrepreneurial experience? We have an open door policy and for now we are
I have a total entrepreneurial experience of about getting around 100 startups in a week. The idea is
16 years. I’ll give you a different story. In 2008 I that if you have come to help we will surely help
decided to do something on my own. 2009 was you with something in that small time.
when I started my own company. From 2009 to
2014 I did 6 different startups. Two of them failed How are your previous cohorts doing now?
while four of them succeeded. The last one I did Beardo is doing very well at this moment. They
was school quiz league which is right now biggest actually went down to make an industry out of it.
quiz company for school kids. That was my last Earlier there was no industry for men grooming.
entrepreneurial activity which I did with someone Other one will be Lenskart. It has been able to
else as a co-founder. Then I went down to work garner immense popularity is very less time. Innov8
with a friend as an employee. Later he asked me to
be a Director with him.
That all being done I wanted to do something
back in Uttar Pradesh on my own. And one of
my friends had started VentureCatalysts with few
co-founders. They had already started for a year
and then he asked me, “Why don’t you do UP?” So
UP is what I have started. At that time it was only
running in India and in 2017 we have expanded
it to Doha and Hong Kong and this year we are
expanding it to Singapore and US. We are now
India’s one of the biggest early stage investors and
Asia’s biggest incubator.

What makes you different from other startup
accelerators out there?
33 crore startups, 315 crore invested and everybody
who invested Re 1 got Rs 12 in return that was the
average. Industry standards are around 3-5x. You
can imagine and if the average is 12x then you have
surely done something better than other. Other
companies take a time of 6-8 months to funds on an
average and till the time money arrives it is already
10 months. But at VentureCatalysts, we have made
a rule that it has to be less than 60 days before they
are funded. The actual money may take another
one month or so to arrive. So it is one-third the
time taken than any other incubator. If you
are going to take 10 months how will the
startup even perform better. We do not
tell them what to do we tell them how
to do it.

What is the lens through which you
see an approaching cohort? What
are the filtering criteria?
If a mentorship comes in, we are
always there to help them then
and there itself. If they wish
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