Sumir Chadha is the MD of Sequoia Capital in India and over the weekend I got this podcast from Iinovate with him.
It was interesting to say the least. He talked about a lot of generic stuff but these are my takeaways from it.
What kind of companies do you like?
• Large market opportunity – a lot of people should be ready to use your product/service
• The management team should have an exceptional customer understanding.
• 100 mn in revenues, cos we want to make 10 times the money we invest (these are ballpark figures)
What Indian IT lacks?
• Product Management
• Marketing Skills
• Technology markets are in the west
⁃ But this will change over the years
• Research and entrepreneurship are treated differently whereas in US, researchers create companies based on their original research.
Why Entrepreneurship?
• Change the world
• Revolutionize something
• Making money – Money is always a byproduct rather than the primary objective.
He also adds a lot of other things like a startup should be geographically close to where their customers are, Importance of learnings and open exchanges, research and entrepreneurship.
As always good to hear people from the industry talking. Not a very good podcast but certainly worth the time.