This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rajiv Srivatsa, a partner at Antler India, a pre-seed venture capital firm based in Bengaluru. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m a partner at Antler India, an early-stage venture capital fund. We launched the India chapter about four years ago, and it was the firm’s sixth location globally. Antler India has a $75 million fund, which we closed in March.
Our plan is to invest in 120 startups over four years, and we have about 65 to date.
The classic Antler model includes running a cohort of individuals who are transitioning from being employees to startup founders. We help them look for their cofounders and give shape to their idea.
One thing we do differently in India is we run a cohort for teams as well. We found that there is a social tendency for people to prefer going into business with people they have known from college or work, and we welcome founders who may already have a team or product in mind.
My team and I receive about 4,000 to 5,000 applications, and we select 100 people to join our individual founders’ cohort. The program runs for six months, and we end up investing in 20-25 people, or eight to 10 companies. We give them a sum of $250,000 to fund their idea, and another $250,000 once they raise additional capital.
I’ve been a founder myself and have run a company in the 2010s. I have seen two main positive shifts in the Indian startup market.
It is a lot easier to attract talent than it was 10 years ago. There was a lot of entitlement and questioning from potential employees, because working for startups instead of long-established companies was seen as a risk. Since the pandemic, there has been a shift, and people are keen to join startups.
Founders are getting more mature by the year and have a better understanding of what it takes.
They’re more frugal because they know capital is tight and they have given their industry more thought. They’re not getting into business because something is hot and are instead building for the next five to 10 years. They also assume that their products will need higher traction to raise the same amount of money that would have been invested in them before.
Here are five things I look for in first-time founders:
Five founder traits
Execution and strategy: This is their ability to iterate fast — move between ideas, drop things, and find something new quickly.
We also seek people who have ideas that match their skill sets. For example, we don’t want to invest in an AI company where none of the founders have solid tech expertise. In the early or “zero to one” and “one to 10” stages, founders have to be able to do things on their own.
Grit and tenacity: Either in their personal life or professional life.
Customer obsession: We spend the longest time gauging how obsessed a founder is with their customer and problem statement. We want to know if it’s just a flash in the pan or if it’s something they have been debating over many years. Does the founder really feel the pain of the customer?
We want people who are not just armchair experts but have worked with customers and gotten their hands dirty. Someone who has spent their professional life making presentations and in conference rooms may not cut it.
Communication: Another thing we look for is a high level of clarity in thinking and how they communicate. At the end of the day, venture capital is a continuous fundraising game — you have to always keep finding good talent, as well as keep telling new investors and the media your story.
We try to gauge if the person is getting mixed up, or if they’re clear about what they’re doing.
Ambition and scale: The venture capital industry does not work if you want small outcomes. Even if you don’t want to be a unicorn, a startup that is valued at $1 billion, you still need to think in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars of valuation and foresee hundreds of millions of people using your product.
Plus an X-factor
We don’t look for people who score about 80% to 100% on each of these criteria. Instead, we prefer if, for one to two of the five traits, they demonstrate a spike or an X factor — they immediately stand out as someone who is world–class when it comes to execution or communication, for example.
We want people who are terrible at some things but exceptional at others.
Cofounder complements
Most of our participants look for their cofounders after they’ve entered the cohort, and we spend a lot of time and attention matching people.
In my experience, India is not a country where teaching communication is emphasized a lot, so we ask each participant 60 questions to understand their values, working styles, and personality types. We look for complements and see pair-ups between one person with a technical background and one person with business acumen. If a third cofounder is needed, they usually come with operations expertise.
One company we recently funded is working on listening to conversations between employees and customers in retail stores, in order to provide retail data to convert more customers. It was the outcome of someone who has worked in retail for years, paired up with a cofounder with tech background.
Are you a founder who moved to India to launch their own startup? Please reach out at shubhangigoel@insider.com
