less humans, more robots

Thanks to my job I meet a lot of amazing minds, thinking about starting their dream ventures, and make this world a lesser complex place.

I think ‘angel investing’ is the most miss-understood phrase in the venture eco-system. As a small contributor to this angel-investing ecosystem, I try to tell these first time entrepreneurs, how stuffs work here in this vertical. Most of the time, they agree to the so-called ‘high finance’ world.

I have high degree of respect to those people. When my colleagues and me make sincere suggestions, they listen to it, discuss it, go back, do their homework, talk to people they trust and come back with a better understanding of venture building.

Like most of the other professionals, we are specialists in a specific area: like, I think I do a great work in alliance building, business development, sales and marketing. My close associate Dipankar is good at understanding technology; Nupur is a Sales professional with a strong investment banking and entrepreneurship background, Shyam plays the devils advocate.
Our investment committee and mentors always throw us to the walls, saying “DO YOUR HOME WORK” [they are high time pissed about our T-shirt culture as well :)]

All sweet days, we invest our capital or time or both in people outperforming our expectation level. Though we follow a 80-step due-diligence process covering the idea to the financials to the team, most of the time its gut feeling. Most of the time it’s the chemistry and faith.

Now, I meet another set of entrepreneurs, pretty old, say 40 plus, managing big P&L in global corporate, 15 years of experience in this corporate world etc and flashy designations like VP this & Head that.

We received this plan, fairly ok idea, funding team collectively has around 70 years of professional experience etc.
Nice! We felt good, Big guns also mailing us, :)

Finally, we planned a telecon, talked about the idea - it’s a consumer Internet product, something to do with girls, women etc. Investment requirement: around 15 lakhs (USD 30K)! That’s it!

Hell, my pal asked one of the founders, give the URL so-that we can check it up etc, yup URL, yep, name of the company, the answer was “we are waiting for the angel investment to develop the technology”

[Technology? My ass! It costs around 10$ to buy a domain, damit! Can’t you fucking afford that, u CEO of that Suburb ADM Company, drawing USD 200,000 Per annum?]

Then we did a little bit of background check, yes, profiles are true, one is CEO at a 2000+ people BPO outfit, second is a VP-Sales and other one is a VP-Ops.
DAMN!

Imagine the base level salary of an executive? 50 lakhs per annum? Minimum? He’s been in that job for the last 4 years, managing a P$L of 230 million!

Now, if a college kid is mailing me this idea and we have liked the plan, there’s no turning back, we prob’ly get involved in the idea stage itself, helping him with better bandwidth, buying him some coffee, introducing him to some of the bigger guys.

All you techies there, give me a figure, how much it costs to create a demo site showing the basic 2.0 idea? Wait! Lemme guess, 5 lakhs? Less than that?

Thanks to caffeine over dose, I wrote a long email suggesting: Sir, please DO YOUR HOMEWORK!