Whats next baby? Lets go VC hunting

Ok, Ok. So I am bitter. Bitter about the hypocrisy and bitter about the hot air that surrounds the VC community in India today. As an Entrepreneur you tend to take these things to heart. In the next series of Blogs, I will take you through our quest for funding and how it pans out.


So when we started in the BPO the business we were told, "Build a good team, Build Customers. Funding will follow. Trust us". So we did just that. Stated with a motley crew of 8 people and built it way up to 100. Went out an got some customers as well . Oh yeah and revenue (Monthly Recurring Revenue). It took us 2 years to do this. Along the way we even finalized bank financing (we were later told that this was quite an achievement).

So we did all this and proudly started taking to the VCs. I ignored the advice of my friend (a fellow Entrepreneur) to stick with our "old way" of funding. Hey, I had all the ingredients right? Screw my friend. The VC he met up with was "not typical" (I was just going to learn what "typical" meant).

The first one had the week before evangelized the concept of funding startups in an interview with a business magazine. We were so excited. We would find someone who empathizes with us and take us from where we were to the next level. After all we were not asking for much money. That’s good right? ... NOT !!!!

So this guy starts talking about how his company does not have the "appetite" to do small investments and that they were just in the process of re-orienting themselves to handle large investments only. He suggested we look for friends, family, TiE and the janitor (ok I added this one for effect) to fund our "next step". He said "You need scale". So its not enough to scale from 8 to 100. It needs to be bigger much bigger!!! I guess the early stage "there’s no risk to me" advisor forgot to talk to us about scale. So we came back sufficiently chastened. I was afraid that he was going to charge us for the coffee he gave us but thankfully they absorbed the costs. After all they had $350 Million under management.

Of course he put his Harvard education to good use and floated a few buzzwords that bamboozled us. We really came out feeling we hadn't achieved much. Don't Revenues, Customers, Team mean anything without size? Probably not to this guy but for us it seemed a significant achievement. Maybe we needed to be scam artistes to get some money. Do straight businesses get funded anymore?

Then we got a call from an advisory company... stay tuned folks... it gets interesting.

P.S: I haven’t told my friend about this visit. I'm sure he'll find out 'cause he knows I publish this Blog :-(