Article about Indian VC’s edited
By Pulkit Sharma

On Sept 25, techgoss had published an article about how the highly regarded CEO Aloke Bajpai (IIT alumni) of  iXiGO had blogged about the 4 types of Venture Capitalists operating in India.  The article began with a caustic description of ‘The Time Waster’ VCs. Aloke was telling the truth,  but it is never a good idea to antagonize the money bags of the industry. 

Hotmail founder and tech icon Sabeer Bhatia learnt this the hard way when he criticized a couple of VC’s in an interview in America. A number of VC doors were shut on the Hotmail founder.  Not that Sabeer has ever been short of money,  but it was still an inconvenience.

Now, Aloke Bajpai had edited his article on VC’s in Venturewoods.org to put a prominent disclaimer to say how nice some venture capitalists are

Before image of article:

“
Seeing a lot of healthy debate on Venturewoods regarding  the VC - entrepreneur relationship and even some amount of VC bashing in comments, I thought of summarizing my own experiences so far. Having talked, met and pitched to several Indian VCs, I have discovered four distinct breeds which are obviously broad categorizations based on my own perceptions. My gut feeling is that most VCs will be alternating between these breeds depending on not just their own personality/motivation but also by what reaction they have to your team, plan, business. Evolution from one breed to another breed over time is also observed.

So here they are :

1)The Time-Wasters

“

After image of article.  New edited version which has a Disclaimer.

“
Seeing a lot of healthy debate on Venturewoods regarding  the VC - entrepreneur relationship and even some amount of VC bashing in comments, I thought of summarizing my own experiences so far. Having talked, met and pitched to several Indian VCs, I have discovered four distinct breeds which are obviously broad categorizations based on my own perceptions. My gut feeling is that most VCs will be alternating between these breeds depending on not just their own personality/motivation but also by what reaction they have to your team, plan, business. Evolution from one breed to another breed over time is also observed.

Disclaimer: Some of my very good friends are VCs and some of the best people I know 

So here they are :

1) The Time-Wasters
“

Now the article has a Disclaimer in the beginning “Some of my very good friends are VCs and some of the best people I know “

The things we do for our startups, love and money!

(Techgoss had published the following article on Sept 25, 2009)

Time waster Indian VC’s
By Pulkit Sharma

iXiGO is making waves in the Indian travel and tourism industry. iXiGO describes itself as an “infomediary, not an intermediary. That means we are NOT an online travel agency. We let you search directly across multiple airlines, hotels, buses, trains and online travel agencies in real-time so that you don't need to search a zillion travel websites. We thus aim to make your travel search easier for you, the same way Google does for information on websites.”

Even before their launch, iXiGO was invited to showcase at Proto. Red Herring chose it in their list of Global 100.  NASSCOM listed iXiGO as among the top 100 IT Innovators of 2007. Last year, Business Today put them in India’s ten hottest startups list.

Now iXiGO CEO Aloke Bajpai (IIT alumni) had blogged about the 4 kinds of Venture Capitalists (VC’s) one meets in India.  The highly regarded Aloke speaks from personal experience and his observations are on the dot.  But only a few businesses have the courage to speak this truth.  After all, these money men VC’s hold the purse strings for many startups and new businesses.  According to Aloke, the No. 1 types of VC’s in India are the time wasters.  The rest of the article can be read in the VentureWoods site.

“
1) The Time-Wasters

The most common breed, the “Time Waster” replies to your 3rd email, schedules a call 2 weeks later, and then when you ping him/her several times offers to meet you.

He/She kicks off the meeting with an associate or analyst talking to you and comes into the meeting late, answers phone calls during meetings, walks out early, tells his/her associate to continue the discussion / follow up. You can also identify the time-wasters by the questions he/she asks which are so basic that you wonder whether he/she has even bothered to Google you or your company. After the meeting, the Time-Waster will seldom get back to you with feedback, and even if he does, it will be so generic (stuff like we are not investing in early stage internet) that you will scratch your head wondering hmm… he could have told me that in reply to my first email.

The Time Waster makes you feel like he/she is doing you a big favour just by giving you some time, or that you haven’t come from the right school, background or pedigree to merit his/her attention. Even if you are lucky enough to keep pursuing the Time Waster patiently until a termsheet , it is likely that the Time Waster will find other worthy things to do at that point or will come back with some absurd terms/valuation since he/she never got enough time to do any diligence to build a solid enough case.

This breed is an inefficiency in the VC ecosystem, and in seed/early stage can harm the company more than they good to it since the company has very little time on hands. Also, it shows serious lack of both professionalism and mutual respect for time.

…………..
“

Thanks for a great article Aloke.  If only you could tell us the names of these time waster VC’s,  Indian start ups will save a lot of their time and energy and money. And yes, we understand that a recent incident would have triggered this excellent article in VentureWoods.