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Notes from Prashant Mehta, VC at Lightbox Venture

Startup capital is a tricky area for many entrepreneurs, hence we organized a session called – Bootstrapping vs. Fundraising – When & How.

Prashant Mehta, VC, Lightbox Ventures, GBG Mumbai

Here are the notable points from our speaker Prashant Mehta, who is a Venture Capitalist at Lightbox Ventures.

Do read and share with fellow entrepreneurs.

  • Bootstrap and show us the money and we will give you more.

  • Bootstrapping shows confidence the entrepreneur has on his/her venture.

  • At Lightbox, we give 80% weightage to decide to fund or not based on team(s).

  • A team should have ability to attract similar or more talented people than they are.

  • We consider to fund service business if they can show the growth potential without necessarily growing the number of people/resources. i.e if a service business can grow 10x by increasing resource by just 2x, that’s great model.

  • Take tough decisions first and take it deep.

  • Building a right culture is extremely critical, having a DNA and looking for talent with right DNA is imperative.

  • Scaling is a very broad term, just hiring more people does not amount to scaling.

  • Technology and infrastructure such as cloud computing, servers, open source languages, etc are now so much more affordable and makes it easy and cheap to bootstrap.

  • Its OK to think about exit, but do not talk about it to a VC while asking for funds.

  • Last mile delivery is a challenge area in India, if this can be addressed, then a significant positive impact will accrue.

  • If two different teams approach them with similar ideas; the brighter team will be considered for funding.

  • Tech startups requiring funding in India are not assessed the same way like US. This is because of cultural factors like ‘how one takes risk and handles failure’

  • In the Indian Geography, Execution of Ideas/Innovation has relatively more importance than Innovation!

  • If a VC asks ‘why do you need funding? It is completely Ok to say ‘we aim to create wealth for all stakeholder’

  • Level 2 and 3 are very important resources in building a great company, they have to be treated well and given options like ESOP to make them wealthy when startup exits.

See more pictures from the event here.

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