Bhat's Notes

Successful entrepreneurs are happy to share their learnings with the budding entrepreneurs. Some invest in them and some take time out to mentor. However, it is extremely rare to find a serial technology entrepreneur turned VC partner to give on-demand quality time at scale to Startups and academic institutions. Dr. Srikanth Sundararajan is such a rare gem of a net giver.

When we contacted him earlier this morning to invite him for a session in February, he readily offered to come today itself. He is very proactive in accommodating his schedules to support the cause of Startups anytime.

Dr. Srikanth started as a researcher at HP and Informix in the USA. Then he founded, scaled, and successfully exited Pretzel Logic. Later he worked as CTO at HCL, CTO at  Cognizant, and COO at Persistent. He worked as a venture partner at Helion and is currently a partner with Venturest. He is also a visiting professor at IIT Bhubaneswar.

Local to global is typically applied to B2B. If you plan to go global, you better have a horizontal problem to solve. How many of you used Remedy? I built the first version of it. Freshdesk is lightweight and horizontal. The key thing is simplicity and pricing. We need to have a non-heavy product that is easy to implement. You want to see volumes. Long onboarding is a no-no. Little touch points with quick rollout are important. Take Nephroplus which is a dialysis chain. Vikram of Nephroplus made sure he got superior processes and he is fine with not having any IP. He could use data points and has an operationally heavy model that is relevant to India. To have a local business go global from being in India, it has to be simple, replicable, and easier to implement.

For B2C businesses, taking something local to global is not easy. Take Whatsapp. It needed loads of money to go global. Darwinbox, an HR startup based out of Hyderabad has appealed to the global world with its light weight. The same is the case with Quickbooks online.

Service or hourly based work is a slow climb as you compete with many local players out there in the USA. If you have a platform offering such as Adobe on the cloud, then it would be better as you can extend the virtual ecosystem.

We have grown Persistent from $10M to where it is now. We took it public. Now it has its own challenges too.

Live in the culture and be in the culture. Just because you have succeeded in your country, you can’t easily do it in another country. Have networks.

Who can write big checks in India? Nephroplus needs big checks for its business model. These are operational needs. Take DarwinBox. I told them to go to a VC fund in the USA as that is their target market.

If you have an investor from the USA but your target audience is here, have a dialogue with US investors to reduce his stake so you can have an Indian focus if that is where you are heading.

Give the angels a premium and have an amicable exit. Let it be practical. Keep it simple.

We invested in TFS, TaxiForSure. Many said Ola and Uber are the same. Why is it different? Uber is a classic share example. 77% of US-owned vehicles and only 26% of them have effectively used them and hence there is an opportunity for a shared economy there. Ola is into taxi rides. Taxi rides versus shared economy. There was an opportunity for Taxi4Sure and we grabbed it. We went aggressive with online taxi booking with some headroom for growth and some forward-looking momentum. When Uber came to India, they got to morph. How many of us share our own cars? Then we sold TFS  to Ola as it gave Ola a head start against Über. In the end, everyone is happy.

When you go after physicians, you shall go for non-experts. Don’t target experts and very big names. Budding and not-yet-popular doctors start trusting you as you bring them business. The following is what you need to focus on.

-Trust

-Responsive

-Relatable

85% of online Lenskart.com business comes from offline. Ophthalmologists are into healthcare and hence is this example. Ben Franklin got 4000 centers but it got lesser funding than say Nephroplus.

You can’t take this to a farmer in Portugal. Cargill as a company has so many modified channels. Leverage on channel partners.

Is this a scalable offering? Do you want to have customized experiences for travelers in each vertical or offer them all together? Unless you have a horizontal offering, you can’t scale this, or else you become a curated marketplace.

Have a contractual agreement such as a value-added reseller. In some countries, you may need local representations. Have some kind of JV with P&L and you shall be alright. if you go global, please understand you have to have a local partner. Even Whatsapp needs a local one at the operator level. The global revenue share model has to be clearly explainable to the incoming investors.

I am more aligned with IIIT Hyderabad from its very early days than my association with T-Hub.

Focus is the key and we ride on some luck.