Investment Thesis: Sumir Chadha

I interviewed Sumir Chadha, as a follow-up to the Investment Thesis series. I met Sumir 7 years back when I was doing Uuma, and Sumir was still at Goldman Sachs. Since then, he moved to Silicon Valley, and started one of the early efforts in venture investing in India, with Westbridge Capital. Westbridge was recently acquired by Sequoia, providing a significant validation, as well as a somewhat changed focus. Whereas Westbridge primarily invested in services firms, now they’re doing mostly consumer internet & mobile, clearly two good growth markets for India at the moment.

SM: Please describe your background, to help entrepreneurs understand your point-of-view.
SC: I have spent the past decade between Sequoia Capital india and Goldman Sachs investing in early to mid-stage Indian companies spanning a number of industries including consumer internet, wireless, outsourced services and software. Prior to that, I was at Mckinsey working on internet and technology strategies. I have an MBA and was a Computer Science major at Princeton.

SM: What stage are you looking to invest in over the next 6-12 months?
SC: We are actively investing in seed and early stage ventures.

SM: What segment(s)?
SC: Our core focus areas currently are consumer internet and wireless.

SM: What market dynamics do you look for?
SC: We look for large potential markets that are early in their evolution.

SM: What size of investment are you looking to make?
SC: We have invested anywhere between $0.5 – 7 mm in early stage ventures.

SM: What are your key investments and the rationale behind making those investments. This will help entrepreneurs understand how you process deals.
SC: Some recent consumer internet investments of ours include Indiatimes, Shaadi, Travelguru, Tutorvista and Guruji. They all share the characteristics of targeting large potential markets and strong management teams.

SM: What kinds of deals are you interested in seeing?
* Describe, in some detail, the last deal you funded, and your rationale behind funding it.
* Do you fund capital-intensive deals?
* Do you fund built-to-flip deals?
* Do you fund “hits” businesses?

SC: We recently funded Shaadi, which is the leading matrimonial site for Indians globally. We feel that the company has a large market opportunity and a strong management team, and has built a business model that can be highly profitable.

We only fund companies that have the potential to be large – we don’t think about companies in terms of flips or hits.

SM: Describe your ideal entrepreneur.
SC: Hungry, motivated, very driven to succeed. Wants to prove something. Has a deep understanding of the customer problem he or she is trying to address.

SM: Which VCs do you like to work with as part of a syndicate?
SC: We work with a broad range of firms, depending on what is best for the entrepreneur in terms of providing complimentary networks and knowledge.

SM: What is your thesis on entrepreneurial / investment opportunities given the state of the market? What markets are likely to crash? What markets are likely to open up?
SC: We prefer not to comment publicly on markets where we haven’t invested yet.

For entrepreneurs working on consumer internet and mobile businesses in India, clearly, Sumir is one of the most important people to call. Mostly, however, don’t expect powerpoint financing. You’re going to have to make some pre-seed investment before you approach Sequoia. Mark Kvamme told me a few months back, that the ONLY successful investment they have ever made where the company did not already have traction was Paypal. I am pretty sure, Sumir and his team will follow the exact same tenet in India.

However, if you have managed to get things off the ground, and believe you have a business plan hypothesis that scales, Sequoia has tremendous reach, and Sumir can help you access that.

This segment is a part in the series : Investment Thesis