Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Padmaja Ruparel, President, Indian Angel Network (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What are your current sources of deal flow?

Padmaja: There are various sources. One is, of course, our own members. For each of them, if you look at our website and go through the profiles of our investors, you can see that they themselves are brands in their own right. So, a lot of entrepreneurs connect with them and send them their plans and, therefore, they send it on because they basically joined the network to help reduce risks, leverage collective domain expertise, and participate in the co-investment process. One source of deals is clearly the members themselves.

Padmaja: In addition, we’ve built, in a very short time, what is probably the most dynamic media strategy in the early stage investing ecosystem here in India. Our own brand building and our media visibility and events participation have created a bit of a push strategy for entrepreneurs to send us plans. And we’ve done some very large business plan competitions.

For example, last year we did about two and that brought us about 12,000 entrepreneurs in 30 days. The other brought us 7,500 in less than a month. And we keep engaging at different levels. So that’s the second source of entrepreneurs coming to us.

Number three is that we’ve now got a very exciting engagement model with investment advisories. That’s become the third model where we get a little more ready-made stuff because the advisories would have worked on them.

And we’ve got our relationship with the Indian Venture Capital Association. They pass on to us entrepreneur plans that are not relevant or not appropriate in terms of investment size or space or geography for the VC funds. That creates still another source of deal flow.

Last, we have a lot of overseas entrepreneurs connecting with us, and that’s how we’ve done a couple overseas investments. That happens because of our engagement on the international front. We are the Indian partner of the UK India Business Angel Network, which [former prime minister] Gordon Brown announced in January 2008. On the British side, there were a group of angel groups and from India, it was one angel group, which is IAN.

We also have taken a leading role in the Asian forum of angel networks. That’s why we get a lot of deals from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, and even China. We are the founding members of the World Business Angel Association. So, we’ve created a bit of an international footprint that gives us a look into different entrepreneurs from around the world.

Irina: Great. Could you tell us more about your business plan competitions? Were they virtual or live?

Padmaja: It was a mix of virtual and physical. We largely did the online part because that’s how you can do a scalable model. For example, when we had the 12,000 plans, we brought them down to 1,000 on a virtual basis. We engaged with them online, we had telephone call, mentoring going on [through] e-mails, and so forth. From 1,000 to 250, we brought it down in a much more engaged virtual program.

We had investors helping the entrepreneurs improve on and understand their plans over a period of ten days, but largely through phone calls, through conference calls, Skype, e-mail, and chat sessions.

We activated everything. But, if the mentor and the mentee were in the same city, of course they met. That was quite nice. But it wasn’t the norm, it was the exception. Finally, when we brought it down to 250, we had each of those 250 meet with a group of at least four investors. So, over four days, we had 50 or 60 tracks running where entrepreneurs pitched to investors.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Padmaja Ruparel, President, Indian Angel Network
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