Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Amit Grover, Member, Mumbai Angels (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Amit: Let’s take Apalya Technologies. The first time they came to Mumbai Angels, we didn’t shortlist them at all. We told them to take three or four months and come back with a prototype in place with customers, a few service providers signed up, and television channel providers.

They came to us four months later and gave a presentation to the group. People were very impressed, but the amount of commitment that came from the group was not enough for what they wanted. Apalya wanted $500,000, and we committed $250,000.

Again, the deal did go through. The team still delivered, they continue to develop their business, they continue to develop more technology and more service channels, and sign up an increasing number of telecom service providers – Vodafone, Reliance, Idea, BSNL, and so forth. These are telecom service providers across India.

They showed more traction, and they got a lot of good customers across the country through these telecom service providers. They came to us again four months later and at that time, we were able to raise more than $500,000 for the company. That’s the story.

Then, there are a few companies that actually fold up because of lack of funds or because of lack of direction. Whatever small way we can do something for them, we try.

There are limitations to the time we can devote to the rest of the companies because we are ourselves running our own businesses. But whatever we can do to contribute to their success we try that. In fact, the idea for Nurture Talent also came through the experiences I had with Mumbai Angels.

The companies that were coming to Mumbai Angels were of very good quality in terms of a single domain of business. But they lacked comprehensive and complete ideas about how to start a company; how to grow; how to develop manpower, services, and skills; how to get customers; how to manage their finances, working capital, and cash flows.

People had good ideas in terms of technology, but they didn’t even know how to register a company, for example, or how to make a business plan. There were people who said, “We’ve never made a business plan. What do we do?”

You understand, a business plan is the first thing that you need to show investors. Even for your internal matters, if you want to understand where your business can go in the worst case or best case, you need one. So, we felt that there was a lack of skills that were required. There are a lot of people who need support, so we thought, let us provide some support for them.

Irina: Tell me how Nurture Talent operates.

Amit: What we do at Nurture Talent is call budding entrepreneurs, people who want to start companies or people who have already started but they are zero to one year, or zero to three years kind of time and they want to learn how to be more successful.

We conduct short workshops and training programs for them. These training programs can be for one day or half a day on topics like finance for entrepreneurs. In finance for entrepreneurs, we cover revenues, expenses, and profit margins in your business. How to manage your cash flow? What is the break-even analysis that you can do for your business? What are the pricing strategies you can deploy for your business? How do you do valuations for your company? What are the sources of funding available for any company and at what stage are they available? These are the issues that we train people on.

We give presentations and have interactive discussions. We invite entrepreneurs who have been there in the past and grown their companies to a certain level. We invite VCs and angel investors to talk from their experiences and guide these budding entrepreneurs.

We do the same thing for topics like marketing for entrepreneurs, where we invite people and answer questions. What is customer value proposition? How do you define a niche for your business? How do you influence the customer? What are the sale cycles like? How do you reach out to customers and spread the word about your business? These are the basics of marketing and sales.

We have already conducted a few workshops on business plans for entrepreneurs. We address questions like: What is the executive summary? What are the financial predictions? How do you make a presentation, whether it’s to investors or banks or for your own internal purpose?

We have conducted these training programs across seven cities. Three hundred thirty-five startups and budding entrepreneurs, including working professionals, students, doctors, lawyers, architects, and software engineers have already gone through these programs. I recently completed my twenty-fifth workshop.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Amit Grover, Member, Mumbai Angels
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