1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the case where people have raised some money before, just raising money doesn’t qualify people for another round of funding. There need to be metrics. I was more interested in what those are.

Sarbvir Singh: In those situations, they have the resources to build something out there. There are customers. In some cases, they may be paying customers. In a B2C situation, they might not be paying but we look for high engagement.

There are two kinds of situations. One is that they’re on the right track. The second is a situation where they just need more time. Many times, businesses don’t come in neat packages. 

Sramana Mitra: Not at all.

Sarbvir Singh: Sometimes a founder starts off and has certain expectations in terms of timing and positive reception from the market. It just doesn’t happen that way. They need more time and maybe more money to prove that out. In those cases, we step in.

We also pride ourselves on being relatively independent thinkers. Our view is formed by whether we believe in something or not. If we believe and if we believe in the founder, then we are willing to back them even when others may feel that the business is not going anywhere.

I’ll give you some examples. We’ve had a lot of success in situations where the company had raised a lot of capital. Things were not going well. Most other funds were saying, “Nothing much is happening here. Why should we come back and fund it more?” We said, “It doesn’t matter. We believe that you can prove something out.” Sure enough, they went on to do bigger and better things.

Sramana Mitra: One thing that I’ve seen is that for enterprise deals, getting a meeting takes three months, or even six months. Those are really hard to validate in a very short time window.

Even if you have something, just getting through that cycle of enterprise validation is a very lengthy process.

Sarbvir Singh: Sometimes, the product itself requires work. Many times, the product isn’t ready. In an enterprise situation if your product is not ready, it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t come in neat packages. If it takes more than 12 months or 18 months, it doesn’t matter.

Sramana Mitra: You do both B2B and B2C?

Sarbvir Singh: We do both. I would say about three-fourths of our deals are B2C. We look at both. Our evaluation process is fairly straightforward. We focus on the founding team. We want to make sure that the founder has the competence and a deep understanding of the problem.

The third thing is we have to believe in the problem. Those are the key issues for us. If those are satisfied, we are willing to learn a new sector or focus on a new sector.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures
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