1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on some of the companies that you have funded. As you talk about them, talk about what situation were they in when you got involved.

What did they have by way of proof points that you resonate with. Let’s start with the one that you already exited.

Sarbvir Singh: The company that we already exited is Unacademy. It’s continuing to grow rapidly. It’s a platform. There’s a lot of content creators in India and there are a lot of people who want to access that content, but they don’t have a platform to access that.

It was also their own story. Gaurav had put some videos on YouTube. He got a fantastic response. When Roman put together some stuff on the civil services, that was also very well-received.

They took the view that if our stuff is well-received, there must be many other educators whose stuff can be well-received. It was a relatively small check for us. It was an early round where it was mostly high-profile angels and us.

Our thought process was straightforward. These guys were aggressive and had full understanding of what they were doing. They had put themselves out there. There wasn’t any revenue or any proof points around other educators. Those were starting to come when we met them.

It scaled very rapidly. Several funds invested after us. We ended up exiting in the Series C round where we really felt that we had done what we could. 

Sramana Mitra: So you exited into follow-on rounds.

Sarbvir Singh: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: I have two questions before we go to another example. Firstly, it sounds like you are okay with the media business model. Can you elaborate on that?

There are a lot of discussions on this topic in the investor circles. A lot of investors do not like the advertising business model at this point. What is your analysis of that?

Sarbvir Singh: Unacademy doesn’t have an advertising business model. Their business model is around subscription. Now that they have a deep body of content, you have to pay for access to the premium layer. I have a background in the media business.

My first VC experience was a fund with a media group. Network 18 was a partner in India for CNBC and CNN. I had exposure to news, entertainment, television, film, and radio. The challenge is, you need a certain kind of scale and engagement. The structure of the industry has to be right for you to make money. That’s why a lot of people are concerned about the advertising model.

As much as we look towards the US, we also look towards China as inspiration for us. There, you see the business model is quite complicated. There is advertising. There may be some subscription. There may be some games. That’s the kind of model that we believe will work in India too where you have to have a mix. 

Sramana Mitra: Pure advertising business models are not venture scale opportunities. 

Sarbvir Singh: That is true just because of the size of the market.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures
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