1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I was just talking about trends in various kinds of lending businesses. If you look at QuickBooks financing, it’s Intuit’s product. They’re lending to small businesses that use QuickBooks online.

The dataset they’re using to evaluate is QuickBooks data. That’s a proprietary dataset that nobody else has access to. It’s an unfair advantage that Intuit has.

That was my question. What is the dataset that gives you that unfair advantage in that case?

Sarbvir Singh: They are focused on finding customers who have good credit but have not been recognized as such because credit bureaus are still new in India. They use a variety of traditional metrics.

The second dataset is the history of the person. In many cases, it’s a single proprietor type of business. You see the history of that person using their SMS data. Then they layer on top anything else that is available out there.

For a restaurant, it would be their rating history. It could be the reviews they get. For different segments, they look at it in different ways.

Sramana Mitra: There are certain problems that you are interested in solving that you believe are venture-scale opportunities. Can you outline your version or vision of what are some of these big problems that you are looking for entrepreneurs to solve?

Sarbvir Singh: The first thing they have to recognize is that India is not a single homogeneous country. There are a variety of Indias that exist. There is an India of 20 million people who are extremely well off. Then there is the next 100 million people who are relatively well off, then there are the 300 million who are doing something, and then 500 million who are really poor. You have to look at these segments in different ways and address their opportunities in different ways.

Let me give you a simple example. For the people who are relatively well off, the concept of time is they want to save time. They want to buy things quickly. They want to buy services available in an instant. Then there is a bunch of people for whom saving time is not the key issue.

Their main issue is to spend time. Let me give you an example. There is this idea that people want to share things on WhatsApp. We should give them a place from where they can get that content and share that.

This is not a business that will make sense to most people. In the Indian context, it makes sense when you think that they want to spend time. Gadget games is another area.

Sramana Mitra: Entertainment business.

Sarbvir Singh: Those are in the spending-time category. We believe that there is a saving-time opportunity and there is a spending-time opportunity as well.

The second area that we believe is very interesting and is coming up is, as this new India emerges, the next 200 million people are coming online but their activity levels are not that high. These people need a different type of handling than the first 50 million people.

Video is far more effective than any other medium. There are opportunities where you can use video to communicate and provide solutions. Third is, if you look at Amazon in India, not only does it sell stuff, it also delivers stuff and provides financing.

Now, there are already people who are used to buying stuff online and who are used to working online. What can we do to build more services and products which they’ll pay for? There is an opportunity in that segment as well. Our focus is very much founder-driven as opposed to theme-driven.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent conversation. Thank you for your time. 

This segment is part 6 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sarbvir Singh of WaterBridge Ventures
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