1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vikas Choudhury of Pivot Ventures (2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some of the things you’ve invested in. We’ll talk about Pivot Ventures investments in a moment. You said you’re one of the first angel investors in the Indian ecosystem.

Talk a little bit about what you invested in 2005. How has that landscape changed? How has your investment evolved through that period?

Vikas Choudhury: There is a sea of change from 2005 to now. 2005 was the first coming of the entrepreneurship wave in India as well as the venture capital ecosystem coming together across various stages of opportunity. The opportunities you saw at that point in time were first generation building foundation products and services.

It was the first set of products that leveraged the Indian internet but still with a market that was not yet in critical mass. They’d established early-stage proof of concept and building that as we move along. Today, it has changed significantly.

One of my first investments was in this company called InMobi. It became India’s first ever unicorn and the world’s largest independent mobile ad exchange. It actually started out as a publisher on the local search engine that ran relevant ads from local merchants.

As was prevalent at that point in time, businesses often very quickly validated an idea and pivoted into an area that had critical mass. That’s when InMobi developed into being a global ad exchange versus being a local publisher of relevant information. That was when Kleiner came in.

At that point, nobody understood mobile advertising in India, but that was a bet we were willing to make. It’s going to ride several waves. Mobile is going to become the primary communication of choice for the Indian consumer. It is then going to evolve into data and information being delivered and consumed. Finally, an entire digital advertising market is going to emerge from one that did not exist at that point in time. That is one investment that worked really well.

The other one that I bet on at that point in time was an institution called Myntra, which is now part of Flipkart. At that time, e-commerce was extremely new in this country. It was the first time ever that the ecosystem was coming into play in terms of logistics for last-mile delivery, payment systems for digital payments as well as innovation of cash on delivery.

That drove Indian e-commerce adoption as well as consumers going out and searching for products and buying online. We made a bet that in a category like apparel, there will be an ability for the product to be able to talk to you, guide you through the journey, and deliver all the convenience of shopping at home. That has been a fantastic journey as well. Those were some of my early themes that I did where we bet on the large ships.

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum