1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepen Parikh of Courtside Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Your talk of the drone racing league reminds me of Harry Potter and the Quidditch game.

Deepen Parikh: That’s right. I would recommend watching it because it actually does.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to add to enlighten us about your sector?

Deepen Parikh: The media side is important. One more big trend that we focus on is health & fitness. That is a global phenomenon where you see the spending of younger demographics going through the roof.

It’s more of a priority than prior generations. Feeling good, looking good, and being genuinely healthy is what a lot of people attribute their spend towards. You will spend more money on an app or gym than you did five or ten years ago.

Every country is like that. You look at India. The trends have been phenomenal in terms of pure fitness. It’s the same thing in Europe. The US is a little more mature of a market. It’s a blessing and a curse because when you have a lot of competition in fitness, the acquisition costs are not cheap.

As an early-stage company, it’s expensive to acquire. You look at Pelican where they sell you fairly pricey hardware. At the end of the day, they’re an entertainment & media company that also sells hardware. Their last valuation that is publicly available was something like $6 billion.

For those types of businesses, we’re trying to think through what’s going to be the next breakout. What will appeal to a larger audience and even for people in the Midwest? In-home fitness is something we have invested heavily on and will continue to do so. People want convenience but they still want the same experience and value of what a gym offers.

Sramana Mitra: In the case of the health & fitness ventures where you’re doing B2C investments, what level of validation do you want to see before you would invest?

Deepen Parikh: It’s dependent on the stage. If it’s a seed-stage deal, we want to see a product in the market. It’s difficult to do a pre-product investment in fitness.

Understanding those retention cohorts and seeing if there is long-term viability is really important. It depends really. If you’re going after a hardware product, we don’t have the luxury of waiting until that company is fully in the market.

If it’s a more digital-oriented product, we wait until they’re in the market. We generally want to see, at least, three to six months of cohort analysis before we can really get a sense of how users are using it. We don’t need to see millions of users but having that understanding of how the audience is using it is important.

Sramana Mitra: Have you done marketplaces in that space?

Deepen Parikh: We haven’t done any pure marketplaces in the fitness world. We’ve looked at a lot. Our biggest challenge is the leakage issue. If you’re going after a marketplace for personal trainers, it’s easy to take that transaction offline.

We’ve invested in a company that is a digital personal trainer. They will create new programs for you every day. That’s a higher touchpoint but it’s not necessarily a marketplace because you’re given trainer. We like having a bit of facilitation. We are bullish on the personal training industry though.

Sramana Mitra: It was a fascinating conversation about a world that we don’t encounter every day here. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepen Parikh of Courtside Ventures
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