The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta (Part 2)

Naren and I met in 2010. My Vision India 2020 book had just come out. We were invited to be on a panel together at Stanford. The Indian startup story was just starting to find some traction in Silicon Valley.

The Indian startup story, by the way, is different from the Indian entrepreneur story. Indian entrepreneurs, by this time, had already found acceptance in Silicon Valley. TiE played a major role in legitimizing us. Naren played an active role in that effort. Naren and Vinita each founded a technology company, took it public, and were flag bearers of a talented, highly entrepreneurial diaspora that would go on to change the technology industry for good. Shantanu Narayen, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Parag Agarwal are each milestones in that continuum of success.

In 2010, however, we were working on legitimizing product startups from India. And Naren, alongside three other venture firms, was trying to jumpstart a fledgling venture capital industry that would invest in these startups.

Today, entrepreneurs in India owe the showering of capital that is happening – the daily minting of new Unicorns – to this man and his visionary leadership. His credibility lifted the entire movement. Almost no one else in the venture capital industry in India had the level of credibility and international stature Naren had.

Without him, we would not get this far.

Unfortunately, few are aware of the enormous contribution he has made. Soft spoken, modest, and committed to old-fashioned, fundamentals oriented values, Naren did not seek publicity the way some of his industry colleagues have done. In a rare burst of frustration, in the summer of 2016, he wrote in Forbes India, Indian Startups Need a Wake-up Call.

Based on my decades of experience in the Silicon Valley and, more recently, in India, I can say that Indian founders are, in general, world class. Venture funders and the media also have their hearts in the right places. The Indian ecosystem, however, lacks maturity. Unlike in the Silicon Valley, only a handful of investors in India have experienced multiple economic and venture cycles. All of us have a lot to learn. 

While building great companies takes years, if not decades, many Indian investors have a short-term mindset. We often invest in areas that are ‘hot’, and shun larger, longer-term opportunities. The result is an over-funding of hot areas, with a concomitant funding dry-up a short time later. Indian investors also tend to value companies based on short-term metrics rather than an understanding of underlying technologies, business models and defensibility.

Post-funding, the investors’ focus seems to be on preparing for the next round of funding in preference to building sound, market-leading companies.

Exceptional founders need to be backed by a stable source of thoughtful capital from people who have gone through entire funding and company-building cycles.  

If you are part of our industry and haven’t read Naren’s article, you should. Much of what he observed then has aggravated. The media is celebrating short-term thinking and aggressive fund-raising focused venture building at an unprecedented scale. The latest celebratory milestone is Mensa Brands achieving Unicorn status within six months!

I am truly sorry to lose Naren at this critical juncture of the Indian startup ecosystem. His wise voice of sanity was necessary to counter this onslaught of Softbank, Naspers, and Tiger-led madness. In his absence, those of you in the Indian and cross-border venture industry who have been influenced by Naren need to step up and counter the death by overfunding carnage that is inevitably going to ensue.

Naren was a patient investor. He was a mentor to numerous entrepreneurs who followed in his fundamentals-focused footsteps. For an entrepreneur who was undergoing acute mental breakdown, and for his distressed wife, he was a friend.

Do you know what it takes to be a friend?

Above all, it takes time.

And it takes commitment.

This segment is part 2 in the series : The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: On the Passing of Naren Gupta
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