1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar (Part 1)

Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar, and a long-time player in the Indian startup ecosystem discusses Exit options for Indian startups and other topics.

Sramana Mitra: I know you’ve been in the industry for a very long time and have been following the evolution of the Indian venture capital ecosystem for a long time. Let’s start diving into a bit of your background. Then let’s introduce Iron Pillar.

Mohanjit Jolly: I am, what you call, an IBCAD. IBCAD is Indian-Born Confused American Desi. I was born in India and moved to the US when I was a teenager. I did all my education through to graduate work in Aerospace. I spent some years on the Defense contracting side building spy cameras for the US military. I was part of the team that fixed the Hubble back in the mid-90s. I did UCLA MBA and launched an incubator at Caltech back in the late 90s. I did a joint venture with Andy Grove at Intel while I was at Mattel.

Then I got a cold call from Guy Kawasaki. He had started an investment bank called Garage which pivoted to a seed-stage VC firm after the dot-com crash. I’m an accidental venture capitalist, but I’ve been working with startups for about 23 years now. Then I was with DFJ and Tim Draper from 2007 to December 2015. Then I launched Iron Pillar in January of 2016. We’re a six-and-a-half-year-old firm and having a blast.

Sramana Mitra: How big is Iron Pillar?

Mohanjit Jolly: I can give you a historical perspective. I’m not allowed to speak about what’s going on currently. We started the firm in 2016. We did not raise capital in 2016. We started the process in 2017. We raised a $90 million fund. That was fund one. We invested in eight companies from that fund.

As one does in the middle of a pandemic, we decided to raise another fund. We raised a $48 million top-up fund to double down on the winning companies from fund one. That got oversubscribed around May 2020. Now we’re on to our next vehicle. We’ve been closing and deploying capital in our most recent fund vehicle.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the positioning of the new fund. Is it a seed fund, post-seed fund, pre-seed?

Mohanjit Jolly: With Garage, it was seed stage. I was writing $250,000 to $500,000 checks. DFJ was more of a Series A. Iron Pillar is further downstream from that. The stage of the company where we invest is usually post product-market fit and the focus for the fund is companies that are building from India for global markets which leans more toward B2B. However, we have an 80/20 rule to say that 80% of the companies are going to be more B2B SaaS and 20% are more consumer-centric. All of them are going to leverage the cloud and all of them are heavy technology companies.

From a stage standpoint, we’re more a post-Series A type of investor. We call ourselves growth investors. It’s when a SaaS company gets to somewhere between $4 million and $10 million. One of the reasons I was intrigued by what you were doing is we start tracking companies much earlier than when they need our capital. Even when they’re seeded or they do their Series A, we start tracking interesting companies and engaging with them so when they get to a point where we get excited from a direct investment standpoint, we can preempt the round.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar
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