Indian VCs know what is happening in the US but they do not know what is happening in Indian suburbs, and they are biased against the founders who are not from IITs or IIMs, says Licious co-founder, Mr Abhay Hanjura. “VCs should first work in startups before advising startups,” he said while addressing National Leadership Conclave.
He said that Indian VCs care about AI and other tech in a startup but baulk at a project that involves commodity sourcing, manufacturing, cold chain and retail app. Many VCs advised Licious founders to offer frozen meat as they do in the US and not fresh meat, he said.
Vivek Gupta, co-founder of Licious, who himself worked with a VC firm earlier, says that Licious struggled to find investors for its meat business and Indian VCs advised the founders to stick to milk and paneer instead. “Indian VCs are risk averse,” he said.
Licious founders said that after their success in building India’s first D2C unicorn, many startups have come up India and in other countries that are replicating Licious integrated model for other fresh food items.
On the subject of VC focus on profitability, Mr Gupta said that while the VC mood has changed in the past couple of years, it has not affected the genuine entrepreneurs. He said that Licious is a few months away from profitability.
On the IPO route for startup funding, Mr Gupta said that Licious would look at the stockmarket after a couple of years. “Once I take public money, I will lose the right to burn money,” he said.
In another session, Youtube financial influencers shared their mantras for success and steering clear of manipulation.
Ms Neha Nagar, CEO, Taxationhelp.in, revealed that financial influencers are offered money to promote particular stocks and they are given readymade scripts for that. It is easy to identify such manipulation by the repetitive patterns in influencers’ advice, according to her.
Ms Rachana Ranade, Founder, Rachana Ranade and Associates, said that usually only the influencers with a few thousand followers agree to take money to promote particular stocks whereas the influencers with large followings avoid it. However, she added, a financial influencer may see the brighter or the darker side of an IPO.
On building following on social media, Mr Ankur Warikoo, Founder, WebVeda said that it is a bad idea for social media content creators to buy views and subscribers until reaching a critical organic following. According to him, by paying one can get views and followers instantly because the platform forces people to watch the promoted content, but as soon as advertising stops, the views disappear because people did not watch it willingly. “Don’t pick up Youtube if you are going to give up before 700 days,” he said.
Talking about how she generated the initial view and following on her Youtube channel, Ms Ranade said that she was a visiting faculty at multiple B-Schools and she insisted that her students watch her video many times for their viva exam.
Ms Nagar said that an aspiring influencer has to upload at least 30 videos in the first 60 days to get any traction.
Both sessions were live streamed on AIMA’s social media channels.
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