The Neon Show Sanjeev Aggarwal, Founder The Fundamentum Partnership & Helion Ventures
Jul 30, 2019
52:06
Sanjeev Aggarwal is the Founder of The Fundamentum Partnership, Growth stage fund.Sanjeev has also been the Founder of Helion Ventures, one of the earliest Venture Capital Funds in India established in 2006.Sanjeev started his entrepreneurial journey as the Co-Founder of Daksh, one of the largest BPO in India which sold to IBM for $150 Million in 2004.Sanjeev shares his investing thesis in the podcast where startups need to solve a big problem for a large market. And if the participants in the market is very diffused which is the case with most consumer businesses, then organising that market can deliver you a very big impact.Eg Daksh was participating in $100 Billion outsourcing industry.MakeMyTrip $20 Billion travel industry.BigBasket $300 Billion grocery industry.Common theme is that very large market, highly under penetrated in terms of how it is organised and how digitally influenced it is.In founding team Sanjeev looks for First Principals thinkers. Reason that element is you are solving problem that has never been solved before so you can’t use a template to replicate. You have to create you template on the run.He is looking for Co-founders who are like Hindu gods Brahma and Vishnu, who are very complementary to each other, one if the visionary and other executes and builds on that vision.Why story tellers win ?Storytelling is as much about your thinking process as it is about communication process.Capital goes to those founders who are thinking big and who are thinking scale. Investors make their own mistakes but that is what is very attractive to investors. Are you solving a big problem. Do you have vision of the future. While you will solve actual problems bottoms up but do you have bigger picture very clearly in front of your mindThere is value in how you communicate but to me communication skills is an outcome of your thinking skills. And therefore they are the rightful recipient of large capital because in India GDP is growing and digital GDP is growing even faster. So there are lot of big problems which are waiting to be solved which is what these entrepreneurs are doing.Journey of scale up think in horizontal. It’s really about 4 things:1. Strategy: How are you thinking of shaping a market2. Structure: What is the organisation design. 3. Putting the right people 4. Having a very strong governance mechanism.