E78: Madhu Shalini Iyer (Partner, Rocketship VC)

Madhu Shalini Iyer is a Partner at Rocketship VC. Previously, she was the Chief Data Officer of Gojek and helped grow the business into a $1 billion unicorn. She was on the board and started the Singapore office. Prior to Gojek, Madhu was an operating partner at a 150M private equity fund building startups across South East Asia. She was part of the founding team of Intuit’s Quickbooks Lending Platform where she helped grow the platform to $300 million and holds 3 patents in the areas of user data augmented algorithms for financial inclusion.

In this episode, we will cover:

1. Madhu's journey from Intuit and GoJek operator to board member and investor (3:00)

2. What aspect of the operator journey makes investing more pleasurable? (10:45)

3. How does Rocketship VC use data science to assist in the selection of startups for investment? (18:21)

4. How does data science influence Rocketship's thesis? (22:41)

5. Portfolio construction constraints with a heavily data-driven model (25:32)

6. Where does Rocketship stand on gut and human instinct versus data science? (30:20)

7. How did Rocketship's data science-focused fund model attract LPs? (34:05)

8. How does data and the Rocketship model adapt to macroeconomic trends? (42:27)

9. Can data be used to assess the impact of an investment on a portfolio? (46:15)

10. Why is investing so personal for Shalini (50:41)

11. Advice to founders and investors (59:25)