E23: Chinnu Senthilkumar (General Partner & CTO, Exfinity Venture Partners)

Chinnu Senthilkumar is the General Partner and CTO at Exfinity Venture Partners, an Enterprise Tech focused VC fund with an emphasis on startups in the US-India corridor.

Prior to Exfinity, Chinnu held Senior Executive roles at Intel, SanDisk and Texas Instruments, both in the US and India. In the capacity of SanDisk’s Country Head, Chinnu spearheaded SanDisk (now part of Western Digital) India operations in the areas of R&D, Operations and IT outsourcing. Chinnu is an innovator from a young age and received "National Technology award" from President of India at the age of 21. He has received his Masters from University of Utah, Salt Lake City, US and B.E. from College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai.

You may follow Chinnu (@chinnusenthil1), host Akash Bhat (@bhatvakash) and our podcast (@thedesi_vc) on Twitter.

. . .

In this episode, we will cover:

1. Current VC landscape in India (2:27)

2. Chinnu’s background (12:04)

3. Consumer vs Enterprise startups (16:10)

4. Investment strategy and criteria at Exfinity (22:00)

5. Dissecting deals won or lost i.e. using post mortem to analyze fund performance and strategy (27:38)

6. Corporate VC vs traditional VC (31:01)

7. The role of a GP and how they raise funds (34:04)

8. Time allocation as a GP (40:04)

9. Raising funds –– which is the toughest, the first or the subsequent ones? (44:05)

10. LP communications –– best practices with existing investors and how to handle conversations with potential LPs (45:55)

11. GP commitment and benchmarks (53:23)

12. Rapid fire (56:42)