The next 10 years

I've had an unusual year. I took some time off for the first time ever. I did an eating and drinking tour through Europe. I got (a bit) healthier. I binged more content than ever before. I also spent a few months helping build a foundational model company in San Francisco (👋 Cartesia ).

More importantly, I figured out what I want to do.

I'm going to spend the next decade investing in early stage startups in India. I’m excited to be back at Lightspeed India investing across consumer and AI, working with an amazing team to help even more amazing founders.

I wasn’t the best founder

A big takeaway (or traumatic memory 🤷) from FrontRow was that I should hone into what I truly cared about and work on that, and everything else will get figured out.

I enjoyed being a founder, but did I love it? I loved parts - seeing the joy users got from using your product, building a brand, seeing folks on the team grow into leaders. I could sound convincing when asked but would I be a founder without the trappings of VC, or the cred of choosing something hard? Maybe not. I loved the idea of being a founder, but not the journey. 

While it had been a dream for years, I also learnt I was okay-ish at it. Don’t get me wrong, I was great at some things (storytelling, fundraising, brand, partnerships, hiring) but definitely missed some (arguably essential) characteristics. The conviction, customer obsession and resilience I’ve seen amongst the best founders are still aspirational goals for me. Maybe it was the market, the idea, or maybe it was me. Reality hits you hard, and this was definitely hard to admit

I was much better as an investor, and am even better now

In the past few months I spent a bunch of time helping friends building companies and I realised I loved the zero to one parts of a startup and genuinely missed investing.

I’d always loved being an investor, but hadn’t felt particularly useful working with portfolio companies. This was one of the main reasons I hadn’t stayed on in VC. In retrospect, this was because a) I had no idea what I was doing, and b) just couldn't empathise with founders. But FrontRow changed both of these. 

The 4 years of FrontRow were a ride - launching with beloved celebs, scaling to millions of users and revenue, raising nearly $20m, hiring and letting go of hundreds of amazing people followed by multiple pivots (more here). It helped me understand what founders go through more than anything else ever could. Interestingly, it also made me understand my own skills better. 

The first inkling of this was when a friend asked for pitch feedback for his Series A fundraise. I was on a hike in Barcelona, and I spent the next hour jamming on his story, and there was honestly nothing I’d rather have been doing. And this happened multiple times over the past year. Founders were genuinely finding spending time with me useful, and I was enjoying it immensely.

I now know what skills I am good at, and also where I am useless, so I know when and how to contribute, and when to shut up and let someone build. I also genuinely feel way more invested in every single founder’s journey than I had ever before. When in VC, I used to get annoyed when founders said “oh no you need to be a founder to understand” but god sometimes you really just do.

Spending a few months helping a friend’s AI startup cemented this. There’s nothing I’m more drawn to or excited by than working with early stage founders, and looking forward to do this every day. In India.

The next 10 years in India are going to be transformative

I wasn’t the most optimistic person when we shut down FrontRow, but another realisation as I got more time to process was that not only am I attached to India, but extremely optimistic about the Indian startup ecosystem. I enjoyed working in SF, but I never loved it like I loved building in India.

We often forget where we were as an ecosystem a decade ago. 

In 2013, Flipkart had just become India’s first unicorn, Zomato had raised <$50M and did not do food delivery while Freshworks had just raised a $7M Series C. UPI and Jio did not exist.

10 years is a short time to go from there to over $40B in market cap of public tech companies, multiple billion dollar revenue startups and an ecosystem bursting with ideas and capital.

The next 10 years are going to be equally dramatic.

Consumer tech companies will be the largest companies in the country. The leapfrogging from unorganised to technology played out with e-commerce, and is accelerating with quick commerce digitising groceries, OTTs reaching hundreds of millions of users, & digital advertising growing crossing TV ads. Spends are getting larger, and an even larger share of them will be tech first.

AI will transform the hundreds of billions of dollars of services that India provides the world. India’s IT services and BPO market have been mainstays of our growth but they will look dramatically different. I’ve spent the last few months working on AI, and not only is all the hype real, I’d say it’s not hyped enough. AI demos are viral today, but AI services will be an integral part of our lives 10 years later.

India is incredibly exciting without even getting into the energy transition we’re going through, the rise of global consumer products from India, the amazing consumer brands getting created, the growth of FinTech, and more!

I’ll be investing across these trends and others, so if you want to chat, or just grab a drink, please reach out. I'm at ishaan@lsip.com and unreasonably excited by cold emails.

It’s going be a fun decade :)