On the Road: Mumbai, India

Last week, I spent five days in Mumbai running around at a frenetic pace with an incredibly insightful and jam-packed itinerary. Here's a look into the memorable time I spent with our world-class portfolio company founders, talented fintech entrepreneurs and forward-thinking regulators.

A perfect 5-for-5

Having managed to hire Sandeep Patil during the height of Covid-19 in December 2020 to lead our first investments in India and Southeast Asia, the diligence process lacked the usual comfort of in-person interactions. 

Pre-pandemic, meeting founders face-to-face and spending quality time with them in person was a prerequisite for an investment. That of course all changed, and bringing in companies and founders for investment committee meetings over Zoom became the norm rather than the exception. To augment a lack of face-to-face meetings, we embarked on deeper due diligence to build conviction. 

I was thrilled to meet the founding teams of our five Indian portfolio companies for the first time during my trip to Mumbai led by – Financepeer CEO Rohit Gajbhiye, OneCard CEO Anurag Sinha, Refyne CEO Chitresh Sharma, Jupiter CEO Jitendra Gupta and Upswing CEO Anupam Bagchi.

All five founding teams joined me at Wankhede Stadium last Sunday to watch an IPL cricket match as the Royal Challengers Bangalore defeated the Sunrisers Hyderabad handsomely by 67 runs. It was an amazing game and the energy was terrific.

I was also thrilled to spend extended one-on-one time with each company over the days that followed, and I was genuinely excited to feel their passion and energy first-hand.

Sandeep has spent, and continues to spend, an enormous amount of time working side-by-side with these wonderful teams while also cultivating the Indian ecosystem at large. His hard work to get to conviction with each of these companies – in an entirely remote environment – was impressive.

The biggest compliment I can give to Sandeep is that after the fifth and final in-person meeting with these companies, I told him that, having spent time with each of the founders, I would still invest in all of them again today – his judgement, even from afar, was a perfect 5-for-5. We can’t declare victory with any of these companies yet, but there was no, ‘oh crikey’ moment. 

A thriving ecosystem

Those who know me realise that I get so much energy from interacting with talented entrepreneurs tackling big problems. I like to say that I am constantly surrounded by people twice as smart and half my age.

I found myself in the company of such groups at least three different times last week – including at an ecosystem-building happy hour we hosted for 75 entrepreneurs on Monday, then dinner on the same evening with our peer investors from Sequoia, Accel and Elevation, and at a fireside chat with The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) on Tuesday evening.

We covered my journey from building Capital One to starting QED, as well as Sandeep’s operational journey that included spells at Flipkart and Truecaller. Such was the enjoyable and lively discussion, we ran over our scheduled time and later continued the questions and conversations over drinks and dinner.

On Saturday evening, we attended the ET Awards for Corporate Excellence, The Economic Times’ flagship editorial event at The Oberoi at Nariman Point. Back again after a two-year hiatus, the event attracted business and political leaders from across the country, including Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman who took home the award for business reformer of the year. 

Collaboration

One of my biggest takeaways from this trip was how forward-looking the big banks and the regulatory bodies are in India. 

When you think about it, the country is actually unique in this sense. In the U.K. or the U.S., for example, fintechs can see incumbents as antiquated institutions that don’t focus on their customers and that ultimately need to be disrupted. Banks think of fintechs as over-eager upstarts running into an industry at 100 miles an hour without a proven track record.

What I saw in Mumbai was the opposite. Sandeep and I met with representatives from two private-sector banks – ICICI and Federal Bank – as well as executives from the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank and regulatory body.

Throughout those conversations, I got a greater sense of how big- and medium-sized banks are thinking about the ecosystem and, more importantly, how vital they consider the collaboration between banks and fintechs.

Cross-collaboration is seen as an advantage rather than an unwelcomed distraction. Fintechs have access to India’s emerging digitally native salaried middle class and they see the potential to gain access to liabilities and regulated infrastructure; banks see a pathway to new, digital-native customers they would otherwise struggle to reach though analogue branch distribution channels; regulators see the potential harmony when all participants in the ecosystem work with each other. 

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I returned home back to Virginia via the U.K., equal parts excited by the opportunities ahead and exhausted by the whirlwind nature of a trip half way around the world. The pandemic has of course limited my travel over the past few years, as it has everyone else, but I took great joy in my first trip back to India in more than five years.

After five incredible days meeting some wonderfully talented founders and investors in the west of the country, I want to make sure it isn’t another five years before I next return – in fact, my challenge to Sandeep was that if Rajasthan Royals make it to the IPL final, I will be back to watch the game with him in a few weeks!