00:49:46 · Anirudh A Damani
[00:49:46] S0: And I think it's, you put it really well. It's about, it really is about creating meaningful connections and by giving before you want things. Right? I mean we used to do this when we used to do door to door sales. Because it's called a gift to get. Right? First give before you want to ask, right? And just give. Give selflessly, don't think about, don't, don't worry about the result, right? Or don't, you know, don't don't get obsessed with what, what's going to happen, but just give. And I, I, I mean, and I, to, to be honest, if you're reaching out to a VC and you want a job with a VC, something I said for a very long time, write me a thesis and tell me where my blind spot is, right? And I might get offenced, you know, it may, it may be offensive to me, it may not, but truly, you know, if you look at, investing of what any, I mean, every industry has its own course, but investing is all about opinion, and you just, I mean, I, I literally could write a blog on what you just said, this is how you get a job with the VC, right? Put out your bloody opinion, right? Let me know, where am I blank for? And then the four guys I should be speaking to. But I don't want to talk about your funding journey because it's almost a page long in at least in my notes. So I might as well go through it. We, you know, you started out with an angel round, you know, you you had Arjun Mehta, Satish Kaul, you had Anand Sankeshwarar, Alok Mittal, Kashadura, Anand Dagose, Swati Desai, Swati obviously, Bhagwan's wife. You know, all these guys that put in money in 2017. Unfortunately, I ended up being the guy that, you know, has you in my anti portfolio. Right? But we also, you know, we also met under very interesting circumstances, right? We were trying to build something between an ISB and a US university, and we met with that intention. Correct. But like you said, you had a lot of these kind of nos to get to the yeses. What was it like getting your first round together? After, you know, you'd... By that time, you were eight years in the eight years in the startup ecosystem. Yeah. That's right, actually.
00:51:44 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:51:44] S1: Eight years. No. So super brutal. I I have to put it in very easy words. My first check came in from... So so everybody who knew me kind of started to put checks. All my peers, everybody I worked with. My first check came in from my friend, who's a CFO at babajob. He started by promising me a 5 lakh rupee check. And we used to do these walks post lunch in Bangalore, in Central Bangalore. And ended up investing about 20 lakh rupees in the first round. Wow. We're getting in close to becoming a millionaire in the next couple of months. So Sadh came in. He got in a few people. I I had met Anirudh Akshay Chaturvedi very randomly at an event. And I had introduced him to Vijay Shekhar around that time because he was looking for an intro. And we got in touch, and he randomly WhatsApp me one fine day, who's a pretty girl in your DP? I said, she's my girlfriend. I'm looking to get married to her in the next couple of days. And we had kind of built out a relationship of kind of being friends. And he said, okay, what's up? I said, I'm raising money right now. He's like, okay. Why don't we talk? And I remember him taking a decision in like two minutes and giving me a 60 lakh rupee check around that time. And he's like the owner of VRL, which is a 20,000 crore group in its overall since logistics media all of that. So lot of those conditions came like that and of course, so I remember I and I I've kept this for every round since I've kept this I've I've made an excel sheet and I do a pass fail kind of percentage. So I had reached out to 88 angel investors and about 22 invested.
00:53:22 · Anirudh A Damani
[00:53:22] S0: That's a pretty good hit rate. 25% is very high.
00:53:25 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:53:25] S1: That's a decent hit rate. And I remember this one time somebody called me to Bangalore to say, hey, I'll give you 5 lakh rupees. I went all the way to Bangalore, pitched for about three hours, went with this guy to to an Idly shop, had Idly, then he said, invest. And this was, like, came in after, like, some 10 to 12 predictions at a go. And everybody who had... And this is all coming from people who had kind of expected to the Dalaikai. Correct. When all these came in and I was so... You get into these phases. Right? And I always tell people who are reaching out to me now that, boss, entrepreneurship is like a lot of lows. It's 99 lows for every single up. So you've got to be ready for that. You've got to have a very, very hard skin. So I remember this is June 2017. I remember it so clearly. And as a as a self punishing measure of sorts, I kept walking in, like, very hot group. And I was like, I kept walking. Walking to a point where my nose started to bleed. And I had to kind of then rush to guy, put eyes and all of that. And then I was so disappointed that I was not able to kind of move forward in the round. At that point in time, had raised about some $35.40 lakh rupees sort of a corpus of 1.5 crores that we wanted to raise. 50 lakhs came in later. And that is when I went to a Starbucks, opened my laptop, and had an email from, who I kind of really wanted to raise money and Kashab signed up for 10 lakh without asking any questions. And I think that's when my luck turned in my angel round. As soon as Kashab came in because he was a prolific angel investor in the larger circle. Mean Kashab came in, I think a lot of people started to come in after him and that's when we kind of got closer around. I remember after we closed the first 1.5, there was a small news article in Economic Times. And Alok Mittal reached out to me via Kashab. Very interesting company I would like to invest. Can introduce me to the entrepreneur. And, Kashyap introduced me, and then I... Alok called me to Gurgaon, and I went to Alok's office. And Alok started to introduce himself in the first couple of minutes. Here, I'm Alok Patel. I've done this. And I told him, hey. You know what? I know everything about you. Sent you a LinkedIn request in 2012. So you can you can begin by accepting that, and then I can tell you about what we are doing.
00:55:31 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
And then as I went about my page, he said that, okay. You know what? I will invest, but a couple of my friends also wanna come in and invest. And that's all kind of they came in and kind of put in the next $35.40 lakh rupees, and then a few more folks came in. [00:55:45] S0: Who accepted LinkedIn request? [00:55:48] S1: He accepted the LinkedIn request finally, yes. [00:55:50] S0: That's it. That... I mean, things... 2019, you had Blume, DSG that came in in January, by December, they came in again. December Blume, DSG, Amrish Rao, Ash, Ash, Lelani, Ash, you know, Capital. Summer Capital runs another fund. Then 2021, you know, and obviously, money attracts money by the end of it. Right? So 2021, you got Tomorrow Capital, Blume Ventures, DSG Partners, and you've got Trifecta, Current Himka. I mean, this like a who's who of the startup ecosystem coming into Leverage Edu. How do you see
00:56:28 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:56:28] S1: Anirudh making small announcement in a week, and then the who's who will essentially completely fit in. But this is kind of come back to what you were saying. Think none of these came in very easy and I'll just narrate a quick one minute story. I won't take too much time. Even to kind of get the first VC investor who bitten was DSG Consumer Partners. And Blume kind of followed them. Even to kind of get... And I was with Kartik about, what, twenty four hours back when I was in Bombay, I was recalling the story. To get Kartik's time, I had to literally wait September, October, November, December, and then June, okay, about nine to ten months. So I wrote to him in the month of July 2017, and I met him during the Champions of Change event. I really wanted to go and say hi to him there as well. Two people wrote an email interest to me. I thought I would get a meeting with him. I... Everything I... All I got around that event was that he patted my shoulder and said,. Then I kept writing to him. And then finally, he gave me time on 06/07/2018. And this was in Starbucks in Cyber Hub, Gurgaon. And it was 12:15 to 12:45. And if you know, milk basket. So he was already sitting with Kartik. And he was having a chat, and I thought interesting animated discussion around that time. And I kept looking at the watch, and kept saying, like, like, I'm I'm just joining. I'm just joining. And he finally woke... Kind of got up from his seat at 12:50, he said, yeah, you're going in Delhi, let me just kind of be in your car and talk to you for the next twenty minutes. And that's why I kind of got my chance with him. And this was despite doing him through multiple people, right? Bad friend of mine, Saddam, my first investor was working with Blume's sister business. Bhagwan was also professor for Sanjay Nath, Kartik's cofounder. Draper folks were LPs in Blume Ventures, second or third fund as well. So I had multiple connects getting in... Kind of going into Kartik, and still, it was so difficult to get his time. And that's finally kind of got my twenty minutes, and it turned out to be a very interesting chat. And he said that, hey. You know what? I'll come in at... But I'm raising the front right now. So let me know if... How things move out.