I recently did two interviews with two very different but passionate entrepreneurs: Deepak Shenoy, co-founder of Moneyoga and Dr. Girish Saraph of Vegayan Systems. Over the past year or so I have spent a fair amount of time talking to both of them and have followed their journey as entrepreneurs.
Deepak and I have spoken at length about entrepreneurship, startup environment, Bangalore, etc over the phone, but never got around to meeting over that cup of filter coffee in Bangalore. Blame it on the messy traffic congestion in Bangalore that precluded me from going to his part of town! Deepak is a passionate and seasoned entrepreneur and it was great fun interviewing him. In the interview Deepak made some great points about entrepreneurship in India.
Girish is an academician turned entrepreneur that I met at the TiE Mumbai conference in 2006, where I interviewed him the first time around. He was very excited at having won the TiE_Canaan Challenge for that year and was looking forward to going to INSEAD Singapore to spend 6 weeks there. I remember how Girish patiently and methodically answered all my questions about the software his company was building and gave me the big picture overview that also helped me in getting a better grasp of his company. Methodical is the word that comes to mind when I think of Girish since that trait or character is reflected in the manner in which he has plotted the course for his startup and in the way he did this interview that I did earlier this week.
Very Nicely done up Moneyoga.com but why show public portfolios ? Probably can do a drill down on the Qly data for individual stocks … showing ratios, etc ….
Great Work !
Kamla,
I read your interviews and they are good(nicely done). Same here.
Can you please tell why you selected Deepak and Girish, is it because you knew them or you did on the basis of some criteria. If it was on some criteria can you please suggest them. It may be useful to know.
Vyaas
Hey Krish: Thanks! I’ve been writing about my picks in my blog, though honestly I haven’t got a multi-bagger types yet. 2 baggers perhaps. Too small a horizon 🙂
That’s an interesting approach for funding and we’re actually talking to a couple people about it (the move to Mumbai helps!). Early days though, and requires some defocussing from the site; but it might just prove to be the way forward.
I’ve been wrong enough times to know that there’s no such thing as a sure thing. If there was, I wouldn’t be telling anyone about it. We’re more into disciplined investing – so the idea isn’t to figure out what stock makes money but a larger theme – what kind of investing strategy makes money.
That means apart from identifying high probability entries, it’s also about cutting losses short, riding profits, hedging risk (with futures/options), statistically validating a strategy (“Buy this stock, it’s giving a bonus” is an invalid stragegy statistically for the most part) etc.
It’s also about managing capital appropriately – how much to allocate, when and how to get out. We don’t plan to address this right now, that’s a for-later.
The difference is not great to longer term investors. But for those interested in the one year or less timeframe, it makes all the difference.
Hey Deepak,
That was a pretty cool chat. Now whisper into my ears the next multibagger before others get wind of it. The quickest way to gain funding for your venture is to help a few early customers get rich, and talk them into investing in your venture. You have their cashflow data and many could volunteer as it gets proven.
The downside is that if your first few strategies backfire, the busters will go talk about it. If they have a blog, worse 😉
The Interview link are swapped.