The Road to Becoming a Venture Capitalist: One Man’s Global Journey from India to Silicon Valley
AngelHub chats with Investment Member Committee Member, Ashish Aggarwal about being a Venture Capitalist
Who is Ashish Aggarwal?
Ashish Aggarwal works as a Principal for Grishin Robotics, an early stage venture fund with presence in San Francisco, and invests in early-stage companies in Robotics, Connected hardware, AI/ML, and consumer sectors. Ashish is passionate about helping entrepreneurs build and scale startups and has over 13 years of experience as an operator, entrepreneur, and investor . Prior to joining Grishin Robotics, he was the Director of Corporate Development at Opera Software and a Team Leader at Yahoo! in India and the United states and opened and grew the Yahoo! office in China.
Few people in the venture capital industry had a straight-forward path to this career, and Ashish is no exception. His story starts in a small town in India, where he was fortunate to have access to a computer and as a 10-year old child he developed a passion for technology and programming. This early exposure to technology would change the trajectory of his life. After graduating from Information Science and Engineering from one of India’s top colleges in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, Ashish accepted a job offer at Yahoo! India as an engineer. This was a pivotal moment in his life and Ashish quickly rose through the ranks to build and lead various technical teams, where he built large-scale enterprise infrastructure for advertising products and also led the service-engineering teams. When Yahoo! decided to open a new office in Beijing, Ashish was selected to help build Yahoo-China office as part of the initial team for executing the Yahoo!-Microsoft search deal. This was the first time Ashish had lived abroad for an extended period and everything was a new experience. The newly formed team grew from 10 people to 100+ in less than a year and Ashish gained significant experience and exposure in the emerging Chinese entrepreneurial ecosystem while observing the rise of Alibaba and Tencent.
Upon returning to India, Ashish decided to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams and start his first few ventures — a spin on Groupon for the Indian market and then a social-live tv app for Indian consumers. As neither venture scaled exponentially and with his career path on his mind, Ashish understood the skills he now needed to gain in order to become a better entrepreneur, investor, or operator. He knew it would be a good time to further his education and decided to pursue a dual MBA/design thinking program at Northwestern University which is where he gained exposure to the venture capital world. During a venture capital internship program at OCA Ventures, Ashish proved to be the perfect candidate for the venture capital industry due to his inquisitive and helpful nature and he knew that he had found a suitable and promising career. Despite this, he decided the timing was still not ripe to join a VC team as he wanted to gain additional operational experience and thus accepted an offer to join the marketing team at Dell and then at Opera Software (a Norwegian publicly-traded company). In his marketing role at Dell, Ashish developed skills in combining qualitative and quantitative research in order to design effective marketing campaigns and go to market strategies, while at Opera Software , Ashish focused on corporate strategy and development. Opera Software was located in San Francisco and Ashish quickly realized and made a wise decision to relocate one step closer to Silicon Valley. This indeed proved to be the case and while working in this role, Ashish led global strategic corporate acquisitions, investments, and divestitures, as well as overseeing multi million dollar transactions and was in touch with many VC’s in the process. Two years later, he accepted an offer at Grishin Robotics in San Francisco.
Ashish maintains that there is no fixed path to get into the world of venture capital, but rather there are several entry points. Most people typically join early-on as an analyst or sometimes post-MBA. Breaking in as a later-stage as a Partner is much more complicated. According to Ashish, if one would like to work in this industry, they need to have very specific skill sets — for an example… if one is an engineer, definitely leverage technical skills. Having a curious nature also comes in handy as one will always be learning about new sectors and industries.
“One should be passionate about working with entrepreneurs and helping them on a regular basis. Hard work, authenticity, transparency, building long-term relationships, being humble and creating your own opinion based on First Principles are vital qualities to become a good venture capitalist.”
According to Ashish while working at a VC:
“I get to meet so many incredible different people who are passionate about solving problems and push me to learn about new industries. Learning from people who are at the top of their game is important as we are challenged all the time in this industry. It’s all about continuous learning.”
Ashish continues:
“Another thing I like about the job is getting to see ideas brought to life. You meet an entrepreneur, partner with them, and two or three years later, the idea starts to take shape. Another few years after that and it’s mainstream and you get a bit of a high knowing that you played a tiny part in making it happen. It’s pretty powerful. I love spending time with entrepreneurs and helping them solve their problems.”
Words of Advice and Wise Words
Venture capital is an environment where it can pay to be a genuinely good person. Relationships are everything in venture capital and it is not a transactional zero-sum environment. From his own background as an entrepreneur, Ashish has a healthy appreciation for the challenges that a founder faces regularly and he believes this is vital to understand when helping a startup company. For Ashish it is really about the human element, being a good person and staying humble — which is crucial for creating and maintaining the founder-investor bond.
“You’ve got to be able to connect with people, with founders. Some people talk about specific skills that are important here, but to me, it’s just about being able to have an open and honest conversation. When you’re meeting with an entrepreneur, you’ve got to be able to tell them what you think. People underestimate the importance of Emotional Intelligence- being able to empathize and assess motivations, but I believe it is important to develop that early in your career. Venture capital is a services business where we are providing a service to the entrepreneurs.”
Ashish also maintains that certain skills such as grit and perseverance are skills that have served him well so far.
“It’s a very long road with many challenges along the way. Most of your returns will come from things that compound over time, and it’s true for relationships as well. You’ve got to be building them for the long-term.”
Ashish wisely notes that if a deal goes well, you could be working together for upwards of a decade. It is also important to always give back to the community that you are part of. He has done so by working with non-profit organizations for child education and blood donation drives. When looking back at his life, Ashish learned this from his family where he was taught that there are always people in a worse situation and you can create opportunities to help people. These things keep him grounded and humble.
When building businesses ….
When evaluating and building a business through the eyes of a venture capitalist — Ashish recommends evaluating the following:
1. Understand the dynamics and human element of the management team the founders need to work well together. When things get tough it can put a lot of strain on them physically, mentally, and in ways that are hard to explain. It is important to understand the level of experience that the founders have and to understand the real added value they have in the market.
2. The market size of the company needs to be large enough. Best to only focus on opportunities in large size markets and validate the market size through understanding the customers needs and the key drivers in each market.
3. What do you have to believe for a startup to have an outsized impact, understand the reasoning and risks involved in startup’s idea and understand how this startup can mitigate that risk? Also having an understanding of potential acquisitions/IPO comparables in that space would help build a realistic picture of the market.
If all of these points above are clear, consider taking a closer look at the company and moving ahead with them.
Ashish has also developed several unique frameworks that help evaluate the startups in the deep-tech and robotics sectors in order to evaluate the technology adoption curves. One of the frameworks that he uses is the Decision Impact Framework, which is the number of decisions being made in a given time period on a Y-axis vs the Cost of making a wrong decision on the X-axis. Large numbers of decisions coupled with the cost of making a wrong decision being high typically results in a longer adoption timeframe, which must be factored into investing decisions. He also applies technical feasibility frameworks, regulatory impacts, and labor market dynamics such as the supply, demand, and costs of human labor to understand the other market factors within a given industry. For instance, Quantum Computing use cases couldn’t be solved a decade ago, but today, we are making rapid strides in that sector.
Why AngelHub?
“AngelHub is incredible — the founders are super passionate and I am really impressed by them. You need a strong ecosystem builder in any community to make a true 10x impact and AngelHub is working to bring investors and startups together to help promote entrepreneurship. Karen’s and Karena’s passion to help entrepreneurs is contagious and they have built such an amazing community in Hong Kong. I am honored to be part of this amazing initiative.”
