Here is what has made EVC Ventures different than the rest

Last 2015 was a spooky year for the Indian startup ecosystem

After 2 exuberant years startups started crumbling down, layoffs counted by the thousands, employment offers for IIT-ans withdrawn and VC funds pulling their shorts out of India.

That same 2015 was the year EVC ventures launched it’s $50 million dollars for funding and support of early stage Indian startups.

When many started packing their suitcases and decided to “wait” for better times we have decided that it has never been a better year before to arrive to India.

We were often asked about the rationale behind our decisions and the outlook of our strategy. If nothing more I can summarize it in 3 parts. Apart from being firm believers that the next wave of 650 million Indian Internet consumers is yet to arrive our set of values too has played an important roll in being contrarian in regards to our mission here.

Lending support to the entire ecosystem

When we came to India we were almost philosophical, on the border of being naïve as someone would say. We thought that we cannot just scout and wait for the best companies out there to pop up.

We concluded that if we want India to groom a new generation of innovative companies we will have to be active participants in building the system that will encourage the birth of these startups.

So we started I-Made.

I-made is part of the Startup India program initiated by the government of India which aims to support the creation of next 1 million startups in India. That’s right. The next one million. We plan to achieve that by enabling students from 35,000 colleges and universities all across India build innovative mobile first solutions solving local challenges on our free cloud-based platform. India needs a million startup to succeed, not just one or two and that is the wave we are leading through EVC Ventures.

Here is one of I-Made’s success stories

And here is what one high school student did with I-Made

Patience

The current downward spiral that is spoken off isn’t surprising. It reminds me of the 90s when I was in New York and we had a similar spark of enthusiastic entrepreneurs. That enthusiasm when coupled with a “mad-dash” of cash from investors — who brought capital and little else — produced the same outcome we see today in India.

Those of us who were active participants and players in the 90s know that what India requires are models of sustained success. India needs successful entrepreneurs at the helm to guide investments and have skin in the game as they do so that they are incentivized to provide the mentorship and guidance our entrepreneurs require to grow and thrive.

Patience still remains a virtue.

Profitability and personal accountability

Passion, timing, idea, team, execution and scaling capability are the top 5 areas most VC funds look up to in a start-up before backing it. We have added 2 additional P’s: Profitability and Personal Accountability.

I like hustlers who have figured out a problem in their market, have found a way to make money by solving that problem and haven’t burned all their cash getting there, just like Milkbasket did.