What We Learned from Our Trip to Mumbai?
Last week we had the opportunity to sponsor and attend Disruption In Banking Mumbai, the first time our VC, True Global Ventures, held an event in India. The highly curated attendees came out in full form representing the venture capital community, banks, and mobile finance. Some of the biggest players were there including: ICICI Bank, Yes Bank, Accel VC, Matrix VC, and many more.
Bluzelle CEO, Pavel Bains, along with the CEO of MatchMove, Shailesh Naik spoke on the panel about how a startup and growth company can work together and what they learned from each other. Here are the three main take-aways:
- The startup should approach the growth company with a fully flushed out product or idea. The growth company is in ultra fast mode and their time needs to be respected.
- Take time to develop the relationship. Don’t just bombard the potential partner right away. Learn each others strengths and where value can be added. Pavel and Shailesh developed their relationship over 6 months before they came up with a model to collaborate.
- Since the growth company’s team has their own deadlines, the startup needs to do their best to accommodate and take on additional work where required. So the startup should first assess their own capacity before proceeding to the project.
Overall everything is quickly moving in India. The government knows it has an opportunity to make leaps and bounds in it’s financial infrastructure. Demonetization might seem like a painful step but its going in the right way. The government is acting fast where it can to keep pace with the changing market needs. VCs see companies that spent the last few years in building their products and technologies to be in a good place to benefit now.
Mobile wallet companies were represented by both Citrus and Freecharge. Their founders spoke about how when they started the market was nascent for their product but they saw that it will be needed. Like the ice hockey adage goes “you need be where the puck is going, not where it is.” This is a lesson for any company in an innovative space.
Finally, Bluzelle’s CEO took some time to visit Urbz, a city architecture and design firm working in the Dharavi district of Mumbai. What some may call a slum, Urbz says it’s the worlds biggest user-generated settlement as its home grown, has its own community and contributes $1 Billion annually to the Indian economy. Truly inspiring work they are doing in making Dhavari a better and more manageable place to live.
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