Last week, while I was in India visiting our SW developers of Babalah and Pixable, I had the chance to visit the offices of Battery Ventures in Mumbai with a team of MIT Sloan students. There we met with Gautam Patel, the Managing Director of the Indian office.
Battery was started by Howard Anderson, my professor at MIT (I blogged about his talks several times in the past). Over time, Battery has raised $3 Billion and in 2008 raised a new $750 million fund. Some of the successful startup investments include Akamai, Fore or Infoseek.
Some of the insights Gautam shared with us:
- "Any model that works in the USA can be somehow taken to a new country"
- In the US you would look for an enabling technology with global outreach. In the rest of the world, you should look for a company that provides cheaper and more scalable services in that local market.
- The 3 things he looks in an investment are:
- Market adoption
- Management depth
- Market need through customer research
In order to back a management team in India, you need a lot of trust. In India, it takes a while to trust people, and then you can do business (the first thing you think about a person when you meet him is that you cannot trust him).
Entrepreneurs need to be close to the consumer market.
You should go back to your country (in my case Spain, and in his case India) if there is a financing community and not because there is a market opportunity.
Some interesting sectors in India:
- Financial service infrastructres: he thinks that 25% of the world financial service infrastructure will be from India
- Mobile: ~60% mobile penetration in cities and 40% in India
- Media
- Education
When you make a decision, think that in 10 years people will ask you why you made that decision.
Battery has currently invested in about ~5 startups in India, including travelguru.com, which is the hotels.com for India.
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