SPEAKER_02 0:02

Hello, and welcome back to the Future Ventures Scaling with Clarity podcast. Today, with us, we have Dip Neil. Dipneil is an investor and operator with a track record that spends banking startups and global venture capital. Over the years, he's been involved in scaling companies, backing high-growth startups, and seen multiple exits, including IPOs and acquisitions. He prides himself on not following the pack, looking beyond the obvious, and not being afraid of traveling the lonely roads that comes with that. What's interesting about his perspective is that it's not built purely from the venture side. He's operated inside businesses, worked through capital constraints, and developed a clearer point of view on what actually makes a company fundable and what doesn't. Today we're going to unpack how he thinks about founders' timing and the inflection points that turn a company from an idea into something investors will actually back. Welcome to the stage, DebNil. Um just for our listeners and viewers, can you please tell us how to pronounce your last name and uh where you're calling from today?

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Oh, great. So my I thought my last name is easy to pronounce it's mook her g.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

So that if you take three letters at a time, mook her, and then G. I thought it's the first name that's difficult, but then the first name you got it spot on. Okay. Um, yeah, and uh today I'm from um my home base at Singapore. Uh, but then um, as you know, my in my fund, um we we have the tagline which we call the world is our oyster, and we truly believe in it. Yeah, so we just need to be in one place, but then uh we go after the best in class wherever they are. Uh because this is one time and tide, and um uh we have to make the most of it uh in one life that we have.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Uh and and that probably beats the first uh cliche of venture investing. We don't focus in the hundred-mile areas from our base, that's and that's where most of our global and mostly in the United States of America.

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Okay, so let's let's double-click on it. So, how did you end up from India into Singapore and how what was your journey into venture?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Oh, wow, okay. So um it started at a very different place, but then when I look back, I think I I see that there's an invisible hand that has always um played in and um put me at the right um uh boxes in the chessboard. Uh so I started off uh as a CPA, so a finance professional, um, and then went and joined uh uh uh a wholesome bank, a full-fledged financial institution, so a fintech play, and that's where uh they were then introducing technology. And I had put on many midnight oil as a rookie, dirty my fingers to learn technology by self-teaching technology to myself. So that's where my um my my journey started, professional career started. Lighting um writing programs and writing um software commands to uh um execute softwares that were uh written by programmers and needed to be uh moved in and out of the business uh um environment.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

But so that gave me an understanding that yeah, you're a CPA like myself. You you self-taught yourself how to program and code?

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Yes, and it was not because I wanted to, as I said, I was forced to. Yeah, because I need to save my job, yeah. I was as a CP as a business analyst. I was put into something where I had to write uh programs, I had to wait programs, I had to understand why the program is uh not working or why it's working wrongly. Yeah, um, so that's how I I learned, and then very soon I realized that uh change is the only constant, and technology is the bellwether of change. And that's where you know I decided I slowly got mutated or morphed into doing everything that is around technology. And for all these uh 28-30 years of my career, I have since only followed on one mantra that is technology and uh uh innovations uh led by technology. Yeah, so that actually brought me to um again. Now, on top of that, if you layer on the the conterism that you introduced me with um being uh looking so very early in my life, I've always somehow been um uh wired in my brain that obvious has no value, crowded space has zero value. So we have to always look above and beyond the obvious, yeah, and that will mean that you are in lonely roads that are seldom traveled, but you cannot be afraid of those. The whole art is not staying with the herd, but breaking out of the herd, getting out of the beaten path, and then going into places where uh you have to be a quantarian but right, yeah, because just quantarianism has no value, you have to be also at the right time and and died. Yeah, so end of the day, it is again one life. Either you use it or you lose it. So I better try something and fail. Rather than at the age of 80, I look back to my life, that one life that I had, and then regret for not trying so many things which I wanted to. So that has been the entire uh thought process. And so even today, right from uh the very beginning, I always been uh looking to try something new. Yeah, and looking to try something that works new that works, that is incremental, that is value accreditive, and so on and so forth. And that's what brought me to Singapore. And um, then from here, so those days I was an operator, and then the the the operation somehow uh went uh literally through the roof, landed me into a top quartile, get me got me a good exit, and um that's where I decided now it's time to change gears.

SPEAKER_02 7:10

Nice.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Instead of being an operator, why not I find people who are better uh than me as operators and try to uh see if I can give them I join their journey and give them some money, um uh which could then uh turn me into uh uh investor.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

And that's the same uh like when did you raise your fund when you excel?

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yeah, so the current was somewhere around uh 2018 is when we started off. Uh initially, before that, it was mostly my own money, and then mostly bootstrapped, and then uh it was friend family uh monies that came in, and then it was word of mouth, and that's how it went on going. Uh, from but from the very beginning, um, when we start when I started the investing journey, I had always been very keen to be disruptive. Yes, because I wanted to invest in disruptive innovation, and then I thought that then uh the whole platform, the vehicle, the medium, the thought process, the narrative, everything has to be disruptive. We cannot follow what everybody else is doing in private tech investing, and that's where we started off. I started off with the some of the main um differentiators that uh would make me stand out of the crowd. And one such thing was like, as I said, uh, wherever the best, we have to go there. We can't say that we will be doing just 100 mile radius, which was a big uh narrative of our industry. The second thing that we looked at is that you know um we have to essentially I wanted to democratize private tech investing for uh our uh LPs or investors. Why? Because it was abundantly clear to me by then that tech and particularly private tech is where most of the value is getting backed, and therefore, if somebody has to make real generational uh uh wealth creation, one has to go away, and that too with a small amount of capital, one has to look for multiplier effect, and that multiplier effect can only come when you are not just patient capital, but you are able to come in at a very early stage. And that's where you know I we I had this thing that I will not take institutional money. Also, I wanted to be an unconstrained manager. I did not want it somebody who write me a big check and then sit on my board and then tell me how to invest, where to invest. And from there, it also came to me is that if I have to get outstanding results, then I have to go after outstanding opportunities. Yeah, and those opportunities will be all over the place. And by then, technology luckily has made the world flat for us. Um, I even read the um Thomas Fredman book, uh World is Flat. I uh somewhere uh during my operator days, and I was very impressed with it. Uh, then I also saw software it's our uh is eating our world. Um from uh Mike and Anderson. And then those all these are things I mean throughout these journeys, a lot of the reading that I have done also helped me shape my narrative and my thought process, and that's how we I landed up with this and started investing. And in these seven, eight years, this is where we are. Uh uh almost like 85% of the portfolio is in the United States of America. Okay, because uh most of the disruptive work is happening there, and uh again, in that what we are essentially looking at, if you see the um technology-led innovation uh has been disrupting some existing large market opportunities, some of those are existing, but most of them are newly enabled. So, one of the cornerstones of our investing thesis is how to go after uh those opportunities which are new market opportunities which are getting newly enabled. And it the conviction comes from the fact that if you say America is just about 27-28 percent of the world economy, but in MSCI, they are almost like 70 plus percent. And within that 70 percent, if you see the magnificent seven, they are almost like a grouping 67 percent, two-thirds. And if you look at each of these magnificent seven plus the other trillion dollar companies, which are not yet magnificent seven, but they are trillion dollar companies of our world, all of them today are American and and tech. Um each one of them, if you go back at their infancy and their formative years, they were dabbling on businesses that did not exist.

SPEAKER_02 12:26

New model creation, new industry creation for sure. I mean, what is your take? Now you said it that uh you you read uh uh Mark Andreessen's uh um essay on software is eating the world now. The max seven over the last week have come down by as much as 10-15%. And so we've seen the kind of the opposite sentiment that software or SaaS software is that what's your perspective on on software, on technology, and what what's your deal flow process? How how do you go about identifying companies that are in the in the space of creating new industries and new markets rather than uh improving on existing ones?

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, so uh so first of all, maybe I take that question into two parts. I'll go to the deal flow later. It's more uh uh operational. I first let me take the the software, and uh although uh software eats our world is now no longer uh pundits will say is no longer valid because um software is not AI is eating the software. So let's go to AI and in let's take the address the whole issue of AI. Uh so what I see is basically two schools of thoughts. Uh, that's where the whole world can be mostly 90% of the world, the crowded space can be categorized. Once is saying that this says something we have never seen before. Of course, this is going to be so disruptive, it will dislocate all of us. Our jobs will be gone, uh, especially the white-collared ones. And uh it's going to become a very difficult world where we are going to see hyperinflation and um uh joblessness and uh uh and and and so on and so forth. And then there is another set of people who are trying to say this is AI is all bullshit. So, all this while they were talking of agentic AI, they were talking of uh AI will do every work for us, robots will be our new companions in our homes, and we will not need uh our pets. It will be robotic pets who will be working as uh the the um uh as the next generation of pets. We don't have to take to vets and all, but then nothing of these has happened. So these are all uh a few people just telling us stories which has not happened and will not happen, yeah. But my my take is very different. Uh, what we will probably see is that that this is again, history will rhyme itself this time. Technology has never taken jobs away. So technology has never made that inefficient, technology has only made us affluent, and AI will also make us affluent, more efficient, they will make us faster, better, cheaper. And dull only thing is that the dull, dangerous, and dirty is not something we will be doing, and that will free up more of our time. So today we work far less and we have much more free time to be creative, to even even whether in production or in consumption, yeah. Uh we are uh living in a much more affluent world than our uh uh grandfathers, than our great-grandfathers. And in those days, they had far more employment and we far more unemployment, and we today have a much more full employment for a longer period of time, lower interest rates. You can see that uh such a huge uh conflict that is going on at the very nerve center of oil hasn't affected uh the oil. Even yesterday, if you see the markets actually uh claimed back all that it has lost before the war, and they are just two percent SP is two percent below the all-time historic highs, all-time highs, yeah, and and we are in the middle of a war, which has no consumption. And if just imagine what was 1974 um uh uh oil crisis and so on and so forth. So it's nothing different, it will be the same in the initial period. There will be dislocation when people like Andy Jesse writes that uh Amazon will lose a lot of people, and managers have to learn, or the employees have to learn how to work with uh shoddy teams. Um he is also right, but those are all transitional, and we have far better wherewithal today to manage this transition. Many professions will not remain. I mean, we are heading into a world where uh in the in the right-heading space, there will be there won't be any people driving us around. And uh this is the reality, but that doesn't mean that those people will be jobless, they will get into new jobs, new professions, new works will come up, and that's where it will go. So that's the overall take on on that. And what we try to do in terms of second part of the question is like how we go for deal flows and all that. So we get at approximately this this keeps on this has been increasing over the years. Now we get almost like 300 applications in a quarter, roughly you can say about 100 a month, but we don't even um we try to read everything, um, have a look at that, but sometimes those are like 15, 20 seconds or one minute of email reading. Yeah, um, we do not mostly uh land up investing in any of these uh because um uh the way it probably works is that when people have found us out and reaching out to us for funding, we are the lamb and they are the lion. They have found us out and they are out there to hunt for us. That's not where we land up investing. So we on our side, we then go out where and look for situations or create situations where we could be the lion and we could go out and hunt, and that's where we we so one part of the the major part of our work is to reach out for game-changing opportunities that have been happening, and in all this, you know, that's uh there's the old proverb machines never fight. So ideas are nothing, it is the men behind the machines. So our narrative is founder first. So, from that standpoint, what we try to look for is that why is the founder doing what he's doing? How much conviction has he has in this? How much many of the same and the same of the many is he doing? How much of this is because he doesn't want to have a job and nine to six job, and he wants to be a founder, and how much of this that he wants to instead, how much of this is where that he wants to be influencing and impacting millions and millions of people's lives to change our world, and that's why if you go to our website, you will see one of my our key words there the in the landing page is we look for rebel minds, but then just rebel minds will not um uh work. Rebel minds will make you cynical. You have to also the rebel mind will give you contrarism, but the contraryism you have to have some kind of a wherewithal, some kind of uh core competence to convert them. That could be even your spirit, your passion, to convert them uh into the contrarian ideas to and make them right, make them work. So essentially the whole idea is how do you are uh how do you just not be contrarian, but also you uh convert this. Remember, ideas are only 25 percent of innovation, implementation or execution is the remaining 75. So that's what we try to look for. So when we even find and in that we first start from the top, we go to the macro level, we try to see where the trends are changing. Like if you see in our whole investing journey, um uh when uh well before Chat GPT became um so so much in the center stage because of Open AI and Microsoft's investment in OpenAI, we have been investing in that space. So some of our investments, like in Palentir, uh like in uh Macbox, like in uh uh ThoughtSpot, they are all in those spaces. Uh they were far well before uh all these um transformer-led uh fast track happened through OpenAI and Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. Thereafter, we realized that looking through our lenses, we realized that uh a lot of software is being written, but there's hardly anything being written to protect these software. So, cybersecurity is become one of the main themes of our investing, and that not only in the US, it took us even to Israel to find good companies in cybersecurity. So, some of the cybersecurity companies that we have invested in, like Biocach and all that, these are Israeli companies. Today they are in America, but they all started off out of Israel. So, wherever the best in class is, we are going there. We have to find a way to be there. It's not about what we can find in our backyard.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

And then by the time we sorry, go ahead and you you mentioned capo of the industry that you're really excited about. Like what's um what currently excites you the most? Uh and and I mean, I kind of I I get the idea from some of your from some of your talk that you're I I would probably describe you as a pragmatist rather than uh um like because you could you describe kind of the the two spectrums of AI and how AI is shaping the world one where uh high uh AI is hype and it's it's gonna the future looks like all machines and no humans and then the other's end who's like no no I'm kind of like not like not supporting AI and you're like no no AI is going to drive dislocation interim AI is going to change the way that we operate and the way we think about it but AI for us is a is a multiplier is an enabling force that's going to make us more productive more efficient um and and the stats support it I mean like the the the most uh the profession that is most prone susceptible to dislocation from AI are coders and developers well the stats currently says that there are more jobs for developers than there were there were before and I mean we use I use uh cloud code all the time um but that hasn't resulted in fewer dev jobs it has resulted in more dev jobs because you kind of need to know uh how to use the tools so you're talking about AI you're talking about security like what what what is like like guide me through the three process of scene around corners and kind of like what are those industries that you're the most excited at uh at the moment and maybe three years or five years out yeah so essentially what I try to look for and I encourage my team to look for is to look ahead of time.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

So like we were doing um AI related stuff well before chat GPT became in the front and center. Then we went into cybersecurity after cybersecurity we went into uh areas like we very soon realized that what we are where we are heading is that the dull dangerous and dirty will not be done by uh humans and so therefore what is we are getting into we are getting into a robotic cobotic world where uh software will enable uh us in such a way that we will be doing tech led productivity gains and that's where you know again when the whole world is trying to tell us that American manufacturing is a is never going to happen because that's a generation that has lost his skills I don't think so I think America is such a even today if you see America is such a uh robust powerhouse and it has become like this over time is because it has been able to be it it is in a productivity boom and it is essentially happening by tech led productivity gains. So we by by by by the time COVID started moving out um or fade out we started investing more and more into tech led productivity gains so anything that can remove or reduce the number of people at the same time make it efficient bring down the unit costs go and hit the uh the basics the first principles and alter the narratives of the first principles so that the whole dynamics change so if in battery uh a particular component is in short supply and is very expensive can we not do the battery without that component those kind of stuff and how we be part of those and and and those kind of investments that we had then been done has really been playing off. And today what we are looking at is we feel that the AI story is definitely going in in is in the center front and center. And therefore anything that is working to scale up AI is where we are looking at and in that if you see what are the first bottlenecks and how we can break those bottlenecks. Like one of our recent investments we have not even announced it is where we are trying to be part of an off-grid data center power supply where there are solar and then backed up by reprocessed batteries and um so why is that because there's a huge short supply the grids are completely maxed out manufacturing the generation is completely maxed out there is no way you can even if you generate more you can wheel power out from the producer to the consumer so then what you do and then nobody's even taking your approval applications there won't be even approvals for you. So how you make this happen you have to go off grid. Now you might say but that's a three year five year seven year problem maybe may not be let's assume it is a three year five year seven year problem by then if you have the power capacity you can actually bring give it back to the grid but look at it when you're doing it now you bring in the technology you when you're doing it you can actually do DC to DC you don't need A C D C A C D C A C D C and each time you do A C D C A C D C alternate current direct current alternate current direct current you lose. So therefore the same 10 megawatts that I generate I have almost like eight or nine megawatts available to me if not entire 10 megawatts for consumption while in the other processes I would have lost anywhere between three to four megawatts out of the 10.

SPEAKER_03 27:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

And that's where your margins go up that's where your capital requirements get scaled down that's where your borrowings or leverage comes to so this is where you go back to the first principle. You try to break down where are the bottlenecks and how we remove those bottlenecks and that's what we look at. And this is where we go for this and founders and that's where we try to interview these founders to figure out why are they doing this? Do they even have any skill sets to do this? Like we have some very early investments in space and those days like the only thing we believed was the the the the the competence uh the circle of competence of the founders they were uh people from space they have been they have done this they have survived the SpaceX's heat and the blast and the fire for nine long years before they came out and started those days SpaceX was uh in oblivion nobody believed in SpaceX SpaceX was verge of bankruptcy it's not the SpaceX that we are the go is going to be the historic case to create history by being the biggest IPO of of of of humanity um so those were the days when we had invested in them those were the days we have invested in people who came out from and this is again another matrix we follow very carefully it's like you know germination of seeds if you are part of a disruptive startup the whether wherever what whatever the disruptive startup does or wherever it goes that's beside the point. If there are 100 people who work for that startup and even 50 people come out later on it's likely that if not the whole 50 at least 40 or 50 out of those 50 will be doing their own startups and each one of them will be doing something which is really pushing the frontiers it's not about many of the same it's not about retiring rich it's not about being called as a founder. It's all about how can I impact millions of lives how can I change our world how can I create that zero billion dollar market a market that did not exist.

SPEAKER_02 29:34

How can I be the next magnificent seven and that's where I got the name for my uh enterprise Decacon because we are looking for Decacons and much beyond DecaCon we're looking for after Decacon you will list after listing you will become a a billion dollar company then a trillion dollar company yeah so today we have two portfolio companies who are in SP 500 and we haven't sold them and remember in our industry we are not allowed to buy from the market so none of these have been bought from the market we found them early and somehow with well maybe I didn't have a choice just like I that day as a CPA I had to run learn coding uh 30 years back we we sat there we went through the COVID they came down they retracted they became out to the bare bones and then uh they became top quartile so that's how we we go for it and and and it makes sense I mean when you invest based on first principles um you it's easy to stick to your conviction uh and believe that your convictions are right because you're not investing in in the hype cycle you're investing in something that fundamentally drives or has value I mean you you mentioned data centers we're working on on a couple of projects that are actually solar based with battery augmentations and so they're self-contained uh connected to the grid uh and we're working with a partner in Germany that allows us to to build a data center in under three months but it's it it's all because of portability if you have the solar farm ready with the batteries behind the solar panels uh building out the data centers is is you you can use portable units right like it's it's not that hard um but it's all based on uh those first principles being like um you you're probably not familiar but in Canada like our most famous hockey player was Wayne Gretzky and so Wayne Gretzky has a saying that like you don't skate to where the pack is you you skate to where the pack is going the hockey pack and it's the same thing if you focus on kind of like where the future is what's shaping the future how can you unlock that future you're most you're most likely to be successful.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

You might not get it though perfectly right but those first principles are a good guiding light yeah absolutely I can't agree more I mean it's so spot on yeah and so with um what what's next for you like what um um are you planning to stay in Singapore invest from Singapore if all the investments are in the US how do you deal with with your founders what kind of what's your relationship with them um does what is Singapore provides as an opportunity in terms of that's not available to I don't know companies in India or a company in China yeah so um if you see the whole um narrative is although I'm based in Singapore but I travel uh almost three to four times uh to wherever uh the investment opportunities for us are and uh look for these companies meet up with these founders and that's where um we are you there yeah I think you froze Max are you there yeah okay so yeah so yeah um Singapore is an anchor uh it's a great place to be it's a great place to do business um probably there are very few places in the world where which can compete with Singapore in terms of the ease and convenience of doing business and um and it gives me uh as uh it's like the bridge of the ship it gives me a 360 degree view I can go anywhere I can move easily and can move my capital I can invest my capital it's a uh FATF uh uh it's a top quartile in terms of KYC in due diligence uh place uh therefore for me to uh invest in um other countries is is uh is a breeze so there are several advantages for being here but then as I said that it is one life either you use it or you lose it so you have to go for the best in class wherever they are I mean even if you look at um uh and and that's what it takes us to uh places like US where uh we are in constant touch with our investors uh the the companies that we have invested in as well as you know we have investments in Latin America we have investments in um could they could be uh Delaware C COPs but their businesses uh touches lives of or changes uh or touches lives of millions of people in Africa so those kind of businesses we uh we are all part of and what we are looking from here as you said what's next is uh to be in um to be able to be in a right place and at the right time to join the journey of some outstanding founders who are using technology to uh um make this disruptive innovations happen from the core uh like we are talking when we're talking about data center and we will wait when once we find out where we are or figure out that this is where we want to go next we will wait for the light uh opportunities to surface we it may take us several years but uh we will not be in a haste like for example we are a strong believer that uh data centers in space people will laugh at us the the way they used to laugh at when somebody said I can take the rocket back in the same place where I launched it from many many years back. And today these are the people who are beelining to join his IPO and giving him any valuation and every valuation that he will ask for.

SPEAKER_02 35:49

So like that we strongly believe that again with when going back to the grain contrarian yet right uh we may still require some kind of a first principle innovation or breakthrough but data centers space is a thing to be so we are even looking for opportunities like those uh how to participate in them and over time how we count whether we are doing uh better or or same or worse is that uh when we are on a on a hunt we are able to figure out or spot uh say maybe 20 30 40 opportunities and we try to speak to them um each time we we we uh find these clusters earlier days if we had have reached out and we would have asked for uh uh a conversation we would not have got much of a response even if you have been able to have five conversations one or two will take our money so over the years what has today happened is that we are getting far more conversations and therefore we are able to give money to more people than more of these outstanding founders than before so that's a very huge uh uh compliment or a feather in the cap that I carry with me that uh that from um two out of five we are today probably at four out of five uh we may never get into five out of five for several reasons and those could be good also but at the same time that's where we are looking for and we want to continue our journey in these and uh where we could be uh we could be part of uh high impact uh zero billion dollar market creation opportunities that changes our world that affects lives of millions of people creates generate greater abundance for the entire humanity uh similar ways we are a very strong believer I don't know whether I'll see in my lifetime but we will definitely become a multiplanetary species interesting and so Debneo I just want to double click on yeah and in this analogy interesting um so I want to double click on something that you said I mean when you said when you first started um your opportunity to invest was uh two out of five now it's four out of five what has driven the biggest change in terms of like I mean I'm assuming the track record and and things like that uh but what has what has made the biggest difference in terms of now founders being interested in taking check size is it because it's never just about the money uh so so walk me through kind of like um what's what what's what's made the biggest difference for you for you in terms of the companies that you were able to invest in yeah yeah so I think the biggest difference is that how how much uh knowing more doing more and expecting less yeah what I mean by that it's not about track record nobody is interested in your track record you may have a great track record uh nobody even know where when did you buy what did you buy what price did you buy what where you are selling yeah these these things help but they don't they don't tilt the scale in your favor they can uh move the needle uh uh a few basis points so what really matters is the conversation when you are talking to people when you are talking to these founders how engaged are you how much you are able to ask them questions that they haven't heard from other investors you get what I mean when you when when you when you stand out as an investor again you have to be a different in type of investor where the founders do not see you as an investor they rather feel this is another uh operator another builder another coder he's talking like me he's he he's asking me questions which are right up my alley and these are like uh either they are sweet spots or they are like things that are keep me awake at night so that's where they get very convinced and then they uh decide to take your money there have been instances recently where people have told us we have been trying to reach them for two months they never um even replied the emails and then when we finally somehow land up meeting them incidentally coincidentally uh and then we carry out a conversation they say hey guys are you available today evening for a beer yeah then we say then they ask us do you have a minimum check size or something you know I am oversubscribed I say yeah we know oversubscribed so even if I have a minimum check size how does it matter you're oversubscribed so no no I will back off some of the investors I want you guys on my cap table those are like music so this can only happen when you are asking questions which are right up their alley yeah which is like really make them salivate so that's where how will you ask these questions you you are not a fortune teller neither imagination so you have to really know the inside outside of their industry you have to be very passionate about your investing narrative why you want to do if you want to do say for example uh data centers in space why you want to do it you must really know some things other investors don't know and mostly in the investing world we are also lucky because most investors follow others crowded space heard they just say oh because my friend did it I want to do it and then because the friend is a heavyweight he says you you have to take his money or maybe um I am a heavyweight so I make sure that the you you you you if you go back to power law there's a very nice chapter there Sebastian writes about where uh some people uh did not even give money to uh Steve Jobs and said that who is and in fact uh called up called up the guy who has sent him as why did you send him to me he gone to some in guru in India and he probably hasn't taken bath for one month and he was giving some crappy ideas um uh you just wasted my time but to Steve Jobs being a lip service you know San Francisco people are very nice on the face so they he just referred him to somebody else and the guy he referred him he wrote him a check and then after a couple of years this guy who shoot him off realizes that he has missed a good case so he goes back to the person he has referred and said I referred you him to you you wrote a check now it's your job to get me in his cap table so this is how people go to people's cap table yeah and he went in he got into jobs cap table and I'm not saying this these are all in the book you can go and read about it yeah so uh so this is how the world works and when and founders don't like this I'm sure jobs has always remembered that guy I mean there are there's a fantastic narrative about um uh Zuckerberg goes to one of the biggest Bay Area investors because they have been after Zuckerberg for almost a year and he comes late to the meeting every partner is waiting and his first slide says why you should not invest in his book first slide.

SPEAKER_01 43:13

Yeah like rebukes that uh you know founders give to these investors and because this this herd mentality is all there um we also get a very when you ask something very solid which is literally up their alley it's on their sweet spot you you get your way through and they might even ask me what else other than money instead of saying oh I will give you contacts I will link you up with this guy that guy they said maybe uh once you write your uh codes before you ship them we can take a quick sneak peek and tell you what are the laundry give you a laundry list of things that you need to fix. That's like somebody from the other side of the counter this is I something I learned very early in my in my um um career that when you are writing your code you

SPEAKER_02 44:00

never find the mistake that is the that's the bug where the bug is is somebody else in the essay like when you read your essay after after five times 15 times now you cannot improve on the essay somebody else has to come and improve your essay the same the need for editors i mean i and so i mean if i can summarize kind of your perspective the goal is to be additive um drive value for uh companies and when when they feel when they sense this when they see this the conviction becomes stronger because they know that you you're not just helping with with money you're helping in other ways okay what um yeah from your perspective also you have to do it in a way which is contrarian which and others are not doing nobody is offering him this service nobody is asking him those uh those in fact we measure our success in a call as to how many times founders say oh that's a great question yep if he never says if he says three times probably we got 30 out of 100 yeah when he says oh that's a great question and if he says none of the time badly so you have to be different so for the basic of this is that in everything that you want to do again go back to that crowded space no value so you have to be contrarian not everybody's giving don't give that if you can't give something new something different you will not get uh fast track if you can give the gates will open for you that's the more important thing from from a DegaCon perspective um what are the things that you're doing that that maybe are not standard or common to the uh investment industry so first of all uh every investment industry um tries to do hundred mile radius of where they are we don't try to do as I explain second is they try to because they think they have because they are writing check they feel they know and they want to shepherd the founders we don't in fact we don't like cap tables where there are investors who are trying to shepherd the founders if we can shepherd our founders just because we were successful in our founding journeys then we should do the next startup and not invest in startups the third thing we try to do is that not go after founders who are there to become a founder who are doing many of the same and the same of the many they don't want a nine to six job yeah so we try to figure out why are you doing what you are doing?

SPEAKER_01 46:44

Why are you here so the the the fourth thing we try to see is that does this person or does this team or the the founder the co-founder they have the wherewithal tenacity maybe uh even um the domain of competence to even pull this out and if they can even achieve 20 or 30 percent of what they are trying to do will that make it a big story will that make it high impact will it affect and change and influence many people's life so these are the few things which in the in the uh uh normal scheme of things we do not uh others don't do similarly like we do not take at the very beginning we do not take monies that can constrain us monies in our own cap table we don't take investors who will try to tell us where to invest yeah who are trying to shepherd us so we want to be non-constrained managers so like this there are at least about as I talked about about five six of these then democratize access to people who cannot invest I'm an accredited investor you are an accredited investor but most people like you and me who are managers C levels uh money managers in Fortune 500s or large multinationals or C levels in small medium businesses they have the money but they do not have the time they do not have the wherewithal they want to learn so you take money from people who put return as third or the last criteria the first criteria is can this be my lifetime ringside view fireside chat to the world that is changing so fast that I am be decimated my wealth and my assets are going to be decimated and then secondly if can so that can I therefore put a small amount of money that I can afford and then can have an outstanding or outcome by in terms of multiples because we are looking for long playbooks but for that what one these investors has to be extremely patient. It has to be patient capital because large outcomes do not come overnight and large outcomes do not come over small capitals overnight.

SPEAKER_02 49:16

So you have to give it the time on one side if you see private investing has been compressing I mean just imagine I if I'm not mistaken Amazon uh in 1997 went for IPO at a valuation about 300 million yeah 300 million and today we are what 25 26 29 30 years down the road spacex is going for 1.75 trillion how many times man just work that out so this is where people are staying in the uh private so if you today are going in at SpaceX at 1.75 trillion you have to wait another 20 years for SpaceX to give you anything significant yeah yet they have given if you look at Tesla the same conglomerate the same uh uh first principles yeah same founder so it has given probably um nearly 400 times um since it's IPO but you have to stay to stay through during this time Toyota has left them and gone Toyota invested 50 million in their IPO at 480 million in three years or four years later they went out of it and today their business is most impaired by by Tesla uh by 2019 Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy so these bankruptcy incidences will come many times you have to still have the balls of steel and stay out there because each time there is a storm and there's a hurricane and you get out of it you have lost it you will never be able to get back so this is what we basically try for and and that's where you know these five six areas where we are completely different from um the the rest of our peers so can I infer tip neo then that you have more investors than a standard uh uh VC fund and that your life of a fund is longer because you're looking for you well you you said it yourself you want to democratize access you want to provide uh people with access to this opportunity you also talked about not taking institutional money you talked about patient capital so I'm kind of getting a sense for how you are thinking about the the the fund and how you've constructed it yeah absolutely but then um I have been we are fortunate the regulation requires us to take only accredited investor money and we also have a minimum it's not that we have many but what we have done is that we have raised very little capital this is again we are very different we are not one who looks for creating new new funds every two two three three years and to be very honest um we are not the one who have looked for a long fund life uh again regulation has been very helpful to us and more importantly we have learned from our larger bigger peers who have figured this out and if you see today the trend in uh Silicon Valley for the big funds is to create evergreen funds where uh there is no no terminal life because if you have a terminal life the end of it you are working for your terminal life because nobody if even god doesn't know whether um by the 10 year or the 12 year your investments are all lemons or are they hit to the fence or they are home runs or they are jackpots. So on on that I I mean definitely evergreen funds have uh are definitely increase increasing in popularity uh we're constantly being approached to even set up our own uh evergreen fund um like the questions that that we have um and we're we're trying to to determine how to structure this is like how do you provide investors with on ramps and off ramps um do you lock in the investment for a period of time uh how do you provide liquidity because I mean the the challenge that we're currently facing particularly in the private equity is like okay well that's great I'm getting some distributions but like when can I get my paid up capital back?

SPEAKER_01 53:26

Or so walk me through kind of your your thinking in terms of um uh of of the the kind of the the change or the shift towards an evergreen fund because I agree having a life uh like having a fund with a life of seven years or nine years like um it forces you to take actions that if you're um a normal investor would you wouldn't necessarily take because they may not be the best action for the investment true so therefore we start from best action for investment and we have we are lucky again to uh see through this predicament right at the beginning so we have been very uh careful in choosing our LPs there have been many occasions where we have refused uh real quality uh money just because they were looking for um the the time and the quantity of return um uh so as i said one has to be aligned first is that this is a lifetime lesson to understand and know how not to get decimated like for example what i just explained about uh uh having an off offline or off grid data center data centers in space right from the time like we we have we have invested in spacex when spacex managed to take the rocket back that's the inflection point and then we stayed on so people who don't want to stay on and here we have our skin in the game we are our own we are the we are also investors if we can stay on why can other and because we are taking a very small minuscule part of somebody's net worth yeah we we we make sure that nobody puts one two percent more than one two percent of their net worth here if they cannot forget about this money and they need liquidity then in that case this is not for them go to the stock market everyday liquidity is there be a day trader swing trader buy in the morning sell in the evening go there's so many products so many some so many things available and this we documented and in our onboarding agreements and this has been uh shared and agreed by our investors yeah and then there are still scenarios where people would like to look for uh exits then they have to uh looking at our portfolio at our work there will be new investors who are willing to join in so since we don't take money they can only new investors can only get a play through secondaries and therefore somebody has to sell but then this new investor also doesn't know how long he has to wait and also he doesn't know whether he will get his capital back he may lose his entire capital including the premium he's paying to the seller if any so therefore the seller has to sell for a uh for a far lower price than uh uh maybe what the navs will NAVs will uh we will will produce it's not a uh it's not a mutual fund of listed securities of airline companies and uh automobile companies and um banks and listed securities that you will sell at an NAV yeah so essentially make sure that so don't take money from people who is not aligned with you yeah and make sure that they understand they sign they read sign agree yeah I mean good faith there will be challenges but then those are all all all uh uh part of the journey at some point we do not know whether at the five year seven year ten year twelve year you will again get lucky and your in some of your investments will will be able to return the whole fund of course of course to sell that sell sell it and return everyone you have to remember the the larger ones never make much noise it is the smaller ones who make the most noise very true so you have to let them know you need to have some kind of a uh foreclosing mechanism where uh you have the ability to uh foreclose so you have a uh you have a call option rather than a put option yeah makes sense and this again helps regulation regulation helps us and uh that's where you were asking about Singapore Singapore has got I would say one of the most friendliest regulation I have seen in the entire world and you know to this dubai and all does not even come close interesting he may try to try to compete with Singapore but they are nowhere close yeah I mean business they will get there too because everybody's narrative is changing they will also get it they will they they are also going to come up and and more uh and more uh you are uh disrupted you will uh be able to pick up the threads and change the narrative faster uh and make it smoother so so there are so many benefits that uh the time and the tide has given us and we have been only lucky to pick them up to be uh anchored at one place and be able to invest in um uh uh where where it matters and so on so forth amazing I know we're uh we're at timed but uh if somebody um if somebody wants to get in touch with you if somebody wants to follow your work or peach your investment what's the best way to do so okay so um I have my LinkedIn uh where I post quite regularly people can join us there as well as uh in our website uh it's uh it's a uh uh short clips website yeah you can reach out to us by writing um at the website um if you uh and that's where most of the people reach out to us uh particularly the people who are seeking for funding um they send their decks uh uh through the website uh and um uh it's not possible for us to reach out as we said we get almost 300 applications in a quarter uh so uh we reach out to ones where we feel that there is uh uh substance often it may not be from investing standpoint it could be even from learning standpoint because we are constantly learning i mean the whole um um the there's a single motivation for us every day is that we have to be uh you have to be uh constantly curious and by being constantly curious we are learning every day so we try to make us we evaluate our each day by trying to figure out had we learned something new today so that I can go to bed tonight and come wake up tomorrow morning wiser. So if you are constantly learning uh there is a we believe there's a far high chance that we will not fall in that trap where we feel that yesterday's rule will work for tomorrow's our problems.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:42

Absolutely absolutely good wisdom good insights Debnew mukharji uh absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast and for you to share your view and and uh perspective on where the world is heading and and how to best position yourself primarily on first principles kind of going back to the basics like what makes sense from a long term perspective thank you so much for for coming on the pod thank you thanks for hosting me it was really nice talking to you absolutely thank you