StartupCentral

I meant to post this a while back, a couple of months ago actually, but got side-tracked. While trawling the Internet for blogs by venture capitalists I came across one called Venture Explorer. It is the personal weblog of a venture capitalist called Vineet Buch. He’s a principal with BlueRun Ventures in Menlo Park, California. I tracked him down through his blog and he agreed to an interview. It is one of the most candid interviews that I’ve been given by a venture capitalists. Here are some of the thoughts he shared with me:

On being an entrepreneur-turned-VC

VCs who have been entrepreneurs often find it hard to give up control. (Buch founded two companies, Karient and Riya, before turning venture capitalist two years ago).

On how much a startup background helps

It is important to have some experience in working with a start-up to be a VC. You can’t really understand the problems and dynamics of a start-up if you’ve only worked in a big corporation.

On local search startups in India

Lots of people are trying to do local search here. The question is: how do you scale that? If you try to monetize local search through advertising, how will you get a dosa vendor in Andheri to advertise? (He thinks the hybrid online-offline model works better in India).

Buch focuses on early-stage consumer Internet, enterprise software, mobile services and clean energy companies in the Valley. He grew up in Bhopal and Delhi and is often in India to look at prospective investments here. You must visit his blog to find out about his off-work persona. This guy is a complete outdoors person — he backpacks, snowshoes, sea kayaks and more. “I love to explore, as much of the earth there is left to explore. I must have been born in the wrong era,” he says.

Image Courtesy: BlueRun Ventures