How much does an average Indian startup need to get started up? Mukul Singhal, associate at Canaan Partners, reckons anywhere between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 50 lakh. Small change for most venture capitalists, except that most venture capitalists don’t invest such small change. This is angel investor territory. And there is a big untapped base of angel investors in India, which needs to be organized, says Singhal, whose post at Venturewoods a few days ago asking for suggestions on the best way to achieve that, prompted me to write to him and find out what was going on. A whole lot, I found out this afternoon, after chatting with him.
Singhal is a man on a mission. He wants to set up a platform, under the Canaan umbrella, that will help entrepreneurs to get in touch with angels more effectively. The first step to that is to get a fix on the angel community itself. There are a few organized angel investor networks, such as Mumbai Angels, Indian Angel Network and so on, but clearly, not enough. Singhal thinks that the angel communty is much larger than the already known pool of serial entrepreneurs, big corporate honchos and other high networth individuals. “There are many people in the (corporate) operating environment, at the middle-senior levels who make decent money and wants to invest as angels. They need to be brought into the system,” he says. Most of these folks never get into the system because either they don’t know how to or don’t want to join an angel investor group.
Instead, Singhal thinks, if there is a platform that allows potential angels to interact with entrepreneurs, figure out their needs and eventually do deals, the angel capital pool available to startups would grow exponentially. It would also allow people who have regular corporate jobs to get involved with a startup. As angel investors, apart from investing, they also get to bring some of their operating skills to the table. “Several people I know don’t want to quit their jobs but want to be involved with startups in some way,” he says. And of course, venture capital firms such as Canaan benefit in terms of potential deal flow being created.
I’m not surprised to see this initative come from Canaan. The India team, notably Alok Mittal, Singhal and Harish Gandhi, is among the more active within the venture capitalist community here in terms of their involvement with the startup eco-system. Mittal is a regular grassroots worker — he’s been an entrepreneur with Jobsahead (acquired by Monster) — and spends a lot of time with entrepreneurs formally at forums such as Proto.in and informally. He’s also the driving force behind Venturewoods — probably India’s best startup and venture capital blog. Canaan also runs the very successful annual TiE Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge. I’m sure this new initiative will also be a big success. Will be tracking it closely.
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