By Sunil K. Goyal
To prepare a dish, a chef collates all the ingredients before starting to cook, and the quality of these ingredients is crucial for the dish to turn out well. Scaling up an organisation is no less.
Capability building always comes ahead of the next big leap: YourNest’s journey started just this way… a thought I had shared with only one person, Sanjay Pande, who – in my view – could transform it into reality with his depth of understanding people. Any startup hinges on its founding team and its core members. If Sanjay hadn’t come forward, we would not have been born. The capability to access and empower founders was key to launching YourNest – we started to live the value of Nurture Capital vs being yet another VC firm.
It was 2011. The opportunity lay in technology and we needed a tech expert. Sanjay and I exchanged notes on nearly 20 profiles, and Girish Shivani’s profile made it easy for him to complete our triad. The key driver was still the value match: all three of us rolled up our sleeves to raise our first fund in 39 months – demonstrating relentlessness and audacity.
Fund II was envisioned to nurture global market leaders from India. We onboarded Dr Vivek Mansingh as our fourth General Partner after seeing him in action on the advisory board of a portco. Vivek brought a global perspective driven by IP-led innovations. The DeepTech opportunity was led by IoT and hardware – thanks to Satish Mugulavalli for initiating it by joining us in 2017, before he handed over the baton for launching his own startup in 2021.
Fund III is typically said to be a testimony of a firm’s ability to stay relevant for years to come. This involved deepening cross-functional strengths with Mohit Hira leading Brand Strategy and Communications post his creative stints across industries, Venkat S Raju bringing the wisdom of his entrepreneurial journey in Silicon Valley while being active with over 70 SaaS/Tech startups, Ranjeet Shetty who grew up devouring science fiction and made a career of being integral to seven technology startups with five of them seeing rewarding exits, and Ketan Krisha – an author coach who understands what it takes to attract talent and design an organisation for success. This team of four Venture Partners is dedicated to nurturing startups, entrepreneurial leaders, and more.
Partners are only a guiding post. The mind and actions of the team count the most. Our team members draw a perfect parallel with an 11-member cricket team, though we have grown to twice that number. To excel, a VC firm has to nurture several functions, and we are happy to state that, triggered by a research Myriad Communications conducted, and an extensive exercise led by Dr Shalini Lal and her team at Unqbe, we have the blueprint to strengthen and build competence in each function:
- Research & Strategy: developing a unique investment thesis.
- Fund Raising: building a corpus from like-minded Limited Partners.
- Investor Relations: nurturing a relationship of trust and transparency.
- Deal Sourcing & Cultivation: winning the confidence of high-potential founders.
- Portfolio Management & Governance: ensuring the highest compliance with standards and monthly reporting cadence.
- Portfolio Growth: consciously driving value creation.
- Exit Management: The founders may choose to build a portco for life, enabling us to manage cash exits so that we can continue to fund more innovations and startups.
- Finance & Regulatory Compliance: for the AIF regime to flourish, we must fulfil every commitment to our LPs and SEBI.
- Talent, People & Culture: enabling YourNest and supporting young portcos in adopting the finest tools to attract and retain talent. And build a culture led and lived by our founders.
- Brand & Communications: living our vision, purpose, and values, and consistently delivering experiences around promises we make.
- AI-first & Leveraging Technology to Create Value: enhancing efficiency, productivity, and, even more, our effectiveness.
As the journey to nurture success continues, there are several people who merit a special mention… Starting with our advisors: Alok Mittal, Amit Mehta, Amrish Rau, Badri Agarwal, Manoj Kohli, Prof MM Pant, Nupur Garg, Prof Rishikesha Krishnan, Sharad Sharma, Satya Narayanan, and Umesh Sachdev.
We are delighted that our team is also gearing up to bring continue nurturing success across the board. And so, a warm welcome once again to Bhavesh Sharma, Sanchit Taneja, Bhavesh Gulia, Vinamra Misra, Harshit Dhawan, Harshita Bansal and Akshat Mishra, who joined our family in the last two months.
We also appreciate Vipul Arora, Shaifali Kapoor, Rajat Chawla, Monika Pande, Aditya Malhotra, Akshat Bhatnagar, Ayushi Gupta, Bhagavi Mantri, Naman Gupta, Pratiik Sharmaa, Sanjay Jha, Shivek Arora, Sourav Gupta, Ujjwala Amba, Vinny Sethi and, of course, Ajay Thakur (who serves us to stay active) for being with us in this nurturance journey
We acknowledge Amit Rapotra, Kunal Sharma, Pranav Bafna, Priya Kumari, Rahul Gupta, Rajat Swarup, and Ravi Poddar, who remain Forever YourNesters in their new organisations and roles.
And, we are looking forward to adding a brand expert, a people leader, and an ESG compliance team member.
Finally, our valued partners: Unqbe as Organisation Design experts, Myriad Communications for independent research, W.E. Matter for team engagement, PyjamaHR for recruitment, GreytHR for people processes, Khaitan Legal Associates as general counsels, KPMG as statutory auditors, Four-S Services as an Investment Banker, BDO as independent valuers, PWC as tax and regulatory advisors, ICUL as Legal Advisors for AIF regime, Ascent as fund administrators, Profectus as due diligence experts, PR Gupta & Co as tax administrators, CGAS for ESG, Vistra as trustee, Orbis as custodians, APT as our event partners, SanchiConnect for partnering us in Velocity, the 2024 fast-track funding platform…
Our ingredients are coming together, the pot is boiling, and a gourmet dish is being prepared. Keep watching this space…