Figuring Out with Raj Shamani Sep 19, 2026 2h 19m 1h 44m saved
With Sasha Mirchandani, founder and managing partner of Kae Capital and co-founder of Mumbai Angels, who wrote the first check into Myntra and has sat on Fractal Analytics' board for 25 years
Sasha Mirchandani rates India's appetite for startup risk at four out of ten. America's, he said, is nine and a half, and India is moving toward five rather than three.
Most pitch advice tells an Indian founder to open with a large addressable market. Mirchandani said he would rather fund a small market growing quickly, because a large one is already crowded, and that the slide promising 1% of a huge market is the laziest one a founder can write.
"America would be nine and a half. India we are still at number four. We're still improving with our simple business."
He founded Kae Capital and co-founded Mumbai Angels, made his first investment off his family television company's balance sheet 25 years ago, and was the first investor in Myntra. Two of the companies in his debut fund, Porter and HealthKart, have each returned that fund more than once.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 139 minutes of audio, 35 minutes of reading.
Here are the 23 principles that matter.
Key Takeaways
Founders solving a problem they had themselves beat opportunistic ones 9 to 1, on his firm's own reckoning
The single best predictor he has found is conscientiousness — "talk is cheap. But are you really doing it"
A founding team needs a seller and a builder, and he will take the seller first
The pitch deck is 10 slides, team on the front page, and the slide claiming 1% of a large market is "the laziest slide ever"
He said 90 of every 100 decks he sees are cluttered
He keeps every fund under $100 million because Indian venture returns fall away above that
His last fund was 760 crores; the new one is capped at 850
One doubt about integrity ends the deal, whatever else the founder has
He passed on Zepto, Groww, Meesho, Ola and OYO — and says a fund missing no iconic companies is in the wrong business
Every deal has to be underwritten to a multi-billion-dollar outcome, because the odds of finding one are so low
Founder salary should still pinch: roughly 30–40 lakhs a year at seed for a 25-year-old
Of a hypothetical 100 crores he put 50 into AI, 20 into health, 10 each into EVs and renewables, 5 into fintech
Arrogant founders keep winning, and he named Steve Jobs and Elon Musk rather than arguing the point
The company he most wants built is an Indian large language model, and the one he would fund regardless of returns is mental health
1. Onida, Trains, First Check
Raj Shamani opened on why founders speak well of him. Mirchandani's answer was that his firm had been through the same thing.
He and his partners were operators before they were investors
we've been entrepreneurs ourselves so we've seen tough times straight line life how can we help the entrepreneur through the tough times to come to where they are
Sasha Mirchandani
His own start was not a rejected fundraise. He joined his father's television company, Onida, in 1995, at the point it was the number one brand in India. He became a director of it in 2025 — thirty years later, a fact Shamani said he had found in the public record.
The reason was his father's rule against entitlement. On day one he was told to take the train rather than the car. Mirchandani had been living outside India and described the first attempt as a physical shock: a crowd running in behind him and his back smashed against the carriage. His brother refused to share a taxi with him the next day. He went back, learned the trains, and was made to travel second class rather than first. He was then sent out as an area sales manager, and after that to Mangalore, a small city he had never lived in.
Selling a television without the family name was the lesson
But all these experiences really taught me only one thing is appreciate what people have to go through at the bottom to go to the top.
Sasha Mirchandani
Shamani pressed on why a father would strip that privilege from a son born in Malabar Hill and sent to boarding school in the United States. Mirchandani said he had never asked, but guessed his father did not want entitled children, having graduated from BITS Pilani in the 1960s as the only entrepreneur in a class where more than 90% took jobs.
Two thoughts led him out of electronics. At a Young Presidents' Organization talk around 1999 or 2000 he heard an industrialist explain moving a family business from textiles into pharmaceuticals, and concluded that consumer electronics was a low-margin industry in which very few companies had built real value. He named Sony, and later Apple. The second thought was that his father had found capital hard to raise in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and that twenty-five years later a smarter founder still could not get it. India in 1999 and 2000 had almost no venture capital industry.
He asked a contact to introduce him to entrepreneurs. One team came to him not for money but for televisions, to compare products on their price-comparison website. Months later they asked about capital, and he invested off the Onida balance sheet. Within three months his father installed a new board, and prominent directors asked why a listed television company was investing in software. He bought the shares out of the company himself. That company became Fractal Analytics; he is still on its board.
2. Fractal and InMobi Pivots
Shamani noted that Fractal, Porter and others share a theme: the founders, not the idea. Mirchandani agreed, and said the first market is usually wrong.
The plan changes on contact with the market, so the team is what he underwrites
Because clear insight that company's all about the entrepreneurs and the best founders will figure it out.
Sasha Mirchandani
At Fractal the original comparison business went nowhere. He told the founders to fold the operations and come back with anything in information technology, which was the industry he had wanted to enter in the first place. Three months later they returned with a data-mining plan, which became analytics, which became the artificial-intelligence business it is now.
He described the same pattern at InMobi, which arrived with a fourth plan and a funding requirement of two and a half crores at a meeting at Opera House. He called its founder the fastest-thinking and most flexible entrepreneur he has funded. InMobi became India's first unicorn in 2011 on a round from SoftBank, and is now building Glance.
3. Hell or High Water
Asked how he identifies the right founder, Mirchandani said the first filter is personality, and the phrase he uses for it recurred through the whole interview.
The first trait is refusing to die
This founder or founding team are they entrepreneurs that are hell or high water but look no matter what they will figure it out. No excuse.
Sasha Mirchandani
He named two limited partners in his own funds as examples. Deep Kalra of MakeMyTrip has described how many times the company nearly died and rebuilt; Mirchandani said it went from four or five hundred people to twenty or thirty around 2001 and restarted. Ashish Hemrajani of BookMyShow went from 300 people to six at one point. Shamani added Shiprocket to the list. Mirchandani relayed a line from one of them: down to one crore, he told his team they would not die, and the company later listed.
The second trait is the one he calls the number one predictor of success.
Conscientiousness, which he defines as doing what you said you would
The number one trait of success Raj is are you a conscientious person? You say what you do, you'll do it. Which is very important. Talk is cheap. But are you really doing it?
Sasha Mirchandani
The firm tests it with a specific question: give us an example where everything said you should give up, because it was too hard, and you did not, and found a way through. At the stage Kae Capital invests there is no balance sheet and no profit-and-loss statement, only founders, so the journey is the only evidence available.
The third is that the founders complement each other. Two people with the same skills add nothing, and a good founding team recruits deliberately for the gaps.
4. A Seller and a Builder
Shamani asked what the ideal founding team looks like. Mirchandani said the requirement changes between day zero and day five, but the two roles do not.
Selling is the job, and raising money is part of the selling
And then of course the third could be other parts of the business as his skill. But that's what we need initially. So you need a seller and a builder.
Sasha Mirchandani
He added clarity of thought as a screening test in the meeting itself: a muddled pitch means the founder is going nowhere, and he expects to be fully engaged by that point. On whether one person can do both, he said his firm sees it often, and that as a company scales the founder usually keeps the half they are better at and hires above themselves on the other. His example was Fractal's founder, who he said still writes code in the office and can sell to anybody. Both skills in one person are rare, he said, because world-class versions of either are rare.
Shamani offered the dreamer-and-developer framing, and Mirchandani used it to explain the return he needs.
The fund is underwritten to home runs, not to singles
We're looking at 50x 100x outcomes. We're not in the business of bunts. We're in the home run business.
Sasha Mirchandani
5. The Right Reasons, 9 to 1
Shamani put the central question: ten founders in a room, one becomes a billionaire, all ten look equally good. What are the nine doing wrong?
Founders who had the problem themselves outperform the opportunistic ones 9 to 1
So the main reason a really good company is created is there a pain point to solve that the founder personally had for someone close to them. So those founders are the best of best because you have a clear purpose. These founders and founding teams we believe outperform the let's say opportunistic founders 9 is to1.
Sasha Mirchandani
Shamani pushed back that this is an old playbook — that entrepreneurship today is a career choice made because it is lucrative and glamorous, not because of a personal wound. Mirchandani's answer was that those are the wrong reasons, and that glamour does not survive the first sign of trouble, since even for the best founders "the probability of success is almost zero."
He then qualified it. Building for money is not wrong, he said, and his firm has funded people who said plainly that money was the goal. Some do fine. The problem is that a venture investor has very few data points, and is playing with the ones available. Where there is no personal pain point, he looks for the substitute: whether the founder has spent real time with customers and understood their problem instead.
6. Founder-Market Fit
The firm learned this one expensively. Mirchandani described a company where the timing was right, the category was right, and the business still did not work. The answer, when they found it, was that the founder was wrong for that particular business.
His illustration was an alcohol brand, a category Kae Capital does not fund, where the work is distribution, trenches and customs officers rather than spreadsheets. On paper the founder ticks every box; the question is whether they will do that work.
They now have to argue the case for the founder, not just the company
and so then we oh my god so now we spend a lot of time why is this founding team the right founding team for this business and we have to qualify that this is the right reason for this reasons and if not. And that has saved us a lot of money.
Sasha Mirchandani
He also said domain experts are a strong version of the same thing: someone who knows an industry, believes their employer is doing it badly, and leaves to do it better. Shamani called that fit closer than strong, a marriage, and asked which he would rather back. Mirchandani said the domain expert, but that he will fund the outsider who has done the work, using the word his firm uses internally for it: spiky.
7. Naivety Beats Experience
Asked whether an outsider can build a large company in a category they know nothing about, Mirchandani said 100%, because they do not know how hard it is.
Not knowing the difficulty is what makes the attempt possible
Who would have said that you can build a gigafactory and make a large public company making electric scooters, right? If he had known how hard it is, maybe he wouldn't have started
Sasha Mirchandani
The founder in question is Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola. Mirchandani is not an investor and said so, but described a 2011 pitch he still remembers, at a time when he meets eight or ten founders in a week and would struggle to name half of them a week later. What he remembers is energy — either calm and articulate, or an aura, but something.
On the criticism Aggarwal attracts now, Mirchandani was direct: nothing is going wrong, the internet hates. He called him a self-made man, said the determination and the desire to win are intact, and predicted he would have the last laugh.
8. Hard Problems Pay Off
Shamani asked whether competitiveness is the most important trait. Mirchandani said not the most, but close, and that second place is not what the business is for. He then corrected the picture of what a competitive founder looks like, using Porter's founders Pranav Goel and Uttam Digga.
Quiet founders can be the most competitive ones in the room
You don't have to come in and have aura. Calm, collected, clear. The key is what insight you have.
Sasha Mirchandani
He said nobody would recognize either of them on the street. Shamani, who had dealt with local trucking himself, described the market they entered as a mess: five operators from the same place with the same trucks quoting five different rates. Mirchandani agreed, and said standardizing it was incredibly hard — which is the point.
His reasoning is that a hard problem has a low probability of success but leaves every competitor behind once it is cracked, and that naivety plus determination is a combination he called deadly and powerful.
9. The Unique Insight Test
Shamani described meeting someone at a dinner in the United Arab Emirates who runs a very large global fund investing from pre-seed through public markets. That investor's filter, as relayed: if in the first ten or fifteen minutes a founder cannot tell him something about the industry that neither he nor his analysts already knew, he is not interested.
Mirchandani said his firm works the same way, and framed it as the founder teaching the investor.
He wants to leave the meeting having been educated, not persuaded
the idea should be that I should have no clue about it the founder should be educating me or any other VC and saying what this is the reason I'm starting in this company
Sasha Mirchandani
He added the practical constraint around it. The founder has to earn the meeting with a deck that makes sense, because a schedule is finite and an unclear deck loses the window entirely. Once in the room, the insight has to survive being questioned rather than dismissed.
10. The 10-Slide Pitch Deck
Asked for a step-by-step formula, Mirchandani gave one.
Ten slides maximum, and the team goes first
This is a bit of a debate on the first slide. I like the team in the front.
Sasha Mirchandani
The order he built with Shamani: team, problem, solution, why now, TAM, product with a demo video, traction if there are a few months of it, competition, and one slide on how much is being raised. He initially forgot the why-now slide and added it back as very important.
On market size he disagrees with the standard advice. Large addressable markets are what most investors ask for; he will take a small market growing very fast, because a crowded one is already contested. What he wants on the slide is the size of the niche and the rate it is growing, or the evidence that it will.
He was blunt about the slide founders most often use instead.
The 1%-of-the-market slide is a reason to stop reading
That is the laziest slide ever delete the presentation.
Sasha Mirchandani
He said a deck gets about 30 seconds to earn 30 minutes, and that at the deck stage market size matters less to him than clarity on the problem and the solution. Of 100 pitches, he said, 90 are cluttered, and the detail should come from working through the business with the founder rather than from reading a longer document.
His recent example was Supernova, an AI-native language-learning app founded by young engineers from IIT Madras. What sold him was the clarity of the pain point. The company has since pivoted the use case while keeping the product, which he treats as normal.
11. Funding Failed Founders
Mirchandani said his firm loves funding founders whose last company failed, provided they can explain the failure precisely: what went wrong, why this time is different, and what has changed. He listed the versions he finds credible — a solo founder without the right co-founding team, a founder wrong for that category, a timing problem now resolved.
Shamani asked whether failure blunts hunger. Mirchandani said some founders do slow down, and that those are not the ones he is looking for.
The screen is for founders who came back more excited, not more careful
Our job is to find the ones who are not slow and more fearful, but in fact more excited.
Sasha Mirchandani
He contrasted the two markets from his years at Nokia Venture Partners in California, where founders would open the deck with the companies that had failed and why. In India, he said, the stigma pushes founders to hide it, and he wants to hear it. His own father failed at three or four companies before one worked.
He thinks the stigma has improved and has a long way to go, because a job still carries more status in India. What he can measure is the confidence of founders who come to him having failed and are willing to talk about it. Asked what would help, his answer was that successful people should talk about their own failures. He keeps a private diary in which he writes down, most weeks, the things that failed.
12. The Ones He Missed
Asked where he has failed, Mirchandani said the business fails constantly by design: on his numbers roughly 40% of investments do not work whatever the firm does. The other failure is speed.
He named Groww and Meesho as companies that came to the firm and were not moved on quickly enough. Then Shamani raised Zepto, and Mirchandani described the meeting in detail: the founder, Aadit Palicha, was 19, pitching him and his partner Gaurav, and the pitch itself was phenomenal. They liked the founder and did not like the Kiranakart idea, and passed.
He expects the company he passed on to list in the tens of billions
And Raj you will see one day Zep will be a bare minimum 10 billion listed company and it'll be far more than that eventually it'll be 20 30 billion
Sasha Mirchandani
His reading of the current pressure on it is that the public market is not accepting the price, so the company will probably raise privately and move toward profitability until it does. He called the founder A-plus and the company a once-in-a-generation business.
He was unbothered by the list.
A fund that misses no iconic companies is not seeing enough
See if you're not missing iconic companies or amazing companies we're in the wrong business.
Sasha Mirchandani
The OYO miss had a different cause. Its founder was 19, running a capital-heavy hotel business, and Mirchandani judged the problem too hard for a single inexperienced founder. He later led the Harvard Business School case study on the company during his executive programme. The firm now runs a standing review, roughly every six months, of the companies it missed and why.
13. What Fund One Returned
Shamani said he had read that the first fund held 32 companies, two of which produced the returns. Mirchandani corrected the count upward. DailyRounds, founded by Deepu Sebin, was a full exit. Certa, a software business in the United States, is doing well. HealthKart is heading for an initial public offering that he expects to value it in the billions, and Tata 1mg came out of the same business. Porter is the third.
One company can return the whole fund, and his first fund has three
Every company we say this founder founding team can they build a multi-billion dollar business? If we don't do that for every single company we're screwed because the odds are so low to find one.
Sasha Mirchandani
On why the rest did not work, he listed founders he should not have backed, founder-market fit misjudged, investments made too early, and determination he misread. He also said the firm has simply got better, and that asked the same question in two years he would have a different list of mistakes.
One belief he has reversed is the requirement for a founding team. He used to rule out single founders. Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma was the counter-example he cites; the deal that broke the rule was Foxtale in fund three, and the firm now backs several solo founders. His conclusion was about stereotyping rather than about founders.
14. Porter's Recycle Clause
Shamani asked about a clause in the fund documents that he had heard was the reason Porter got funded. Mirchandani explained the mechanism plainly: a recycling provision lets a fund return the profit from an early exit to investors while putting the principal back to work, which buys more shots on goal.
He had not included one. An investor asked him about it in conversation, showed him data that funds without recycling underperform, and he went back to his own limited partners after the fund had closed and asked them to change the terms. They agreed. The extra capital is why the firm could keep investing past the 25 companies it had modelled — and Porter was company number 29.
Then came 2015. The company was raising another round when the market turned, the trip never happened, and the round disappeared. Porter was running intercity and intracity businesses on a cost base built for both.
The investor recommends; the founder decides, but the cash is finite
Most founders push back and rightfully so is their company. Our job is to say this is what we recommend but the cash is limited.
Sasha Mirchandani
The founders came back on the Monday having decided to shut one of the two businesses and keep the other. Mirchandani said the discarded one could have become a company in its own right. Many startups of that vintage died; Porter was back in the game inside a week. He also described a founder waiting outside his firm's annual general meeting to raise 5 and 10 lakh checks from the investors inside, which he offered as an example of humility. The round that ended the scramble came from Mahindra — an unconventional investor for a seed-stage logistics company, and after it, he said, there was no turning back.
15. The Myntra Story
Mirchandani said he was the first investor in Myntra, and that board meetings were held in Mukesh Bansal's house before there was an office. The pivot was not his doing. Another investor told Bansal that the original business, personalized cups and mugs, which he described as a Cafepress for India, was too small, bought him a ticket to Brazil to see what had been built there in a different category, and the company came back as online apparel. Mirchandani flagged the limits of his own memory on the detail and said he was 99% sure.
He also said Myntra's share of the eventual Flipkart enterprise value is far larger than people assume and is rarely discussed, though the figures he gave for the split could not be verified.
Asked whether Bansal was competitive, he said super competitive, very clear thinking, and still going at it one company after another.
16. Money Is Not the Driver
Asked to name the most competitive founders he has met, Mirchandani started with Sunil Mittal, whose comeback he called the most inspirational story he knows, and who he said does not talk much. He named Dhirubhai Ambani as the legend, and said people forget that when Mukesh Ambani took over, Reliance was only a couple of thousand crores. Shamani added Gautam Adani, whom he had met the previous year.
On whether these people are driven by money, Mirchandani said it has zero interest for them. His example was CitiusTech's founders, Rizwan Koita and Jagdish Moorjani, who sold their company for two billion dollars.
The people who made the most are the ones who wanted it least
They hate me for saying this, but they give crazy amount of money in charity, right? Amazing 10 on 10 entrepreneurs. They can be going in private jets. They have done remarkably well.
Sasha Mirchandani
He said he still sees one of them walking past in the street, and that both live in small apartments. The purpose, in his telling, was the problem rather than the proceeds.
17. Valuation Is More Art
Mirchandani said the firm sees several thousand deals a year, mostly through emails, connections and calls, and that he personally meets the fewest of anyone in the firm now — around 60 or 70 a year, close to one a week, because his partners do the sourcing. He said it is the part of the job he misses most.
On how a price gets set when there is nothing to value, his answer was that it is more art than science.
There is no discounted cash flow at seed, so the number is negotiated
See, science you can do a discounted cash flow. There's some balance sheet. There's logic.
Sasha Mirchandani
What is left is how well the founder argues their number, how hard they negotiate, and loose comparisons to what similar companies at that stage have raised at. He said the honest answer on whether they have overpaid is often yes, because the target outcome is a one-, two- or ten-billion-dollar company.
The constraint that actually kills deals is ownership. The firm runs the math internally, and when the stake on offer falls to 6% instead of 10, or 12 instead of 15, the partners have to decide whether the founder is exceptional enough to make an exception. On a small fund, he said, a half-billion-dollar outcome at 1% is pointless and at 10% is $20 million.
He described the deals he actually wants as head scratchers — the ones where his first reaction is to wonder why anybody would do this. Zetwerk was one: his first investment committee rejected it, a partner asked them to look again, and the insight from the founders was compelling enough to change his mind. It was also a small market at the time, which is his stated preference.
18. Diligence and Integrity
Shamani asked how he separates a charming storyteller from an executor, noting that a good one can make an investor feel stupid for not funding them. Mirchandani agreed that lazy diligence is how an investor gets caught, and named WeWork's Adam Neumann as the example, while allowing that he may be doing well now.
The reference check runs to 10 or 20 people per founder
We will talk to at least 10 20 people per founder to go deep into each individual.
Sasha Mirchandani
The calls go to previous employers, university professors where the founder is straight out of college, and anyone who has worked with them in any capacity. The questions have been sharpened over the years: would you fund this person; how would you rate them out of ten and why; why are you not putting money in yourself; give me an example of them being collaborative or political; would you work under them; would you leave your job to do it.
The disqualifiers are specific. Giving up too quickly, jumping from project to project or job to job, and being political all register. One thing ends the conversation outright.
A single doubt about integrity kills the deal on the spot
Without integrity there, no matter how good he or she may be, if there's even a doubt or integrity, we will drop the deal right there.
Sasha Mirchandani
He said the firm asks referees about integrity issues directly, and that a referee who knows about one and does not say so loses credibility with the firm permanently — which is why the signal usually comes through even when it is not stated plainly.
19. Small Funds Outperform
On valuations now, Mirchandani said the joke in the United States is that a billion-dollar startup means a billion-dollar seed valuation. Founders leaving OpenAI or Anthropic are raising at one to two billion before they have a product, on the expectation that another two-trillion-dollar company arrives within four or five years. He noted Anthropic's own valuation in the hundreds of billions against the twenty-five or thirty years Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon took.
America supports that because it has thousands of funds with different mandates. The constraint is fund size, and Mirchandani said a core part of his firm's thesis is that Indian early-stage venture returns fall away above a threshold: "maximum 100 million is enough after that certain number the performance starts coming down." His last fund was 760 crores and the new one is capped at 850, both under $100 million.
He worked the arithmetic aloud on a hypothetical $400 million fund. Two excellent outcomes, say 6% of a $2 billion company and 7% of a $3 billion one, produce a few hundred million dollars against a $400 million fund, before dilution. That is barely one and a half times the fund, and the remaining capital has to come from companies that are, by construction, worse. About 40% of the book, he said, is zero.
Shamani's objection was that a small fund cannot take real risk, and therefore cannot fund deep technology. Mirchandani disagreed on the premise: at the stage he invests, mortality is highest and the risk is already extreme. Zetwerk, he said, was an extremely risky bet.
His explanation for why Indian deep tech lagged was a stack of causes rather than one — the market was not ready, gestation to revenue is long, there was not enough capital willing to wait, and the founders were often technologists rather than operators who could build a business around the technology. He said the government is now serious about it, that the firm funds ancillary businesses selling into defense and drones, and that a $2–3 million check is enough to get a company off the ground in India even where the American equivalent raises hundreds of millions on day one.
20. Arrogant Founders Win
Mirchandani said America is the best country in the world for risk capital, rates its appetite at nine and a half against India's four, and thinks India is heading to five — pointing to space companies and Skyroot as evidence that small capital has produced real innovation.
Shamani asked why investors wait for a role model instead of funding the risk themselves. Mirchandani's answer was about timing: it is much harder to change when things are going badly, so the discipline is to disrupt yourself while they are going well. He said he has done it with about half his decisions and that it worked every time he did.
On delusion, he drew the line at the point where it stops being belief. Early on, exceptional self-belief is required. Later, the risk is a founder who will not stop because stopping means admitting failure, while the company rolls along at numbers that go nowhere and the opportunity cost mounts. He said he nudges those founders to take a job or start again rather than keep going.
The tell is who gets blamed
The best founders have just take it as reality as to something's gone wrong. No problem. We'll move forward. I'll fix the problem. I'll find a solution and I'll move forward.
Sasha Mirchandani
The opposite is the founder blaming investors, the market, competition and everyone but themselves. Shamani then asked whether arrogant founders win anyway. Mirchandani said sometimes they do: he named Uber's founder, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as widely disliked and entirely successful, against Larry Page and Sergey Brin as the loved version. His only condition was legality.
He also made the counter-case. A founder with excellent internal ratings and a best-place-to-work award whose operating business is failing has won nothing. And he noted the other extreme in his own portfolio: Porter's founders, whom he called cute and sweet people, which is why he says the trait cannot be stereotyped.
The conversation turned to succession, which Mirchandani treats as part of the same judgment. Jobs, he pointed out, is not recorded shouting at Jony Ive or Tim Cook, built a collaborative senior team and handed over cleanly. Microsoft's handover to Steve Ballmer destroyed value, and Satya Nadella was picked by the board rather than by Bill Gates. Shamani added the story of Larry Ellison firing a floor of engineers who told him something could not be done in two days and sitting down to write the code himself.
Asked to name India's most competitive first-generation founders, he started with Sachin Bansal — ruthless in the right way, thinking big, and then leaving to build Navi after Flipkart. He added OYO's founder, and returned to the improbability of the original bet: a 19-year-old with a few lakhs setting out to build one of the world's largest hotel chains, in a capital-heavy business, with no founder-market experience. He said he has never met a sweeter founder in India, and that the two things are not in conflict.
21. Founder Pay, Secondaries
Shamani asked when he writes a company off. Mirchandani said the firm never gives up before the founder does, and listed portfolio companies that went through periods of no cash: Fractal in 2001 and 2002 and again in 2007 and 2008, InMobi more than once, HealthKart, Tata 1mg, Zetwerk.
Where a company is going nowhere and cannot reach reasonable scale, the firm tells the founder it is marking the residual stake at zero to its own investors, and that it will stay friendly and responsive but will stop proactively chasing. He said he does not hold grudges against founders who lost him money, and would fund one of them again. What he will not forgive is spending investor capital on a personal lifestyle.
Founder salary should be enough to live on and not enough to relax
I say take a salary that you can just about sustain. It should still be pinching you but you're not thinking too much about this. It should be nowhere near your market price like nowhere close.
Sasha Mirchandani
He gave rough numbers, with the caveat that he was working from common sense rather than recent data. At seed, on 1 to 2 million dollars raised, a 25-year-old founder should take 30 to 40 lakhs a year, an older founder with dependents 50 to 60. At Series A, on about 5 million, roughly 10% more. In a 20-million-plus round, 50 to 60 lakhs for the younger founder and 75 to 80 for the older one, moving toward a couple of crores close to an initial public offering.
On secondaries, he said the firm does not object to a small amount to buy a house or clear debts, and that his own firm had approved one for a unicorn founder the previous day. Series B is too early, because selling that fast means selling too much of your own company. He wants the founder holding a large share of their net worth in the business for eight to twelve years, and said so as a matter of aligned self-interest: "you can be rich or you can be wealthy."
On expenses, his line was to run the company like a temple and account for every rupee, given the number of shareholders. He said Indian public-company founders spend heavily on company accounts because minority-shareholder protections are weak, and that American seed founders, on comparable money raised, spend far more than Indian ones, which he attributed to a consumption culture and to Americans being comfortable discussing net worth in public.
22. The 100-Crore Poker Chips
Shamani ran a live exercise: 100 crores in poker chips, five sectors, allocate. The allocation is an illustration rather than a published fund thesis, and Mirchandani treated it as one, revising his own numbers during the exercise. He put 50 crores into artificial intelligence and technology, 20 into health, 10 each into EVs and mobility and into renewable energy, and 5 into fintech and digital payments.
Renewables got the smallest weight for a structural reason rather than a bearish one. He said India is well suited to it and money is flowing — he named Inox and Suzlon as businesses that have scaled, but it is not an early-stage venture game, and a small check does not move the needle. The same logic is why the firm avoids alcohol and tobacco: several of its own investors do not want those categories.
He raised EVs from five to ten during the conversation, and explained why he might be wrong to stop there.
EV adoption tips at 5% of cars, and India is at 4.5 to 4.8
Secondly India is actually at a very interesting phase at 5% of EVs is when actually EVs take off.
Sasha Mirchandani
So we're almost on the cusp of explosion. So as long as the government keeps supporting EVs, we will see a big opportunity there.
Sasha Mirchandani
He cited China passing 50% as the comparison, named Ather Energy as evidence that a startup can beat conglomerates in the category, and said the firm nearly funded River, an electric two-wheeler company whose founder he expects to regret missing — he told him so. Asked whether an entrepreneur could build a car company in India, he said it is very hard and capital-heavy but not impossible, and pointed to Lei Jun building Xiaomi's car in China, which he said is the hottest car in that market and better-looking than a Tesla.
Fintech got the smallest allocation despite his enthusiasm for it: he said the government has done a good job, that Indian founders have scaled multiple businesses, that Razorpay and Mswipe have done well, and that Snapmint, a buy-now-pay-later business in the portfolio, should return the whole of the firm's second fund several times over. Asked whether the sector is saturated, he said new pain points keep appearing.
Health got 20 on penetration. He said everything from hospital beds to digital and mental health is under-provided in India, and when Shamani noted it is one of the hardest sectors to crack, Mirchandani answered with the thesis he had been repeating all interview.
Hard problems are the business model, not an obstacle to it
We love hard problems. That's why we wake up in the morning to crack hard problems.
Sasha Mirchandani
AI took half the notional fund. He accepted the bubble framing in part — hot categories attract opportunistic founders, too much money is coming in, and there will be burnout and deaths. His claim is that the category is the largest addressable market he has seen in his career, that every company will need an AI strategy, and that one without it will not survive.
23. What He Wants Built
Asked for a startup idea a young founder could take from him, Mirchandani first described one the firm had just funded: SuperLiving, a consumer AI business aimed at small towns, which he compared to an OpenAI for that audience. The founders came from Meesho and knew how to sell to the customer; his partner Sita led the deal. He said Lightspeed has since put $7 million in and the business is exploding.
That is the thesis behind the allocation. Consumer AI works in India, he argued, because the large American companies find the market too small to bother with, and because local founders understand it better than any of them would.
Then he named the company he most wants to exist and probably could not fund.
India needs its own large language model, and he would clap from the sidelines
So if some founder is willing to think very big and willing to go out and say okay what I need 50 billion I need 200 billion I will do it there is money available somewhere in the world I'll go do it and build an Indian DeepSeek or whatever that will be amazing because India needs sovereign power around this
Sasha Mirchandani
His own unsolved problem is smaller: he wants more low-calorie healthy drinks in India, and said he now drinks four or five bottles a day of a healthy soda from Hector Beverages after calling its founder about it.
The idea he would back regardless is mental health.
The support does not exist, and he says he would fund it whether or not it returns
Having said that in the last few years slowly people have started to talk about it but I have known people who've gone through mental health issues in our country and the level of support and help is nowhere near where it needs to be.
Sasha Mirchandani
He said India needs thousands more mental health specialists, that a company built around it could be incredibly successful because the pain point runs to millions of people, and that he would put money behind a good one regardless of whether it works. Shamani said he has watched the absence of support inside his own family.
Bonus Insights
He has never run the numbers on how many founders he meets
60 70 ear almost one a week boss it should be way above 100 earlier like in my early parts of my career
Sasha Mirchandani
He said the drop is a function of having good partners rather than a change in appetite, and that meeting entrepreneurs is the part of the job he misses.
Indian founders move to the United States for the capital, not the weather
Mirchandani said some complex businesses are better started in America on day one because the capital available suits them, and that the country is meritocratic in a way he thinks India is not yet — his phrase was that India gets fussed into too many stereotypes, including his own office.
Getting to him at all is part of the test
If you have figured out a way to reach me then probably and if you're smart enough to reach to me through a good reference that's key is a good thing.
Sasha Mirchandani
He pointed at Shamani as the example, noting he started from Indore with no connections.
80% of the Shark Tank investors pitched Shamani's show, and Kae Capital funded none of them
Shamani made the point; Mirchandani's addition was that the ones they passed on have all done very well, which he offered without defending the record.
Growth mode is how he lost millions on one company
He described a founder arriving ten minutes late to a meeting, having just come from the landlord, while the company burned through cash. Mirchandani had gone in to argue for cutting the burn; the founder was, by his account, listening without hearing. He called it inexperience rather than bad faith and said he would fund him again.
Mirchandani's bottom line is that everything he screens for reduces to two questions: whether the founder was going to solve this problem anyway, and whether they will refuse to stop. The fund's structure, from its size to its recycling clause to its ownership targets, exists to make sure one right answer pays for the forty percent that do not work.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Kae Capital and Mumbai Angels (The seed fund he founded and the angel network he co-founded; he says every Kae fund has been kept under $100 million deliberately)
Porter (Company number 29 in fund one, funded only because he renegotiated a recycling clause; killed one of its two businesses in the 2015 downturn and was rescued by a Mahindra round)
Fractal Analytics (His first investment, made off Onida's balance sheet as a price-comparison site; he is still on the board 25 years later)
InMobi and Glance (Arrived with a fourth plan and raised two and a half crores; became India's first unicorn in 2011 on a SoftBank round)
HealthKart and Tata 1mg (Two fund-one holdings he expects to return the fund at least twice over, with an IPO he says would value HealthKart in the billions)
Zetwerk (The head scratcher his first investment committee rejected; entered in fund two and now valued in billions)
Zepto (Pitched to him as Kiranakart by a 19-year-old Aadit Palicha; he passed on the idea and expects the company to list at $10 billion or more)
Myntra and Flipkart (He was Myntra's first investor when board meetings were held in Mukesh Bansal's house, before the pivot from personalized mugs to online apparel)
Ola Electric (Bhavish Aggarwal's gigafactory bet, which he cites as proof that not knowing how hard something is makes it possible; he is not an investor)
OYO (Passed on because the founder was 19 and the problem capital-heavy; he later led the Harvard Business School case on it)
SuperLiving (A recent consumer-AI investment aimed at small towns, founded by ex-Meesho operators; he says Lightspeed has since put in $7 million)
Supernova (An AI-native language learning app from IIT Madras founders, which he used as his example of clarity in a pitch)
Snapmint (A buy-now-pay-later business he says should return the whole of Kae's second fund several times over)
Certa, Square Yards, Nua and Foxtale (Other portfolio names; Foxtale was the single-founder deal that broke his own rule against backing them)
DailyRounds (Deepu Sebin's company, a full exit from fund one)
MakeMyTrip, BookMyShow and Shiprocket (Founders he cites for near-death recoveries — one from 500 people to 30, another from 300 to six)
Ather Energy and River (His evidence that startups beat conglomerates in EVs; he told River's founder he expects to regret missing the deal)
Razorpay and Mswipe (Payments businesses he met early and names as proof the fintech category keeps producing)
Inox Wind and Suzlon (Scaled renewables businesses, which is why he says the sector is not an early-stage venture game)
Skyroot (A space company he offers as evidence that India's risk appetite is moving from 4 toward 5)
Anthropic and OpenAI (The labs whose departing researchers, he says, now raise seed rounds at one to two billion dollars)
DeepSeek (His reference point for the sovereign Indian large language model he wants a founder to build)
Xiaomi (Lei Jun's car, which he calls the hottest in China and better-looking than a Tesla)
Paytm (Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the single-founder counter-example that changed his mind)
CitiusTech (Rizwan Koita and Jagdish Moorjani sold for two billion dollars and, he says, still live in small apartments and give heavily to charity)
Onida (His father's television company, where he started on the trains as an area sales manager and made his first investment)
Hector Beverages (He called the founder about low-calorie drinks and now drinks four or five bottles a day of its healthy soda)
Meesho and Groww (Companies that came to the firm and were lost to slow decision-making)
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