Generalist

Consultant

Analyst

How do you ask people to pay for your meal?

Business analyst

My friend is raising funds for his fintech startup.   He pitched his product to an angel investor, but now the investor is no longer interested in investing.   After the call when they were chattin...

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

My friend is raising funds for his fintech startup. 

He pitched his product to an angel investor, but now the investor is no longer interested in investing. 

After the call when they were chatting, the investor asked my friend to pay for the $10 sandwich and coffee he ordered during the pitch.

Like, seriously? The investor can't even cover his own food?

Worst Investor meet-up 🥴

Worst Investor meet-up 🥴- Grapevine

Heard from ppl that he doesn’t give time to his investee companies & he charges a success fees for being on the cap table. He’s also known for low balling founders on the valuations , any experience? 

Best part of this shitshow is when his parrot prateek speaks to founders, he talks as if he runs BoAt

Ps : he’s not even the decision maker at boat, he’s just the face & heads marketing 

What a scam

Aman Gupta ~ do startups need such investors? Maybe no

Data scientist

I will get the ball rolling: heard that Kunal Shah invests as less as INR 50K in return for good % of equity, by saying that using his name in media will give the startup enough value in itself (can't deny tbh).

What have you heard/seen around the circuit?

Secrets of Indian Angels/VCs

Founder

The allure of startup investment is undeniable – the chance to be a part of something groundbreaking, to nurture innovation, and to potentially reap substantial financial rewards. However, for every success story, countless tales of caution highlight the inherent risks associated with this high-stakes game.

The Due Diligence Dilemma
While many angel investment/ crowd-funding platforms tout their rigorous due diligence processes, concerns linger about the consistency and effectiveness of these measures. Given that these platforms invest at a very early stage, investing in Enterprise Tech, and FinTech businesses at this stage is highly risky without the time-consuming and resource-intensive nature of thorough due diligence, it's crucial to understand whether these platforms are adequately screening potential investments to minimize the risk of fraud or failure.

Platform Self-Investment: A Conflict of Interest?
A couple of angel investment/ crowd-funding platform raising money for itself using its platform raises eyebrows. This inherent conflict of interest raises concerns about the platform's impartiality and its ability to objectively evaluate potential investments.

I invite you to share your thoughts and experiences on angel investing/ crowd-funding platforms. What are some of the challenges and opportunities you have encountered? What advice would you give to others considering angel investing/ crowd-funding platforms?

Angel Investment/ Crowd Funding Platform - A Maze of Risks & Red Flags

Product Manager

Have learnt from fellow founders that he has habbit of going back on his word after giving termsheet. He does not have a spine and only relies on FOMO to invest. Another founder told me that he is known for throwing his founders under the bus in crisis situations.

Any reviews for Better Capital (Vaibhav Domundkar)?

Program Manager

Heard a story yesterday where some colleague was telling me that an EdTech Founder( now Unicorn) said something super salty when the fund did not go through with his Series A few years back.

He said, "Le Moot dia tere VC pe" after raising his Series B to him. 😂

What is the saltiest thing you have a heard a startup founder say to you?

Software Developer

I'm hearing some horror stories of pressure and unreasonable expectations coming from VC's even at the seed stage. Pre and post funding. 

Do you folks have stories to share about this. Especially w.r.t. interaction with associates with zero business experience giving Gyan !.

Founders on here....what's the worst VC experience that you've had ?

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

https://anonymfile.com/NEEXl/tiger-global-draft-of-new-yorker-story-doing-the-rounds-in-nyc.pdf

TLDR: Tiger Global may pass soon.

Leaked NewYorker Article on Tiger Global

Corporate Strategist

Okay, so this happened to me last year. I was approached by a college alumni (got my number from college alumni group) who told me he had a side business going on which was leading him to earn more money than his corporate job and that he was going to leave the corporate for his “business”.

I was initially not interested but he was insistent and also I was looking to explore some options (may be my naïveté) that I asked him more and so he setup a call with his senior to explain more about this “business”.

Now this senior gave all sorts of gyaan regarding how to reach financial independence and picking up on the general mindset of how to make more money. They asked to create a list of 10 things that I desired the most at the point of time which could be solved with more money. I complied thinking it was a good exercise (again, I was a big fool). Now I was connected with another senior who gave all sorts of gyaan regarding how I could make more money and lead to financial independence.

Please note, during all this time I was constantly asking what the business idea was and how it would be achieved but got no response on the details and only white washing regarding how I should be prepared to do anything to achieve my dreams.

Now, it was revealed that I would need to put in 5L as investment to get bigger returns. Since I did not have that money in handy, I was suggested to get a personal loan through their agents. Also not to inform this to parents because they won’t understand this stuff and get “worried”. Luckily I did went with their suggestion and informed my parent about it. Thinking it was a startup idea, I got the investment from my father through an OD in my name.

Now we get onto a call two days later, where they reveal the company QNet and makes me purchase 5L of stuff from their website and explained the business model which was to get other people from your knowing to buy products from this company and get commissions on the sale.

Continued……

Pyramid scheme scam

Software Engineer

Tiger, Elevation and Matrix backed fintech startup has started layoff.  CTO has left and they have started firing in business roles with the largest cuts in tech. 

- Bad product fitment and loses money on every account
- Core team has started leaving
- Even got an opportunity to see their office space available for rent
- Classic case of poor culture and no actual product
- Founders travel to USA/london on trips
- Horrible place to work as a girl

Got this from one of their devs.  


STAY Away!!

JODO - Silent layoffs Started!!!

I got some friends at Jar and got to know in their lending business their only nbfc partner has backed out and for sure they are gonna cut cost, got my other friends offer revoked in tech, product managers are leaving and now even the funding is drying up 
Their founders are begging for funding from last 1.5yrs but nothing. Got to know from my product friend at Jar how badly he/she is trying to get out but suddenly they increased the np as the culture is so shit that no one is staying willingly

Jar is fu***d up

The most cringe Q&A i have ever seen! Top tier investors and founders asking such dumb non relevant questions. We can defend as much as we want, but we Indians do have an inferiority complex when we interact with foreigners - in the end he called you hopeless, right?

ET Sam Altman Talk

Image source: https://twitter.com/f6ary/status/1712505898688528719 

I used to work with one and always thought he was like this wanted to know if anyone had any experiences like below with them here?

Anyone had any experiences like this with VCs in india?

I'm looking to angel invest in a startup who is building slack AI agents.

The agent should continuosly listen to the chats and keep building intelligency along with crawling the links shared through the chats. 

The agent should participate in threads and reply whenever it senses something it knows from before or can infer and deduce from previous and current knowledge. 

If you are building something like this, share me a link where I can test drive something no matter how buggy it might be - scroll@proton.me

Don't send me deck or any pitching material.

I want to invest: AI slack agent

Welcome to Business Roles's Private Community

Happy almost Halloween! What have been your most horrific experiences at work? 

I’ll go first. My manager went on a week long holiday, all the while not replying to texts or calls and came back and yelled at me for going on without his approval :__

Job horror stories

Database administrator

Welcome to News Discussion's Private Community

dfaq, funding winter over allready?

what did they find worth investing in this "irritating scammer" venture ??


source 
https://www.forbesindia.com/article/storyboard18/nikhil-kamath-invests-in-sharan-hegdes-the-1-club/89313/1

Nikhil Kamath invests in Sharan Hegde’s The 1% Club

Backend engineer

This came out of nowhere. Poor investments? Executive troubles? Both?

Investment & social media not aligned 🥹

He’s Angel investor at Mesa school😂

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7155144061912240128/

Things can go downhill, that's understandable but reaching out to an investor of the said startup is basically the privileged folk trying to get even with the founder on fucking up. Thoughts?

Average Privileged Founder

Founder’s office

Something I've found very frustrating while pitching to investors, platforms and funds is that so many of them actually just bait and switch.

They pose like gyani people earnestly looking for investments or helping entrepreneurs, but when you speak to them they start selling you their services.

Fundraise is apparently just a step away, need to signup here first, or create xyz report first, or do outreach to xyz number of people, or do market research and fresh pitch deck creation, or hire xyz consultant/agency to get to the "next level" - basically a bunch of barriers you need to pay to clear despite having a profitable business with paying customers. 

Fact of the matter is there are plenty of people raising money based off of pitch decks with no MVP , or even just the right conversations with the right people. But they are rare and hard to find organically. Requires lots of networking and connecting dots over months and years.

The point is, this selling in the guise of securing investment is tiresome and a waste of time for most entrepreneurs. They probably do get a few suckers occasionally which helps them stay afloat I guess.

Some of them might even take your ideas and start building something of their own or back someone to build it under them. Once you start pitching, the deck starts floating around in VC groups and networks mostly beyond the reach of the average entrepreneur.

Considering all this, just keeping one's head down and bootstrapping forever in peace seems like a better approach.

Disingenuous behaviour in startup ecosystem

Product Owner

What does this d**k think of himself.

The person running a Business is literally begging.

Worst Investor meet-up 🥴

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