I’m a VC in India. Here are 5 traits I’d like to see in new founders.

Our plan is to invest in 120 startups over four years. So far, we have managed to invest in about 65 of them.

The classic Antler model involves managing a group of people who are transitioning from being employees to being startup founders, helping them find co-founders and shape their idea.

One of the things we do differently in India is that we also run a group for teams. We have found that there is a social tendency for people to prefer to start a company with people they know from college or work, and we welcome founders who may already have a team or a product in mind.

My team and I get about 4,000 to 5,000 applications and we select 100 people to join our individual group of founders. The program lasts six months, and we end up investing in 20 to 25 people or eight to 10 companies. We give them $250,000 to fund their idea and another $250,000 as they raise additional capital.

Having founded and run a company myself in the 2010s, I have seen two major positive changes in the Indian startup market.

It’s much easier to attract talent than it was 10 years ago. There was a lot of superiority and questions from potential employees because working for startups instead of established companies was seen as risky. Since the pandemic, that’s changed and people are eager to join startups.

The founders are becoming more mature every year and have a better understanding of what is needed to achieve this.

They are more frugal because they know that capital is limited and have given the industry more attention. They don’t get into a business because something is hot, but instead build for the next five to ten years. They also assume that their products will need more traction to raise the same amount of money that would have been invested in them earlier.

Here are five things I look for in people starting a business for the first time:

Five Traits of a Founder

Execution and strategy: They have the ability to iterate quickly—going from one idea to another, abandoning some things and finding something new.

We also look for people who have ideas that match their skills. For example, we don’t want to invest in an AI company where none of the founders have a solid technical background. At an early stage or at the “zero to one” and “one to ten” stages, founders need to be able to do things on their own.

Perseverance and perseverance: Both in my personal and professional life.

Customer Obsession: We spend the most time assessing how passionate a founder is about their customer and their problem. We want to know if this is just a passing trend or something they’ve been debating for years. Does the founder really feel the customer’s pain?

We want people who aren’t just experts in armchairs, but who have worked with clients and gotten their hands dirty. Someone who has spent their working life in presentations and conference rooms may not be up to the task.

Communication: The other thing we look for is a high level of clarity of thought and communication. At the end of the day, venture capital is a constant fundraising game—you have to keep finding good talent, and you have to keep telling new investors and the media your story.

We try to assess whether a person is wrong or clear about what they are doing.

Ambition and scale: The venture capital industry doesn’t work if you want small results. Even if You don’t want to be a unicorn, a startup valued at $1 billion, you have to think in terms of valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars and anticipate that your product will be used by hundreds of millions of people.

And the X factor

We don’t look for people who score 80% to 100% on every single one of these criteria. Instead, we prefer them to have a spike or an X factor in one or two of the five traits—they immediately stand out as people who are global stars.–class when it comes to, for example, execution and communication.

We are looking for people who are weak in some areas but exceptional in others.

Co-founder of complmeMentations

Most of our participants look for co-founders after joining the group, so we spend a lot of time and attention matching people.

In my experience, India is not a country where communication is heavily emphasized, so we ask each participant 60 questions to understand their values, work style, and personality types. We look for complements and see pairs between one person with a technical background and one with a business acumen. If a third co-founder is needed, they usually come with an operational background.

One company we recently funded is working to listen to conversations between employees and customers in retail stores to provide retail data that will convert more customers. It was the result of someone who had worked in retail for years, combined with a co-founder with a technical background.

Are you a founder who has moved to India to launch your own startup? Contact us at [email protected]