On April 27th, Neythri’s Founders & Funders committee hosted its first event — a “FoundHer Resilience Hour” with 15 amazing South Asian women entrepreneurs. We came together to build community and share experiences and advice to support each other during this unprecedented time. Sharing some key takeaways from the discussion below:
We have to be realistic that we’re seeing a deep downturn — but we will come out stronger. ~8.6M jobs were lost in the 2008 recession, and today, we’ve unfortunately already lost 25M+ jobs. It’s going to be hard to predict when things will rebound. From a venture industry perspective, in 2008, we saw a relatively quick rebound in tech and a swift correction of valuations. We were in the middle of many strong tailwinds for technology innovation — the move to mobile, cloud, SaaS business models and D2C ideas. The impact of the 2001 recession was longer, and probably required ~10–12 quarters of deep triage for many companies. We don’t yet know which of the two this current downturn will be like, but we will come out stronger on the other side.
Use this time as an opportunity. There’s real evidence that great companies are created in tough times — examples include Twilio, Lyft, Shopify, Credit Karma, Whatsapp, Instagram, Pinterest and more. If you have a good idea, you may have more space to think and operate in this market. The companies that survive this period may deal with less competition than they did before. This is going to be more of a fundamentals market, where access and brand may not necessarily be as important.
Venture firms will have a bias towards protecting their existing investments, but are quickly looking forward to what’s new and early. Risk-averse investors will increasingly prefer writing smaller vs. larger checks in this environment, which benefits early stage founders! We have also seen a trend of later stage investors starting to invest earlier, and anticipate this trend to only increase.
Founders should think about what’s most relevant in the new world. We’re seeing a huge acceleration in remote working, healthcare, sustainability and more. How does your business fit into the new reality? What is the long term, strategic value of your product? Are there other applications or markets for the technology you are building?
There will be a bigger emphasis on business fundamentals vs. growth at the seed and Series A stages. Investors are starting to look for more clarity in business plans at earlier stages. How much cash are you burning? How do you plan on containing that cash? How thoughtful are you in building your team? How prepared are you to withstand tides that are not predictable? Investors will also focus on early indicators of healthy unit economics and sustainability in addition to user metrics and growth.
Focus on the long-term. Short-term valuations are not everything. Valuations have come down and may continue to go down, for all stages of investing. What’s important to remember is that if you are an early stage company, raising now at a lower valuation than you might like is not the end game. This is one round in your long journey, and you can still build a very large company. As long as you are able to continue to build and get customers in, you give yourself the permission to raise when you want to since you’re able to fund your business sustainably.
Thank you to Rohini Chakravarthy (Partner, NGP Capital) and Priya Saiprasad (Investor, Mayfield Fund) for sharing these fabulous insights, and to all of our founders for helping us kick off our inaugural event. From health to commerce to machine learning and more, these founders are building the next generation of great companies and together, changing the game for South Asian women representation in entrepreneurship!
Founders:
Afshan Abbas (Co-Founder & CEO of Fuschia); Anshu Agarwal (Co-Founder & CEO of Nimbella); Aparna Krishnan (Co-Founder of Opyn); Archana Sathaye (Founder & CEO of Proxmal Systems); Cimeran Kapur (Founder & CEO of Communikind); Leena Joshi (Co-Founder & CEO of Ogmagod); Meena Subramaniam (Co-Founder & CTO of Dropprint Genomics); Meha Agrawal (Founder & CEO of Silk & Sonder); Navya Swetha Davuluri (Founder & CEO of Curie AI); Nikita Gupta (Co-Founder & CTO of Symba); Ridhi Tariyal (Co-Founder & CEO of NextGenJane); Sarina Siddhanti (Co-Founder & CEO of Riya Collective); Shubhi Nigam (Co-Founder of Lumos); Somya Kapoor (Co-Founder & CEO of Loops); Supriya Iyer (Co-Founder & CEO of Spares.io)
Neythri Founders & Funders Committee:
Committee Co-Chairs: Priya Rajan (Managing Director, Silicon Valley Bank); Sarika Garg (Former Chief Strategy Officer, Tradeshift)
Committee Members: Isha Abdullah (M.D., Former President & Co-Founder, Organ i); Kamini Ramani (Vice President of Marketing, Mayfield Fund); Mythili Sankaran (Co-Founder, Neythri; Managing Director, Goldenseeds; Managing Principal, Stratalens); Nikita Parekh (Investor, Goldman Sachs Growth), Priya Saiprasad (Investor, Mayfield Fund), Rohini Chakravarthy (Partner, NGP Capital), Shruti Gandhi (General Partner, Array Ventures), Sruthi Ramaswami (Co-Founder, Neythri; Investor, ICONIQ Capital)
Author Bio Sruthi is an investor at ICONIQ Capital. She previously was an Investment Banking Analyst at Goldman Sachs. Sruthi is a board member at Archbishop Mitty High School and is a co-founder of Neythri and Shakti Collaborative, a content platform focused on narratives of South Asian women. Sruthi holds a BA degree from The University of Chicago.
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