Our guests today are Mohamad Faraz, Shivam Prasad, and Vinay Jain, founding partners at Upsparks, a micro VC firm that the entrepreneurs-turned-investors started in 2020. In this conversation, they talk about bootstrapping a communications platform-as-a-service business at a time when there were no playbooks in India and seeing it go through an acquisition and eventually the IPO of the parent business—an experience that they want to offer startup founders, along with their cheques.

Notes:

(00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:52) Our guests today—Mohamad Faraz, Shivam Prasad and Vinay Jain, founding partners at Upsparks micro VC firm

(02:22) Three friends from college, coming from a lower-middle-class family, everything starting in Bangalore

(04:59) More about Solutions Infini, the CPaaS venture the trio built

(10:35) Starting Upsparks, switching from startup founders and operators to VC investors

(14:05) A sense of the kind of startups that they are seeing today. What kind of entrepreneurs are coming on the scene? What kind of ideas are they bringing to investors?

(17:05) The initial fund at Upsparks

(18:09) Changes in the Indian startup ecosystem — are aspiring founders bringing really original ideas to investors

(21:43) The time it takes for an entrepreneur, from first pitch to the first cheque at Upsparks

(24:12) Any subsets within SaaS and fintech that Upsparks would be interested in?

(26:25) What are some of the advantages of having a small fund? What are the ways in which it helps Upsparks to focus on its investments; what are the advantages that they bring to their portfolio founders as a micro VC firm?

(31:37) What is still missing today in the Indian startup ecosystem?

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