Want To Work In India? Call DFJ
Mohanjit Jolly — who started his career as an aerospace engineer and ended up working at Garage.com — moved his family to Bangalore two years ago to oversee DFJ’s investments in India. He inherited around ten portfolio companies and has since added eight more. He’s also hired three people.
“It’s very difficult to manage a growing portfolio halfway around the world remotely,” he says. “DFJ [which had been investing in India since late 2005] realized that.”
U.S. investors have underestimated the cost of investing in India by about a factor of three, he explains, because they don’t realize the challenges that Indian companies have.
The biggest one is a scarcity of talent. Product management, marketing and business development, especially for the young technology companies that DFJ likes to invest in, haven’t been around long enough in India to graduate interesting candidates to hire.
As a result, “I’m much more heavily involved in day-to-day decision making and operating issues in India than I ever was on boards in the U.S.”
Recently, DFJ has started to look overseas for people to fill key positions in its startups rather than trying to train local people, which can take up to a year. There are some Silicon Valley transplants in India, but the hard part is finding people who have both the skills to work in a tech startup and the experience to understand how to navigate business in India, which is a conglomerate of nation-states with different languages and cultures.
“You need the right kind of guys and gals for feet on the street,” he says. “You can’t hire people in the south and plant them in the north.”
DFJ has had no exits yet but plans to continue investing in three to four startups a year — a quarter of them in clean tech — out of its main fund, the $650 million DFJ IX.
True seed stage funding still doesn’t exist in India, Jolly says. “Until you have that, the venture ecosystem can’t be sustained.”
Related posts:
bob said on September 18, 2009
From Garage to DFJ He will probably never see an exit.