As per a recent article,“About 60% of companies that reach pre-series A funding fail to make it to Series A, so the success rate is only 30%-40%.”

Infact if you check on Crunchbase, in India you’ll find 4300+ startups at Pre-seed or Seed-stage, but only 600+ out of them have managed to reach Series-A, which bring the success rate to even lower at just 15%.

Apart from this, even in the entire Indian startup ecosystem, there are so many Product Managers, Ex-founders, and many more, who either have an idea around a Problem-statement, but don’t know how to proceed or there are students in college, who are amazed by the startup ecosystem, and want to take their early step, but afraid on how to take the next step.

In order to solve this we have with us our guest of this episode, Rajiv Srivatsa & Nitin Sharma, Antler India.

Antler unlike most VC firms bets on the startup ideas at Pre-seed stage with their Antler India Residency or in some cases even earlier with college students via Antler India Fellowship.

During the episode, catch Rajiv & Nitin sharing their First Principles approach and what infrastructure they are building at Antler India to make the founders succeed considering the time constraints at Pre-seed stage and much more.

Notes -

03:50 - Intro

04:44 - Why did they choose to build Antler India?

09:35 - How did Antler happen?

12:02 - Why kind of institutional mindset do they bring in?

16:18 - How do they balance the equation of a Founder’s optimism & a VC’s pessimism between them?

18:22 - Background around Antler’s India Portfolio over the last 18+ months

22:08 - Zoho Sponsored – Prashant Ganti on Where do founders struggle with Payroll and how can they fix it?

23:47 - What’s their approach and what’s the general cheque size?

29:48 - Learnings from the Ups & Downs in Urban Ladder Journey

33:28 - Focusing on building around core foundational use-cases during times of crisis

38:18 - Keeping founders from falling in love with the product and not the actual problem-story

42:12 - Examples of building PeakPerformer & Bookee with Antler

46:47 - How & when do founders get distracted after funding?

50:08 - When do founders have the best chances of succeeding at Seed-stage?

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