Holding The Purse Strings

Sequoia Capital India Advisors has written cheques of all sizes—from seed to growth—and never lost sight of an exciting startup. But liquidity and exit concerns remain

- Sayan Chakraborty

Nobody frets. Nobody’s flummoxed. Nobody makes so much as a vague attempt to interject. It seems as if people inside the conference room at Sequoia Capital India Advisor’s office in Bengaluru are thanking GV Ravishankar in silence for letting the cold truth out.

“We don’t think of ourselves as wanting to just become a founder’s best friend,” says Ravishankar, managing director at Sequoia India, the country’s largest venture capital firm with approximately $4.5 billion in assets under management across seven funds.

“We have a lot of empathy for the founders. But, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our clients (limited partners or LPs) as much as we do to our founders. We want to be their best business partner, their first port of call. We wear that badge with pride. Our role is to make sure that they deliver to their best potential, not necessarily be their best friend,” Ravishankar lets on.

It’s a loaded statement that can stir up extreme emotions in the tech universe, a melting pot of brilliant minds, chronic insecurities and colossal egos. After all, friends are altruists. Business partners? Perhaps self-serving. At the end of the day, they have a shop to run.

At Sequoia India, they aren’t swayed by such emotions. “Let’s do what’s right for the founder and the company” and “serving ourselves by serving others” are the recurrent themes. Here, they like their conversations upfront. Fawning isn’t their forte.

“One thing about Sequoia which is under-appreciated in the outside world is the culture,” says Abheek Anand, managing director at the firm.