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Lessons Norwest drew from its Wrong Call on Ola

Niren Shah of Norwest writes in Mint about the concerns that led it to pass on the opportunities to invest in Indian cab hailing app  Ola and the lessons it drew from the experience. On the positive side, we really found Bhavish (Aggarwal), the founder, to be a strong disruptor and felt that he could execute and scale the business, innovate and take this very far. We also felt that the space was going to be huge in India, given the under-resourced public transportation. ...on the unit economics, we had significant concerns that this space would bleed for a very long time and found it hard to understand how the space would become significantly margin positive. Lastly, we saw a lot of regulatory friction in India which we felt could be binary (Uber was still very tiny). ...The key learning for me from this anti-portfolio was that once you find (1) really strong teams, (2) demonstrated execution (in the current company or a previous track record), and (3) a large market space...

Fund Manager Interview: Mohan Kumar of Norwest

Venture Intelligence spoke to Mohan Kumar, Executive Director, Norwest Venture Partners India, on the firm’s recent investments in the VC segment. Kumar, who had earlier worked for over 18 years at companies like Motorola and Texas Instruments, has led NVP's recent investments into medical devices firm Perfint Healthcare, tablet PC-based education services firm iProf and China-headquartered Smartphones maker Borqs. This interview first appeared in the latest issue of the Venture Intelligence India Venture Capital Report . Venture Intelligence: In recent months, we’ve noticed that Norwest is once again active in the VC segment with investments into companies like iProf, Komli, Quikr and Perfint. What is driving this? Mohan Kumar: NVP’s DNA has always been venture type deals. About 2 years back we had added two segments - financial services and infrastructure - where we started doing late stage deal with large size cheques. In Technology, E-Commerce, Med tech, Healthcare and Educati...