Inside a VC's world

This rather personal account of a venture capitalist’s journey through the ups and downs of the start-up cycles stands out for its honest narration more than anything else. The Moonshot Game reads like a collection of many start-up stories with Rahul Chandra, co-founder of Helion Ventures, as an anchor. Since Mr Chandra himself is part of all the stories, it’s his memoir — up, close and personal.

Divided into 21 chapters, with no separate titles, the book is an easy read if you are interested in an insider’s perspective of the venture capital and start-up space in India. Moonshot  captures the dilemmas and doubts of a venture capitalist even after 20 years of experience in the industry across India and the US. Having started at age 26 as the first employee at Walden International’s India fund in 1998, Mr Chandra has seen several cycles of boom and bust as a VC  (venture capitalist), and that’s evident. 

While the build-up is fine but not striking, it’s the last few pages that are the most hard-hitting and hold your attention. This is the part when Mr Chandra’s thoughts and frustrations find expression as Helion, the VC firm he had co-founded more than 10 years ago, is fading out. “Being a co-founder. I thought of myself as part of the firm I was building … In my head, I was Helion,’’ he writes as the top team is disintegrating some time in 2016. And so a good story ended abruptly, as the writer notes. He explains, “some would ask me has Helion shut down. It was the wrong question. VC firms don’t shut down until you sell every company on the balance sheet and return the capital to the investors”.

The book describes the process of closure at Helion in great detail, some of which could have been shorter. But being a protagonist himself, Mr Chandra perhaps wanted to record all his feelings through the pages of Moonshot  without being selective, before he makes a transition to raising his new fund — Unitary Helion —  at the end of 2017.     

Book details

Besides the lull in venture investments in 2015 that wiped away many start-ups, Helion’s decline is also attributed to mistakes on the way. Likening the VC business as the chaos caused by the monsoon, the author says that while the history of triumphs is rare, a history of misses is guaranteed here. Mr Chandra goes on a personal trip to list out the mistakes he had made. “My basket of mistakes was heavy after having actively invested for the last 12 years …. Until BookMyShow, I used to rely on Excel models to understand market size … Now I know better than to base my thinking only on market size.’’

The book devotes many pages to Mumbai-based BookMyShow, an online ticketing company for movies with which Helion had engaged for a possible investment, but moved away looking at its market size potential. It is a mistake that Mr Chandra finds hard to forget. He made the mistake of comparing a necessary spend like air ticket on, say, MakeMyTrip with a movie ticket on BookMyShow. The question on his mind was, would the people of India ever worry about buying movie tickets in advance because prices would otherwise go up or seats would run out. He wasn’t sure, and Helion concluded this was not an investment it would want to make. The rest is history. As the book points out, BookMyShow went from strength to strength; as for the market, it didn’t just grow, it exploded. As of 2018, the firm was valued at over Rs 3,000 crore, Mr Chandra writes.                   

One97, the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-promoted company that owns Paytm, was another miss that Mr Chandra regrets. But in this case, it was not an error of judgement but a case of falling behind others in terms of the speed of taking a call. “Vijay had presented at another VC firm and done an equally impressive job. We realised the other firm was ahead of us—they had already offered a term sheet and locked Vijay in, preventing him from speaking to other investors.’’      

Among Helion’s investments, there’s an interesting chapter on Housing.com and its co-founder Rahul Yadav, who made headlines regularly. “At Helion, we liked the real estate opportunity. We had, in the process of diligence, tried to assess the persona of Rahul Yadav.’’ Mr Chandra’s verdict is “Rahul Yadav rocked the investor-founder relationship so hard that the traditional pattern of dependency in the relationship had been shattered’’.

In fact, the relationship between a start-up and an investor forms the fulcrum of Moonshot, in a way  that blurs the distinction between professional and personal. “I had so much riding on the performance of the start-ups I backed that my life started revolving entirely around them,’’ Mr Chandra says early in the book. That message stays on through the book.