When Ram Shriram of Sheraplo Ventures visited Bengaluru

Shriram cautions that building apps creates an opportunity but doesn't necessarily guarantee success, reports Tech in Asia

“Even the strongest climbers need a guide.”

This is the line you see when you open the page of Sherpalo Ventures, the investment firm founded by Ram Shriram. As a person who wrote a cheque to Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were starting out, Ram knows what he is talking about.
 

Ram was in Bengaluru for an event hosted by [24]7, an IT services firm founded by two Indians PV Kannan and Shanmugam Nagarajan, a company which he had invested in its early stages. 
 

Ram says he is happy to see start-ups emerge in India but is unhappy with the infrastructure in the country. But he admits that the “switch to mobile has been interesting.”
 

He has a word of caution though for entrepreneurs building apps.
 

According to him, everyone thinks that building an app itself guarantees success. But he says it just creates an opportunity.
 

“The mobile app in itself doesn’t create success. There have been only three mobile apps that have become multi-billion dollar businesses. Of those, only one – Uber – is a real business. The other two are Whatsapp, which has a lot of users but isn’t a great revenue business, and Instagram, which has a lot of users and is a wonderful product. So, if you are building a consumer app on the mobile phone, remember, either you have to have highly engaged users or you need to have a lot of revenue on the product. By revenues, I don’t mean food delivery or those kinds of businesses because they are losing money on every order. I am talking about businesses where you can make money with each transaction.”

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.