Grayscale Ventures Launch
Today we announce the launch of our new fund - Grayscale Ventures - focused on DevInfra and SaaS investments in India and the region. You’ll hear more about our thesis and focus areas in future posts, but I decided to pen some thoughts on the launch.
Embarking on a new journey
As many of you’d know, for the last 7 years I invested across several companies in the DevInfra/SaaS space - Hasura, Classplus, Ayoconnect, Testsigma - to name a few. I deployed two funds for STRIVE, and as luck would have it, they did well. Just yesterday Preqin announced our second fund to be the best performing sub-250M venture fund in Singapore.
But as we started to prep up our third fund at STRIVE, more and more I felt the need to go back to my roots and focus on the two big (and related) shifts I’m seeing in the market - talent explosion in India and the proven playbooks of building DevInfra and SaaS companies from India for the world.
The Early Believers
I’m beyond excited that some of the best operators and founders in our network - from Slack, Zendesk, Hasura, Apollo, Ayoconnect, etc - decided to back us on the pursuit of these two trends. Investing in a first-time fund is always risky, and I am truly indebted to those who have believed in us in such volatile environments.
Our aim is to bring onboard the best SaaS and DevInfra operators globally on to our platform - as investors and advisors - and help our portfolio companies expand to every corner of the world leveraging the insights and experience of these operators. I can proudly say we are off to a good start.
Going Back to the Core
At my core, lies a geek who sat up late last night setting up a Gastby instance on a Netlify server while struggling to get Ghost working on a DO droplet (thanks Nishant for all your WA troubleshooting). If all this sounds g(r)eek to you, that’s the point. These are my dev roots that I can now return to.
Now I know that I am no longer in the race for becoming a “10x engineer”. But at Grayscale, I’ll have the chance to enable such devs to fulfil their dream of building a legacy. And through them, I plan to live vicariously for the next two decades.
P.S. Besides Grayscale gives me a chance to go back and tinker with code, an itch for a few years. Next time Sid comes and tells me to stop fooling around and move on to Webflow, or pay up that SaaS company providing a template blog instead of hosting a bunch of OSS systems on a server that might break any day, I can say to him “This is part of my job, dude. I’m building a thesis here”
Leaving old friends behind
When you start a journey, you end up saying farewell to many special people. This time around it was a pretty hard thing to do. I’ve worked together with Yusuke Amano, Tatsuo Tsutsumi, and our Japanese colleagues for so many years now, it's become second nature. I’ve learnt a lot from them, especially the Japanese art of balancing aggression with calm, exploration with focus, and velocity with patience.
But thankfully, it’s not really a goodbye, as we continue to service STRIVE and its portfolio companies - our portfolio companies. I’m even more thankful to not walk this path alone, and instead have Sid join me on the ride. While Grayscale is a new journey, it builds on from our previous STRIVE journey.
Some Core Values
As we embrace the unknown, we carry two things along with us - a bag full of learnings, but more importantly, a keen sense of our values and those we are searching for in the founders we back.
Over the years we feel we have come up with a darn good framework of sussing out who we want to work with - that’s also a post for another day. What’s more important though are our own values which we go back to again and again - to enable the builders in their 0-1, no matter what. Every step we take, every action we perform, every shareholder we bring on, every investment we commit to, every “Pass email” we send - should be enabling the builders around us.
To be able to do this, we’ll rely often on one word: “Product-led”. Not only will we be focusing on Product-led founders, we ourselves will aim to be Product-led. To us that means being iterative, honest, great at communication, and trusting in technology.
Parting Words
This is not an easy time to build - neither for a Company nor for a Venture fund. But it’s most definitely the best time to build, as the noise settles down and the signal shines through.
Let’s build.