 This is Sonali. Thank you all for carving out some time for attending today's webinar on funding scenario during and post COVID-19. To all the attendees out there, please type in any questions you might have in the Q&A section and we'll try to answer as many as possible at the end of the session. Request you to keep the questions within the scope of today's discussion and not to your personal business curies. I would now like to introduce our speaker. He's a serial tech entrepreneur, investor and TV host who started his first startup at the age of 19 around his patent pending technology while still studying as a computer engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He built it into a multi-million dollar valuation by the age of 22. He has built eight businesses in the US and India with multi-million dollars worth of products and services. As the great-great grandson of Sarojini Naidu, he continues the legacy forward by tirelessly serving the Indian youth through entrepreneurship education using lean startup methodology and principles of Bhagwat Gita. His efforts through Kolkata Ventures in the past three years have resulted in more than 400 revenue-generating startups responsible for around 4,500 new jobs created in 10 states of East India. He has had more than 500 student White House Panel for Entrepreneurship Education, Startup America, Invest India at Rastapati Bhavan, TEDx Talks, Josh Talks and more. More than 150 awards in India, US, Canada and China, more than 1,800 startup mentees in India, US, Canada and China. He is an influential youth icon with a monthly reach of 2 lakh youths over social media. Please welcome Mr. Avello Roy. Thank you very much for the nice introduction. Thank you everyone. Nice to meet all of you. So I'll quickly start sharing my screen. Can everybody see? Can I get a quick yes from all of you so that I know you are all able to see and hear me clearly in the chat section if you can just say yes. So I want you guys to be a little bit more participative. So you can ask me questions as we go along through this. You don't have to wait till the end. If there's something burning, you ask me, I'll stop, I'll pause in the middle, I'll respond to you and then come back. So there's nothing that's like not settling in. Okay, I will get through. So this is basically about investment strategy during and post COVID-19. So all the lockdown and everything that's happening, the craziness make a little bit of sense of that. So I'll tell you a little bit about my background and my story. Actually, Sonali did mention a little bit, but what you don't know is I started my first startup when I was actually going through the last recession, which is from 2008-2009. And during that time, we not only built it to a multimillion dollar valuation, but we also got the team together. We utilized the actual opportunity of the crisis that the economic downturn of 10% employment and all of that. So I'll tell you a little bit about that. That kind of gives you an understanding how an entrepreneur thinks about crisis. So here you can see, as a student entrepreneur, we were on entrepreneur idle. We've got a team together, this isn't happening in Chicago. 115 with the plan competitions in US and Canada. And everything was going great. We were being mentored by billionaires and millionaires. These are like the CEOs of Motorola at the time. Their grandfather started the company. Later on, one of them Chris Galvin became a CEO of Nokia, I believe. So amazing people. These people were mentoring us, telling us how to not do the mistakes they did. And all of that was going great till this. We graduated in 2009 and the recession struck us. 10% unemployment, people were losing jobs. And all the other startups that were around us were competing for the same investors, were competing with the same resources. They realized that this is not the time to build a startup. So most of them quit. And what happened was because they quit, for us, the life became easier. So what happens is during this recession, because the news media, everybody is talking so negatively. As an entrepreneur, if you're not one of those people in the crowd, you see it as an opportunity because then there's less competition for the same resources that you're competing for. So the investors who are getting 100 emails a day are now getting 50 emails a day or 25 emails a day and you're one of them. So you're competing with less people. So you're more visibility. And as the recession went through, more and more startups kept dying and kept leaving and getting jobs and whatnot. And me and my co-founder decided we will never quit. We will do whatever it takes. And so what we ended up doing was we were one month away from being homeless. We had just one month's rent left and Chicago is a very cold city, you know. So what we did was I love baking and cooking. So one of my friends told me, well, we should sell these cheese biscuits that you make so well. They're so good. I said, okay. So we started this cheese biscuit business. This is a weekend business. So on Saturdays, I would bake for eight hours. On Sundays, I would sell for eight to 10 hours on farmers market, which is like literally on the streets of Chicago, along with people selling vegetables and selling coffee tea. We were selling cheese biscuits, big engineers from a very deported university, you know, had building a business. So that was our option. And trust me, when I say we met 600% profit, we were profitable within 30 days. And this business taught us marketing customer relationship. So many things. It was a jugart business. And it sustained us. You're making $3,000 a month from this business. And Monday to Friday, we're doing a technology business. And Saturday Sunday, we're doing this food business to just sustain ourselves. And I tell you, it was such an experience was very scary. And just as summer was about to end. And we're like, Oh my God, you know, we cannot sell on the streets in the winter. What are we going to do? You know, by God's grace, we got an investment firm interested in investing in us. And literally they made the investment decision in 10 minutes. They talked to us in 10 minutes. They're like, we're going to invest in you. Done. They're going to do a little bit of due diligence. But 21 days, you'll get your check. And they kept their promise in 21 days. We got our check and first investment in the recession. Right. So, so that was amazing. And it was, it was very tiring. Of course, you're doing a full time startup, full time, a second startup to sustain ourselves, but no jobs and we didn't give up and we made it through. Right. In fact, the Huffington Post, which at that time had just become a massive news agency online. They, they wrote about us that everybody's quitting and these guys won't give up despite the economy college grads set to launch innovative product. Right. So they talked about, you can see my name here, a fellow Roy Edward Suda co funders Illinois and technology. So they're like, they're talking about, they made a whole series about us and how these entrepreneurs won't give up. And that is why they will succeed and, and we did, you know, we built amazing team together. You know, XCT of Motorola, X head of marketing for L'Oreal, head of innovations for Wrigley, Steel Tycoon. So these guys had everything. They had the Ferrari, they had the beach house, they had crores worth of package, everything they had. So why did the joint two teenagers, me and Edward, because what they were missing was that fund that had ventured in their life, the ability to touch lives, do something and see the people's lives transform. That's what was missing in their lives and that's why they joined us. And in that economy also, they took the risk to join us and build a startup together. Now, what happened was we got in rejected by 300 venture capitalists 300 rejections. I mean, that's a lot of rejection. Right. And they were all with me and kept on going through one after another and many of the rejections will come back in three months. Now we're not ready. We don't have money. No liquidity. You're not ready. You don't have traction, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So we kept on building traction and kept on pitching to investors. There was one investor. This guy was an ABCDS, we call it American born confused, they see. So they don't know that American they look like Indian. So the passports is America, but they're all completely they see. So these guys really hate Indians, most cases, you know, not stereotyping. So this fellow just ripped me to shreds, you know, in the investor meeting. And when I came down, I still remember a on center that building. I came down and I was crying. Like, I can't do this anymore. I'm done. And this lady standing next to me, Jackie, she put her arm around me. I said, a fellow. We left everything to join you. You cannot give up. We are. And that was very inspirational. And from that day, we got invested. So if that day I had quit and Jackie didn't inspire me, I wouldn't be talking to you. I'd be sitting in some cubicle in Chicago doing some simple job. But that's the beauty of having a work class team, a team that inspires you. You don't only inspire them, but when you're down, they also push you up. And together you build something, you know. So we built these companies together in US, Canada, Hong Kong, India, being the first week in India. I came back in 2016. I started cool to the ventures. And that has become the largest startup incubator in India. I'm very proud of it. 412 revenue generating startups, multiple investments. And even two of us started when investment during lockdown. Right. You when you do things at a young age, you get a lot of name and fame. So, and that's a good thing. It opens up doors. It allows you to get access to people who wouldn't let you get access. So as a young entrepreneur doing things, US, India, I've gotten enough publicity that helps me to reach more people and help more people like you guys. Right. And cool to the ventures are a goal is to fuel our dream. You know, your dream, make it all happen. 400, like I said, 400 plus startups. We had in three countries, now Germany and Australia are there. Two exits already within a very short period that we have existed 10 crores funds raised just this year. Right. These are some of our really powerful startups that are making more than four lakhs a month. These have already gotten funded. The rest are on their way to getting funded. Right. And like I said, some of them got funded during the lockdown period, which is fantastic. I also teach at some of the prime institutes in the world. So there's the six IITs, three IAMs, North West University, Kela School of Business, as well as Illinois Institute of Technology, just my university. Right. So COVID-19. So it's actually an opportunity. Why? There are demands that were not there that have come up because of COVID-19. And if you write that demand of COVID-19, you can actually grow with it rather than die because of it. So you have to pivot. You have to figure out a new way of doing business. Right. And I'm going to talk more about that. But the point is anything physical is going to be dead for a little bit. Anything digital is going to be thriving. Like I would never do webinars from November to till 10th March. I was on a flight three times a week speaking, talking to entrepreneurs, you know, mentees, just going around the country. Last 70 days I am at home and I was forced to do webinars and I just realized the power of webinars. It's so powerful. I'm in three cities in one day, which I couldn't do when I'm on a flight, you know, flying to one place only. So it's great. I love the digital economy. I love things digital. Look at the ventures has also been focusing on virtual incubation from 2016. And today it's more relevant than ever before where people are not able to leave their homes, go to places. We are virtually incubating our startups from around the country and the world now. So which is fantastic. So COVID-19 is an opportunity for you to take what you're doing and pivot that to digital and align it with the demands of COVID-19 and post COVID-19. And I'm going to give you more analysis and data based on it. Now, one of the biggest things about COVID-19 is working from home. It has become a norm. It is no more a thing that people are like, oh, work from home, nothing gets done and all of that. Now what do you have access to? You have access to the most talented people in the world for the cheapest amount of money because they can be sitting in some village. In fact, the first slide you saw that the flyer that was made by a little boy in Rajasthan for 100 rupees. Can you believe it? 100 rupees. I was paying 40,000 rupees to my graphic designer. And this guy is doing my graphics for 100 rupees a graphic. I mean, I'm shocked, but I'm able to access him because I'm not limited by hiring somebody in my daily office or Calcutta office or Hyderabad office. I'm focused on anybody working remotely. So my cost has gone down. I'm getting talent, right? I'm able to communicate clearly through video chat what's left. So remote working is huge. In fact, I'll tell you one of my, one of our startups in Calcutta Ventures. They were a core space owner, 5,000 seater in a tier two city. And I was like, dude, you're going to get slammed. What, what are you going to do? How are you going to pivot? So we helped him out. We said, okay, you know what? This is what we're going to do. Work from home is such a powerful concept right now. All these big, big companies are spending so much money shipping computers, you know, desktops from office to people's employees homes. Why don't you ship co-working space to their homes? How foldable table, foldable chair, laptop and a dongle for internet. Send it over to people, ship it over to people's houses. And he already is making so much money right now. He's profitable already. You know, it is veggie because he already had the furniture connects laptop. We already have another business that we consult with that's a hundred crore India based laptop manufacturing company. Right? So it's amazing. You're able to ship the office to the house of those who want to work from home for big companies like DCS, Capgemini, IBM and all of these guys. Right? So he's pivoted his business from co-working to shipping work from home kit to your house. And it's working beautifully. You need to figure out how you want to do this, you know, where you can make money during COVID-19 and, you know, grow your business and get investment. Now you're going to fail. Of course, there's going to be difficulties. It's not going to be easy. Many people are not successful because they fail to fail enough number of times. They feel like fear hold them back. Right? Powerful statement. When you were learning to walk, did you falter and fail? Yes. Did you tell you better, you cannot walk for the rest of your life? No. Try again, try again, try again. So similarly, yes, COVID-19 is a new thing. It's a whole global pandemic. It's a new situation we've never faced in the last hundred years. We've never faced it. Of course, we will try new things and fail. But the point is this is the new normal. There's going to be a lot of new normals here onwards. And you need to understand that that is not going to change for a long time. So better get used to it and adapt to it or you'll die. Right? Okay. So investors strategies for startups during post COVID-19. That's what the topic is today. So let's jump right into it. These are the different categories of investors. You start with friends, family fools. They just invest because they love you. Right? There is crowdfunding, which is still available where people are throwing their money because they want to be early adopters. One of my mentees, she, you know, iPhones have speaker at the bottom. So what she did was she took a Starbucks coffee cup mug. Took the lid and put it around and put it under her phone. Made a video out of it, put it on Kickstarter. She was going to raise $10,000. She raised $330,000. When did China build a plastic version of that? And she already had customers before she even had the product. That's the power of crowdfunding. It's basically a platform where people are allowed to invest in a startup. And one of our co-culture venture startups. Crowdcouch is the first crowdfunding platform for startups in India. We have crowdfunding platforms for people dying, you know, people raising money for cancer and all that. But for startups, crowdcouch is the first one. And we as co-culture wedges are proud to incubate them and invested. Also, you know, they have gotten an investment from some of our investors. So it's a fantastic opportunity. Crowdfunding platform. Next up, angel investors. These are generally people who are high network individuals. That means their network is above $2 million. Now these guys tend to be CXOs of big companies or consultants or charmed accountants or, you know, big guys who have not necessarily built a startup. Or they have built a startup and they have gotten an exit and with that money they're invested. But generally when there are six CXOs or employees or consultants, these guys are not very risk-taking. So they are not investing right now. They're holding on to their liquidity. And they're making sure that, you know, once things get better, they will invest in startups. But now is not the time. They will not be investing in startups because they're scared. They're rather invested in day trading with stocks and whatnot. But angel investors who are from the background of employment are not invested because they're just not entrepreneurial. And that's okay. That's who they are. When she capitals on the other side are very different. They are people who might have not invested their own money, but they are having investors who are pulled in money into their fund. And generally every VC fund has a 10-year life cycle where they promised investors that in 10 years I'm going to give you 10 times money return. So find out venture capitalists who have what at the beginning or the mid-area of their tenure. They're not at the end. Then they'll be having guns. But the point is they are almost pushed to deploy their funds as soon as possible because they know the money will come back to them only when they deploy it. And a lot of the startups will fail. 90% of the startups will fail. So the 10% that succeed is going to make up for the 90% that fail. And that's how they're going to make their money back. So a lot of these VC funds are investing. And they have a gun to their head because they have their own time schedule to invest the money. So many of the startups that are getting invested you'll see are from VC funds or angel networks. But there is a timeline involved. They cannot wait for lockdown to go away or COVID 90 to go away. They are looking to invest and they're looking to invest now just like people are wanting to invest in stock markets because the price is cheap, right? Everything has crashed. Similarly, a lot of entrepreneurs start up on investors start up entrepreneurs are struggling to pay salaries struggling with liquidity. So investors are taking this opportunity to get a better valuation a better pricing and invest. So in venture capitalists are big on this. Corporate investors. These are people like, let's say, Tanzan India has an investment firm. Amazon has investment from Google Ventures, Xiaomi Ventures, Samsung Ventures, all these companies invest money along with services. So let's say you have an app business and you want a million downloads. But if you look at the cost of customer acquisition to get to if you do Facebook ads, Instagram ads and whatnot to get a million downloads, it might be up to 100 rupees a download for your app. 100 rupees. So that's basically, you know, you're talking, you know, close to 100 million dollars. That's a lot of money. Now it's not always going to be 100. It's going to be national progressional. So if your app is good. So let's say it's even 10 million dollars, but that's a lot of money. So what Samsung Ventures and companies that are phone company, what does it do? They say, okay, I'm going to give you half a million dollars. You make this product unique to my phone. And I'm going to make sure I'm going to give you downloads into a million phones, right? How, when the software update happens, your app would be pre-installed on my phone. In the target eight area you want with this urban, with this rural, I'm going to make sure that happens. You save 10 million dollars. You get half a million dollars. You, you know, make the app a little customized for their needs. And you have so many customers looking at you. Powerful opportunity. And these guys are also under the gun. They have venture funds that they need to invest. There's a timeline involved and they want to get in, right? Banks and government agencies now with the 20 lakh crore thing. So it's always been the fund of funds, right? But certain venture capital firms are connected with the government. So they invest a crore. The government invests one crore, you know, so there's a massive investment. It's called fund of funds. So anyway, the government of India had 10,000 crores putting to it. State governments had 100 crores, 500 crores, you know, different states, different money. And now with COVID-19, they haven't put in more money into SMEs, small and medium-sized businesses. So if you get investment, you get matching investment from the government. And also you can get loans up to two crores in some cases. In some other cases, there could be less or more. But the point is, and there's automated loans also coming up. So it's not going to be until February. If you had accounts payables that you're not able to pay because of COVID-19, whatever that amount is, I think 10% of that you can get automated loan like that where the government takes again, which is powerful. So a lot of money floating around during COVID-19. If you're intelligent, you will grab these opportunities that I'm telling you. Now investors look for something. What do they look for? They look for you as a founder that do you have an automated skill and will high energy, high ethics and skills, the proven skills. That's why IITI and background guys get funded. Why? Because they've proven they're intelligent. But even if you are not from IITI and background, that's okay. Have we done any job? Have we done any internship? Have we done anything that shows that you can execute? You have to have some projects or internships or jobs or some history or some awards or board of advisors where people trust you. They see big industry leaders are saying, I trust this guy. So that's what people trust you. So something that validates you as a founder, that validates you, your co-funding team as for execution, your market validation, market should say, yes, we love your product. How? Google analytics, daily active users, daily monthly active users, weekly active users, right? A letter of intent if you're a B2B company that a big client is saying, yes, if we can make this, I will buy it. So some form of market validation, geographical proximity. Most investment firms want to invest in a local state where their startup is, right? Now with COVID-19 work from home, a lot of those investment firms are opening up. They are investing outside their state also, but do check that. Traction, very important. You can have a beautiful slides, but if you have not achieved anything so far, then what is it that you really are, right? It's no value. So traction is very, very important. Scalability. Are you taking able scalable, right? You could be, for example, let's say your restaurant business. If you build three restaurants, your cost goes up and so does your profit, your revenue. But it's not a scalable business. Why? Because your cost and profit are in proportion. What is scalable? You have the same cost, but your proportionally your revenue, your profitability goes up. So that's, that means you built three restaurants. Now you have a brand, people recognize you and you give your brand as a franchisee to other companies, right? And the franchisee, you can just charge for it and people pay for it and they invest in the infrastructure of your restaurant. And then you have a scalable business model. Oh, that is interesting, right? Or you build an app. You build one app, but that gets downloaded into one crore phones. Now that's a scalable business model that you can scale throughout the country, throughout the world. So scalability. Imagine a year from a 5G technology is coming. Are you ready for it? Right? Will it be relevant at that time? Are you ready for AR, VR? Are you ready for artificial intelligence? I'm not saying you have to push technology and I'm not saying you should do that. That's not healthy. But are you thinking in those terms? Will you evolve by then, right? Your evolutionary thought process is important for the investor to hear in your pitch deck. Go to market strategy. How are you going to acquire your first hundred customers? How are you going to acquire your first thousand customers? Now, if you say digital marketing, everybody does digital marketing. Like I said, if you really have to download a hundred million customers and you're going to pay a hundred rupees customer acquisition, you're spending a hundred million dollars. Who's going to give you that? You have to think growth hacking. How are you going to use strategic partnership? How are you going to use different methods to not spend as much and yet get the traction, yet get the downloads, yet get the customers? How are you going to do it? How are you going to steal your competitors' customers and bring them on board? Important part of your strategy, right? That's why we have this program at Polkot Event. It's called Make Your Startup Investor Ready. We take you through all of this. We help you with your pitch deck. We make you ready for the investor because this is how you're judged. A 95% of startups don't get investment because they don't have these answers. They are really just clueless. They just go to the investor hoping the investor is an ATM machine and the investor will pay you for whatever your beautiful idea is. But it's not like that. Investor wants to see his money grow. So timeline for execution is important. How will you grow my money? That's what investor wants to hear from your pitch deck. How will you grow my money? Use of funds, where are you spending your money? Are you investing in a big office and a nice-looking assistant? Or are you investing it in marketing and sales? Are you growing it? And your exit strategy. How are you going to give the investor his money back? Right? So is it through acquisition, acquire? Is it IPO? Are you going to go public? What is your vision? What are some of your competitors doing? This is when you talk about your competitors. It's very, very important. Then the investor can see, the competitors did it so you can do it better if you're given right guidance. It's good to have competitors. Never say I don't have a competitor. Even Airbnb and Uber, which are very unique ideas, even they in their pitch deck talk about their competitors. Competitors may say, where are your customers now? Who are they getting their services from? And how can you do it better for them? That's your competitor, right? It's credible. So if there's nothing you've got out of this, there's one thing you should remember. Investors looking for people. Credible team capable of execution. If you have this, rest of the things can be figured out. If you don't have this, your idea is brilliant. You're not going to succeed. Guaranteed. A little bit of industry analysis I'll do for you. From my research, what it's come, not my research, but research of experts. And I've done research on research of experts. And this is kind of the common thing. So the industries that will be bust travel tourism, physical retail malls will be closed for a while. Hospitality industry. So hotels and restaurants, many restaurants are closing already at 670% of the restaurants are predicted to close. So that's very, very scary. A lot of these five-star hotels are closing. Automotive industry people are working from home. They don't need Ola Uber. Uber has already been firing people, right? Malls, theaters, restaurants, luxury goods. If you don't have anyone to show off what you're going to do, you're at home. Real estate, it's good to go down. Great time to buy an invested real estate, of course, because it's going to go up after two, three years. Oil and natural gas, again, down, down, down. Construction, down. Live events like concerts and sports events, down. What will thrive? Actually, the list is more and what would boom, imagine. Chemicals, anything with chemicals, FMCG, past moving consumer goods, going to be huge, right? People are going to more into sanitizing and all that. Pharma is going to grow leaps and bounds. Health care is going to grow. Health tech, health at your home. Medicine delivery, digital entertainment, right? So people are more watching Netflix and more content, more OTT platforms. Even movies are getting launched on hours on Prime. PVR and Inox are scared. What to do? I mean, nobody's going to the movie theaters the next, at least 10 months. So online delivery of groceries, medicines, essential goods. Amazing. They don't have people. If you can provide people power, if you can provide last minute delivery, you're in great situation. Give economy. This is the new way of doing business. Many are going to lose jobs. Many people are going to lose jobs and then I'm looking for jobs. They want to self sustain themselves. They want to be freelancers. They want to work when they want. They want to chill when they want. So give economy. Stock market investing. People are making loads of money on daily trading. I don't know about this. I'm not giving you investment decisions, but this is a growing market. People are learning from Udemy and investing in stocks. And many young teenage boys and girls are making lots of money. Mental health. People are going to be depressed. Divorces are happening. A lot of issues. So mental health related businesses are doing well. In fact, one mental health startup got funded. I think it did before yesterday. Insurance is going to grow because people are scared. A lot of insurance opportunities there. Gaming opportunities. People are bored at home. They're going to play games. So a lot of new game gaming technologies coming up again with 5G technology. Gaming is going to be up there with extended reality, virtual reality, augmented reality and all of that. 4D technology. So gaming is huge and growing. Data science. So much data created. New digital economy has been created. New digital products are being sold and resold. Resellers. Affiliate marketers. All these data. So much social media. One person is being hit by Google ads. YouTube ads. Facebook ads. And the advertisers want to know which is working. Is it email marketing? Is it Google? Is it YouTube? Is it Facebook? Is it LinkedIn? Is it TikTok? Is it Instagram? They want to know. So a lot of data analysis, data engines, data visualization is going to be massively profitable. And astrology. Religious things will also grow because people are scared. They want to know the future. If you have a startup related to astrology, psychology, tarot, occult sciences, it's going to do well during this time. I'm not saying it. Researchers are saying it. Right. Okay. So again, if we didn't get anything out of that, and I was speaking too fast because I don't have too much time. This is simple. Growth of digital economy and death of physical. So manufacturing and all of the, although they move into India from China and all that good stuff, but at least one and a half years. Right. So digital, if you want to make right now, money right now, go digital. Anyway, you can, if you need help, reach out to me. My name is Avello Roy. I'm the only person in this world with that name. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to help you out. I could find one Instagram. Just reach out to me. I'll meet, you know, This is a picture with the prime minister of Nepal. You can see here. So Modi had sent us a couple of years back when he got elected. And Ritu is here. Ritu is actually the owner of business X. So Ritu is here. Many of my friends, Ritesh is there. Who's the owner of oil rooms. Right. So amazing opportunity where we got to meet the prime minister and kind of consult with him. And he was asking what can I do for Nepal. And one of the things I told him was Mr. Prime Minister, your Nepalese engineers in Nepal have the same opportunity as those in Silicon Valley. Right. Because he was saying, oh, we don't have right roads. We don't have infrastructure, everything. I like none of those matter because think digital. If you can make money digitally, you know, it doesn't matter if you're in Nepal or Silicon Valley or Delhi or Bombay. It's the same thing. You just have to have internet phone and laptop and you can make money wherever you are. It doesn't matter. And Nepal has transformed one of my, you know, one of my dear friends, six shit is about a multimillion dollars business, copying Uber for bikes because in Nepal, they don't have too many cars, but they have a lot of bikes. Right. And there are so many copies of ATM, there's copies, all these digital businesses have come up and they're making so much money in Nepal. So whole Nepal economy has risen because of the digital economy. And now they've moved to China. They look to China to help. Anyway, I'm not going to get political about it. But the point is, same thing applies to all of us here. Right. All of us here. So know that. Okay. So I'll end it here. Again, if you need any help, go to the ventures.com. You can go there with this funding, whether it's guidance, mentorship, whatever it is that I can help you with, or my team can help you with, we're here to support your cause. And again, business X is here. We have a whole community of people who are helping entrepreneurs. And this is your time to rise and shine. This is the time to, you know, really start your startup. You'll probably never get this opportunity. Such a long lockdown where you have extra time, you have internet and you can grow. Okay. In fact, I don't have internet to be honest. Like at Calcutta, we had this cyclone. I was using by Ford data. That was telling. So that way I'm like, I don't know if I can do this webinar. My phone data is hardly working. But even then I'm here for you. Right. We made it happen. I hope you could hear the whole presentation. And then appear any questions. Please feel free to ask right away. Thank you so much. Hello. It was so amazing. Such an amazing session. And thank you so much for sharing your personal experiences and your insights. I'm sure everyone loved it. And yeah, you were actually able to answer a lot of questions already. But we do have some questions. I'll just read them out for you. And you can ask. Okay. So the first question is which sectors will be given preference by investors post COVID? Now, I think you've already covered that in the previous slide. So yeah, anything else you would like to add to it or something? Again, very much focusing on the digital aspect on the healthcare aspect. Anything that is from home, even parties at home, right? Companies that are providing that, that how you can Netflix, you have, you get food delivered to your house and then equipments to your home, entertainment at home. So anything you can do at home, delivery, digital, that's the way things are going to move. And that's a, you can make money right now as we speak. Great. So the next question is from Mr. Saurav. He says, is it right to pitch five years to investors from sectors that are badly hit by COVID, like tourism or event management? First, pivot your, your business. So yes, tourism has been hit. Event management. So for example, the business X is owned by, I think Ritu, Ritu is the owner, right? Ritu and her husband. Yes. Ritu mom and her husband, Gaurava. So they do 600 events in a year, 600. That's not a joke. 365 days. So they're basically doing two events a day. Now, and I'm seeing them doing so many webinars and whatnot. So they're pivoted. Right. So you need to figure out how you're going to pivot your business, which is in tourism, which is in live events. And then the pivoted event, you can pitch to investors. Like for example, our startup that I talked about with the coworking space, who was like, what do we do? They pivoted to shipping your office to your home, work from home kit. Now that he's pitching to investors and he already has half a million dollars committed. Right. So first pivot, then pitch. Great. So the next question is from someone who says, I own a chandelier and fancy light showroom. Basically, I'm a retailer. Can you suggest how can I digitalize my business besides registering on e-commerce platform? Certainly. So you don't have to do much with digital. Just I'm sure you have a lot of clients who have a lot of your chandeliers. Tell them to share a three-second or a five-second video of how that chandelier makes their room look as opposed to without it. Right. Get maybe 10 or 15 of them make a collage of 45 seconds. Put that across social media because as people work from home more, they're going to focus on making the house more pretty because they are spending more time at home before it used to be, I just come to sleep at home. Right. It's only for weekends, but now people are going to spend more on making the house is pretty. So get real testimonials from people of how your chandeliers make people's houses look and make a video out of it and share it. You will see your sales will grow like anything. Perfect. So the next question is from someone who says, I'm a software guy and started my own business a few months ago. Should I use artificial intelligence to accelerate business in the coming times? So you're a software engineer. You know this as much as I do that artificial intelligence doesn't show its magic unless there is a data set long enough data sets like a child. Everything goes in the mouth. The child will ask, oh, food goes in the mouth. Shoes don't go in the mouth. Right. But it takes a lot of trials and errors to figure that out. So just don't use artificial intelligence for the sake of saying it because investors are intelligent enough to understand. Only when you have a data set or you're using let's say Google your piggybacking on Google or Amazon's engine and using their data sets to enable artificial intelligence, then do it. Don't do it for the heck of it. You can pull in intelligence into your product. That is okay. It can be an intuitive product just like expert systems have existed since 1960s. Since computers have existed, expert systems have existed. Artificial intelligence is the evolution of expert systems. So intelligence is there in products. But if you just throw AI, IoT, buzzwords like that, trust me, I and many other people here investment pitches all day long and the moment people say there's like, oh God, another one. This is the reaction. And the reaction is because unless you have a data set, unless you're a big company, you cannot afford to have so much data. Or you piggyback in your strategy partnership with a big company like a Samsung on a Google, then you have the data and then you can say AI. So only when you have that say AI backed by a massive big daddy. Otherwise you are cheapening yourself because everybody says AI. So the next question is how the valuation can be calculated for startups when pitched to raise funds. If you ask a accountant, they're going to give you if you ask the entrepreneur who has raised money over and over again and invested, it's emotions. It's not about any formula to be honest. I have seen people with idea on a sketch on a piece of paper getting $10 million funding and people with traction and 70 lakhs monthly revenue not getting funding. So the point is it's about relationships. It's about trust. You will not give 10 rupees to a beggar, right? Unless there is something, something that makes you feel like I should give. So similarly an investor, oh, I'm not saying you're a beggar or anything like that. Don't get me wrong, wrong example. Sorry. What I'm going to say here is when we don't know someone or they don't come recommended or there is no validation, it's difficult to trust them with the money. So have a board of advisors. But people are like, I don't know the entrepreneur, but I know those guys on the board of advisor. And because of them, I want to invest in the company. Right? That helps. So your credibility of your co-founding team yourself, your board of advisors, all of that helps. That adds your valuation. So valuation has two things. Tangible assets, intangible assets. Most startups don't have tangible assets. Tangible assets are what? Laptop, table, chairs, whatever, right? Physical things. Unless you're a manufacturing company. Then you have machines and whatnot. But intangible assets, your reputation, the board of advisors you have, the engineers you have. When aqua hire happens, the company's value each engineer at 100,000 to a million dollars per engineer they value, right? That's how they acquire a company. So the point is, what you have intangibly makes a lot of sense, your patents, your press media coverage, every like on your Instagram, Facebook, all of those have value. Because they are your reputation, your Google analytics. What is it saying about daily active users, monthly active users, stickiness? How much time are people spending on your app or product? All of those come together to say, this is what your valuation is. And then it's your word versus your investor. And you both argue and negotiate. You should negotiate. You come to a common ground where you both agree, huh, this sounds right. It's about this sounds right, right? And then the CA makes it right on paper and the lawyer comes and does a shareholders agreement and you both sign up and you have happy money and equity works. Makes sense. I hope it does. It does. Great. So the next question is, many of the new startups get funding, but many startups don't know how to contact venture capitalists. Can you shed some light on this? Yes. The biggest mistake that people do when I get so many messages every day, people just reach out to you thinking it's your duty to give them money. Investors are not bound to invest, right? So if you're writing to somebody saying, looking for investment, the next line is, can you give me eight to 10 lakhs for my startup or 82 lakh to a crore for my startup? I'm like, can you please tell me your name and a little bit of introduction about yourself and your startup before ask me for money. So the important thing is to not disrespect the investors. It's as common sense as that might be, but please understand, right to somebody, if you write to somebody saying I want your money, it's not very respectful. A good way to start a conversation is, I really appreciate what you're doing. I really appreciate the post that you're posting. I've been following you for a long time, buttered them up a little bit, right? And just seeking your expert advice. The place where you get rejected is the subject line. The subject line effort is like looking for investment. It's like by another person come here. I don't even know you. Either you say referred by a friend that a name that an investor can recognize, or you just seeking your expert advice and then say, want five minutes of your time to just get your guidance. When you push them up as a guide or a mentor, they feel the ego has been boosted. They want to help you. And that's when they're invested emotionally in you. There's a little trust and liking. And then you can say, what would you suggest for investment? And then they might say, okay, I can look at it. You can give me your pitch deck and let me see if it's interesting. So you go step by step. You don't just jump into bed. That's like on a date. You just don't tell the person that on the same day, let's hook up. You take it out for dinner. You give some roses and all that. And slowly, slowly, you know, I cannot give a dating advice. The point is, make it step by step. Don't make it like, boom, here. Copy and worst is copy-paste messages. Dear Sarah madam. You don't even know if I'm a Sarah madam and you expect me to write you a check. You know, so please don't be a machine. Treat an investor like a human being, reach out to them, butter them up a little bit. They are people with high equals, right? It's just how it's normal. So that's the way to do it. Perfect. So the next question is a bit controversial. So someone says, to what extent should we disclose investors about our business so that it doesn't get copied? Is it 100% safe? And now I myself see a lot of startups asking this question to me as well. And I always tell them the answer, but if you can just say it more clearly. Don't expect investors to sign non-disclosure agreements. No one will. Having said that, do investors, many investors have a reputation of stealing ideas. Yes. It is true. In fact, one of my investors did that, not with me, but somebody else. And he was trying to put me into it. And like, I'm an entrepreneur. I know how it feels. Don't. I won't do it. But the point is, yes, if your idea is stealable and you're just an idea, then please trust me, it's going to be stolen and you can do nothing about it. Even if you don't talk about it, 10 months from now, somebody will have the bright idea and they'll do it. You're not the only one with that idea. So the way to do it is speed. If you have something, start working on it, show traction, build traction. So if somebody is copying you, they will always be behind you because with your creative juices, with your innovation, with your hunger in the belly, a copycat can never keep up because you're fired in the belly and you're the creative innovator. They'll always be behind you. Speed is important. And if you don't have a barrier to entry, you don't have a business. So you have to have certain hooks. For example, you have a good engineer that can build fast or you have a great strategic partnership that helps you, you know, pulls you faster. So you have to have a hook. Otherwise, an investor will think, why should I give them the money? I have developers. I have designers. I have money. I can have the right people. I can do this faster than you. Why should I give you the money? But when they see you've already done the hard work, you have traction. And it makes sense to partner with you. Put money in you because you can do it better than me. And you already have the team in place. You already are ahead of the game and you're, it's faster to grow with you than to steal your idea. Then obviously somebody, even if he wants to steal the idea, they'll grow with you. Right? So don't blame, don't do the blame game. You're not a baby anymore. So don't be like investor stealing my idea. No, be such that investor doesn't want to steal the idea. Don't want to invest in you and grow with you. Very, very well explained. So the next question is, can a prop writer registered business get any investment? It's, you might get H&I investment where there's an angel investment, but a venture fund or a professional investor will not invest unless it's a private limited company. So it's a requirement to have a private limited company if you want outside investment. Even in a company, you might have issues with H&I also. So private limited companies are most for investment. So the next question is, how to create brand equity in the present scenario? Educate people. So know who's your industry, who's your market. Again, I'll go back to Ritu's beautiful array of companies, restaurant India, franchise India, startup, entrepreneur India, all these companies, if you look at it, they all have blogs, they have content, they have videos, they have webinars. What are they doing? They're educating the market. And then what happens? People understand you're the market leader and they come to you for the services that these companies offer, right? So educate the industry that you're in. That proves you as expert. When you are proven to be the expert, people naturally come to you to solve the problem and you get paid. Perfect. So the next question is, how do you think the education sector will evolve post COVID? So there's a lot of noise in the education sector now because of by Jews, many of the people are thinking they can be the next by Jews, but you have to have something more. I'll tell you the biggest hurdle here. Most educational institutions are run by people who are money hungry and they need to have either bribes or they need to have people. I'm being very honest here, right? We have many tech startups and I know how this goes on. Many of them are only working with a business development guy. So for example, if you're a tech company, trying to get into a college or a school, find a competitor who has a regional head for business development. That person has already a relationship of 10, 15 years with the schools and colleges and they will get you in very easily, you know, for 20, 30% of success fee. That's the way to do it. Now, is there a need? Yes. Is it saturated? Yes. Can you do something better? Yes. Students are still needing things. Education is not just cool college education. There's executive education. That is the colleges are going to realize that people are going to work from home. People are going to study from home. So what can we do better? What can we do in this scenario where you see all these videos, memes of people just, you know, showing their phone in front of the camera and showing the teacher how I'm listening. You know, and they're not. How can you make it more exciting? How can you make it more fun? How can big universities get into your home? Right. So there's a lot of room for innovation, but don't try to copy paste by juice. Then you're really, there's a lot of. Saturation in the market, but if you can do something unique where, you know, connecting education with marketing with the whole. Funnel where, you know, it all works together and educational companies can use that to grow. It could be a very powerful B2B business. A lot of experts are losing jobs from Oyo and Zomato and Ola and Uber and then becoming consultants and they need customers. They don't know how to get them if you can. So that's education also, right? If you can create something with trainers and coaches and whatnot, that's the big business. So a lot of opportunities there, but don't try to be another by juice. That's just a warning. Sure. So we are short of time. So we'll just take the last few questions very quickly. One is, do you think is, is it a drawback? Then you do not have any co-founders, but have a good team to do the job. It's not a drawback. It's just more painful for you. That's all misery likes company. So if you have a co-founder, you can cry together when you're going through the, the sleepless nights of a startup. When you're alone, you cry alone, but it's great to have a team that's executing and generally what happens is when in the process of in the process of funding, in the process of growth, you might come across somebody who has complementary skills, who has skills you don't have and you have skills they don't have and both are high, high-skilled, high-well people and you become good friends and you say, let's be co-founders together. And it's perfectly okay to get a co-founder a little down the line. Okay. So the next question is, is Kolkata Ventures interested in social impacting ventures? Also, what's your take on AgriTech? So we have a lot of AgriTech businesses that are there and we work directly with the government of India with the Ministry of Agriculture also to help support these companies. So, yes, there is. So we are not, so Kolkata Ventures doesn't do anything that harms animals, humans or intoxication business or gambling business. We just don't touch those. But anything that makes money ethically, whether it's high-impact social venture or AgriTech or whatever else, but we try to focus more on digital business. But if there's a physical business with a digital element or there's a tech-enabled scalability involved or we can help you become tech-enabled scalable, we will definitely be interested to see. So one question is, is funding from banks a better option than funding from venture capitalists? Are there any guidelines on what is better? Always. Funding from banks is cheaper. Why? Because they're charging your interest, they're charging your money. What we see that taking is equity. Equity today, it's like equity is here, your cash is here. But eventually as your startup grows, equity is here, cash is here. So bank is going for the cash. They're just saying give me a 15%, 20%, not 20%, 15%, 12%, whatever interest, right? If you're going to start up India, it's 5%, 6% interest. So always better. Now banks are more paperwork, more begging and pleading. A lot of banks will reject you, just like investors will also reject you. But far better to go with a bank. They'll never come with a gun to your head, investors will. So always better with banks, if you can get that done. So one more question. How do you look at the China market impact on the Indian market? How can the Indian market recover when major support in terms of raw material accessories are being imported from China itself? I'm not educated enough to answer that question. Okay, great. So I guess we'll just take the last question now. It's from Mr. Santosh. He says, what are your suggestions on cloud-based micro ERP solutions for MSMEs to reach more customers in pan India and generate more revenue? Super. But again, there are many companies who are doing that micro ERPs for MSMEs. There are a lot of competition. Look at what is missing in those MSMEs, actually in those micro ERPs that are competing with you. So call them up as a customer and tell them what all you offer. Talk to 15 of them. You will see there's a lot of common features that all of them offer. And there are features that none of them offer that might be your opportunity to provide that. And if you can do better integrations with again, marketing, sales, project management, all of that with ERP system so that it's just a one-stop shop that works with the Trello, works with the Slack, works with the GetResponse, works with MailChimp, works with Instamojo or Razorpay, you know, all of that. So that's where you really need to add values integration because a lot of these businesses are just stand-alone, right? And somebody needs to put it all together. And the CEO needs to see it all in one dashboard rather than going to Google Analytics and Salesforce and all of that, right? So if you can do that, at least in my experience, that would be a lot of value addition. Okay. So the last question is actually from Mr. Rahul Lagerwal. He says, how are you feeling? Excited and also a little scared. I don't know what the future looks like but an entrepreneur always likes the exciting journey where it's unpredictable. You make sense of a chaotic situation. That's the feeling. Thank you very much for asking that. Okay. So thank you so much, Evelo. It was absolutely amazing having you here and thank you for being so patient while answering all the questions. Our session was supposed to be a 45 minutes but we took it to one hour. So thank you so much for that. Most welcome. And have a wonderful time. I wish you all success to everyone. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you to all our attendees. We hope you were able to add some value to your lives through the session. And if you have any further questions or anything, please get in touch with me and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have. Also, we have another webinar tomorrow only. It's about your opportunity in crisis. So how you can make the most of this period in crisis. So if you... And it's a free webinar again. So if you want to know any further details about that, please get in touch with me as well. Until next time, thank you so much. Stay home. And if you are going out, then please stay safe. Thank you so much.