Startup Fridays S5 Ep12: Vishal Gupta’s optimism for unicorns turning wealth creators for India

**Vishal Gupta** (0:03)
The 90s was the rise of Infosys, HDFC, Asian Paints, a lot of other companies that you mentioned. And now, that's what the Sensex is. And now you will see a different Sensex, I would say in 10, 15 years. It's just started, right? So I would say that that's going to happen, but and some will fall by wayside, which has happened in the past as well. Not all companies which show the glimmer of hope will succeed, but I'm hoping a lot of these will succeed and build really large categories and be part of Sensex eventually at some point of time because the nature of the world is changing, the consumption is changing, enterprise behavior is changing, it's more software dominated than it used to be. And you will see the rise of these companies eventually at some point of time. But I think we'll have to be patient.

**Hari Arakali** (0:56)
Hi. Wherever you're joining us, I hope you're doing well. Welcome to Startup Fridays, Conversations with Accomplished Entrepreneurs and VC Investors. I'm Hari Arakali, and in this episode, Vishal Gupta, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the world's oldest and storied VC firms, talks about his career as a venture capital investor in India, and gives us an overview of the opportunities he's excited about in this country on the basis of what Bessemer calls roadmaps that the firm develops for various sectors. In this conversation, which was recorded on November 26th, Gupta also talks about how, from among today's privately valued internet unicorns and those that have recently gone public in India, will arise the next generation of blue-chip companies and large-scale wealth creators in the country.
Okay. Vishal, thank you for doing this.

**Vishal Gupta** (2:00)
Thank you.

**Hari Arakali** (2:02)
You are a very low-profile, high-impact VC in this region. And through this conversation, we are kind of hoping to remedy that also a little bit.

**Vishal Gupta** (2:13)
I hope it remains high-impact.

**Hari Arakali** (2:19)
So yeah, so from a general audience's perspective, maybe we can just start with that a little bit. Give us the story of how you came to be at Bessemer. And we'll go from there.

**Vishal Gupta** (2:32)
Yeah. Maybe, maybe again start all the way. I started my career almost 22 years back. I passed out of business school at a really hard time, just around the dot-com bust era. And I was lucky to find a job. Went to HCL Technologies.
And by serendipity, I ended up as an executive assistant to the CEO of a large subsidiary of HCL, which was in banking and financial services area. And I still remember my first conversation with the CEO. I walked in and when he learned my background that I was like a fresh MBA grad, he looked at me and said, Oh, you wasted two years on a lot of money. Let me teach you how to build a real business.
It turned out to be a great ride. That subsidiary grew from almost 20 million to 100 million in revenue in like 18 months flat. And I was really hooked. And I did everything under the sun, sort of from building Excel sheets for large RFPs, to board decks, to board conversations, to M&A conversations, to finding new facilities, to hiring, to vetting people. So it was a good, very good overview of how businesses are built and how businesses are run. From an operator perspective, and that operator was phenomenal. He was a gentleman called Sanjay Kalra. Sanjay then went on to become the Tech Mahindra CEO. When he left, I left. And I went to a really large conglomerate again, called Reliance Industries.

**Hari Arakali** (4:33)
Sanjay was the one who hired you, was it, at HCL?

**Vishal Gupta** (4:36)
No. The way HCL hiring process works is they hire about a large 40-50 people from campuses, and they put them across different subsidiaries and different roles. And you have to pitch for those roles, and I pitch for that role, and that's how I ended up being Sanjay's EA.

**Hari Arakali** (4:57)
Please carry on. You joined Reliance.

**Vishal Gupta** (4:59)
Yeah. This was sort of early years of Reliance starting diversifying away from its core oil and gas business. And I was part of what you would call the treasury team. There were two treasurers at that point of time, Amitabh Janjanwala and Alok Agrawal. Alok was also the CFO, and Amitabh also used to run a bunch of other financial services, businesses for Reliance at that point of time. And this was a small team which was doing, I would say again, sort of new business initiatives for Reliance. There was a project around credit cards. There was a business to be built around primary dealership, which is around bond trading. There were the two life insurance and general insurance businesses. There was the whole AdLabs acquisition that happened at that point of time. And Reliance was starting to build out large infrastructure projects themselves. And one of the things that essentially happened was, they thought that as they do that, there will be a lot of ancillary ecosystem that will benefit from that. And they did a JV with TAMASAC, what was called a Reliance TAMASAC Power Fund.