Raising money for your startup in the early stages can be a real nightmare. To emerge victorious in this quest, you need to say the right things (to the right people) at the right place and at the right time. But what are those things? Who are those people? What's the right place and time? We don't know. But as an investor active in the scene for over a decade, Mr. Nath does. And after reading his book, so can you.
'Funding your startup (and other nightmares)' has been written as a distillation of countless interactions Mr. Nath has had with startups over the years. Mr. Nath is the Director at Lead Angels, and as an angel network, they hear a lot of stories. This book narrates those stories from the perspective of angel investors alone, which is important because there are a lot of misconceptions about how the desi investing community thinks about this whole process. I frankly think books like these are important because there's a serious lack of homegrown non-fiction literature in this space. Maybe 20 books, tops. Is that enough? I don't think so.
If you're a young gun without connections (and pedigree), you'll have no idea about how these guys work. To educate yourself, you might pick up books written in the west (as I did), which might do more harm than good because Indians don't work like that. Indians are different, with their own idiosyncrasies which need to be tackled very carefully. 'How to not get it wrong' is what is conveyed in this book indirectly, but very frankly.
The language is simple, the tone candid and message clear - the startup needs to be PERSISTENT. Explained in the book, PERSISTENT is a framework used to evaluate startups by the likes of Mr. Nath, encapsulating important attributes like the problem being solved, earnings model, scalability, etc. Pretty wholesome. Here's Mr. Nath, discussing the book on an episode of I Read This Book:
As you can probably feel, he's one of the nicest folks you can learn from.
Read the book. It might prove to be helpful.
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