We met Akshay Mehrotra and Ashish Goyal, founders of EarlySalary, in November 2016. Akshay is an astute businessman with immense passion for his business. This is clear from his past achievements. Ashish, meanwhile, has extensive experience in the financial ecosystem and is the financial backbone of EarlySalary. Their focus and vision for EarlySalary was vivid, and that is critical for an early-stage venture capital firm. EarlySalary was pioneering the credit system for a large population of first-time employees who lacked the capability of availing credit cards and other loan facilities.
The company was strategically acquiring a new class of users and had incredible unit economics to support its expansion. The founders used advanced data science to generate a social credit score which enabled them to extend formal credit facilities to a population that is generally excluded from the formal banking system.The company seemed to have an amazing product and was doing a great job delivering value to its target customers. Incidentally, it was in discussions with other investors and was eager to close the round fast.
At Windrose Capital, we prefer making errors of omission rather than errors of commission, and choose not to divert from our methodological investment decision-making process. In the meantime, the company received an offer from another investor and went ahead with the same. Given the passion of the founders, the business plan and the combined skill-set of the team, the company was always likely to succeed. The industry’s growth also significantly contributed to its expansion. We have always been a founder-first fund with a thesis-driven investment approach, and have stuck with it. Early-stage investing maybe more of an art than a science, but we supplement our decision-making with a sound thesis, derived after hardcore research, data, analysis and mathematics around de-risking and delivering returns to our investors. Investing takes time and as long as we abide by our principles of investing, we will be on track to achieving our target returns.
