Helion’s Ashish Gupta: How I Became An Entrepreneur
By kamla bhatt • Oct 16th, 2008Category: Bangalore, Business & Tech, Diaspora, Featured, Ideas, India, Internet & Telecom, San Francisco/Silicon Valley
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Ashish Gupta is co-founder of Helion Venture Partners, a India focused venture capital firm with a $140 million venture fund. Ashish is an entrepreneur turned investor and is one of the few investors to have had a successful exit in India. He was an early investor in Daksh that got acquired by IBM. He has invested in over 30 companies as an angel and a VC and sits on the boards of Kirusa, Naukri and others.
Earlier this year I caught up with Ashish to find out about his journey as an entrepreneur and how he and his c0-founders built Junglee in the 1990s without a formal business plan or business model. What they had was good chemistry among the team members that saw them through their bumpy ride to success. What probably also helped was they founded the company at the start of the dotcom bubble and the team members were either Stanford alumni or students.
In part-1 of the interview Ashish talks about how Junglee was born and how they landed funding from friends and family. Ashish candidly confesses that often he was politely shown to the door by VC firms when he tried to raise money. The founders of Junglee eventually lucked out and got money from friends and family with the help of Rakesh Mathur. He has an interesting story to share about how Rakesh got involved with Junglee. Interestingly, Helion was a recent investor in Rakesh’s startup: SMS GupShup.
Tune back in for Part-2 of the conversation.
In case you missed, you might want to listen to Ashish talk about Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship in India. This was a series of conversation that I recorded with Ashish towards the end of 2007 in Bangalore, India. Ashish Gupta on Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital in India Part-1, Part-2 and Part-3.
Technorati Tags: Ashish Gupta,Junglee,Helion Venture Partners,Rakesh Mathur,entrepreneurship,VC,Bangalore,India,Technology
Kamla Bhatt is the host and producer of an Internet Radio show where listeners can find stories about the new and emerging India and the global Indian community. As a pioneer of 'internet radio' format in India Kamla started her first show News about India, followed by TalkNewsIndia in 2005. In 2006 she premiered her new show: The Kamla Bhatt Show: Life, People and Ideas. 
This is a great podcast. I recently had the chance to meet Ashish here at Yahoo (where he gave an excellent talk on Product Management) and i felt i already knew so much about him and his approach/style through the podcast! His story and views are invaluable for wannabe entrepreneurs and mid management folks alike…
-Amit