From Escape Velocity to Power of Compounding: Here's the lowdown on the tradition of the Blume Day tee

For Blume Day 2023, we celebrated long-term class over short-term form. Or how “form is temporary but class is permanent”. Venture capital is best exemplified by this phrase, especially in the post-pandemic era. After all, the point of venture capital is to fuel innovation that takes humanity from 0-1.

But that means you fail….a lot.

Startups and their founders often try valiantly but don’t achieve greatness. And that’s okay – because if you look close enough, they leave a trace of class behind that is carried over to the next generation of startups. We’ve seen this at Blume too: a lot of our Fund I founders building in early 2011–2015 lost ground to newer start-ups flush with cash. It was a period of bad form, sure, but what emerged out of the rubble was class.

A lot of our second-time founders are examples of this: Koo, Ultrahuman, SmartStaff, Uolo, Zolve, Atomic Work – their first attempt showed good form, but their second innings exhibited class.

Blume Day started in the same spirit of compounding.

Back in 2011, we held the first ever Blume Day at the small Mumbai’s Breach Candy Club with just 30-40 guests and half a dozen portfolio founders. It was an awkward but intimate gathering. Cut to 2023, when we had 5 keynotes and 400+ attendees.

Our Blume Day tees have evolved through the years as well.

Blume Day 2015 [our 5th] had us geeking out on rocket science at a Blume offsite leading to Go Big or Go Home – dedicated to nerds with big ambitions. 2016 was an ode to founders who don’t want anyone “to tell them the odds” – because, well, anyone can be Jedi if they chose to be. 2017’s “Exit Velocity” came from a random comment by someone at Blume who said, “What the Flucht is that?” to which the reply was “It’s German for Escape Velocity – and Flucht is “Flight”.

Then there was our offsite in Sariska in 2018, where our friends from Constellation Blu came up with the theme of connecting the dots to help founders. 2019, all our chips on the table – “all in on India”. 2020, playing for the long haul, celebrating the idea that to go all in, you need all three dimensions of health: mental, physical, and fiscal. To 2021, our 10th anniversary celebrating the Music Makers of the ecosystem. And 2022, the year of the underdog.

Getting here took a lot of iterations. And of course, a lot of mistakes along the way as well.

But that’s the point. Blume Day was to serve as a reminder that we’ve got to keep growing as a venture capital firm. We need to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. To keep innovating as a firm.

And that can only happen when you take things one step at a time.