Building a Content-first Venture Capital fund with Rohit Kaul | How Did You Get Here

Rohit Kaul leads all things Marketing and Content and has taken up the heavy mantle of helping Blume retain our pole position when it comes to being a content-first, content-led VC fund.

In this interview, I was particularly intrigued by listening to Rohit's thoughts on: how he defines a career what his non-negotiables are for making a career decision how he considered the move to Blume what Content's secret superpower is, and why he is particularly kicked about content marketing as a tool to propel fund performance and vice-versa how he figured out the difference between a long career and a long-term career the life values and lessons he picked up that have propelled his growth As many more Venture Capital funds explore growing their Content and Marketing functions, as well as expanding Platform arms to deliver deeper value add, we're proud to keep pushing the boundaries of how to design, structure and grow a VC fund to deepen brand, impact and outcomes.

Ria:

Thanks so much, Rohit, for making the time for this. I think we'd just love to spend some of the next few minutes understanding a little bit of how you got here, right? I think the goal is for us to capture the stories of people who have joined Blume, their reasons behind it, and help articulate a behind-the-scenes view of what it's like to work in venture capital, and how skills transfer. So hopefully other people who are considering a VC career or even non-investment roles have deeper insight before they even consider the process. So I would love for you to just start maybe going a little back into the timeline and I'd love to understand where did your career begin, what sort of things did you do and what were some of the decisions that you took along the way to start out on that process?

Rohit:

Sure. Thanks, Ria. I believe that a career is a unique aspect of our lives in the sense that you live it forward, but it only makes sense backward.  I have had a fairly long and non-linear career. This is my 16th year working now after my MBA, and I've done multiple things.  I started with sales, then I moved into management consulting for a few years, then I went into marketing, which is what I have been doing for more than a decade now. In between I also worked in two startups, almost 14 years apart. My first startup was in 2008 when startups were not really well known or popular. And then next was in 2022, just before I joined Blume. Interestingly, during my MBA days, marketing was the thing that I wanted to do and if you had asked me to choose between being a CMO or a CEO, I would have gone for CMO 100% of the time. So I am glad that I am back to marketing.

I would say I’ve had a fairly non-linear career, to use that term. But I think a couple of things that have been consistent across my career. One, I've always wanted to be a part of places that are not massive. I don't like to work in huge multilayered, multi-structured marketing setups where there are, say fifty marketing managers, five VPs, and one CMO.  I've avoided that religiously. Secondly,  I've always tried to imbibe the Jeff Bezos-coined term of having a day-one mentality, which is explained best by the cricketing metaphor of you're only as good as your next delivery. So you should always be open to learning new things, exploring, and understanding new things. Otherwise, you stop growing as a person. So I think these two have been fairly consistent across my career which spans across sales consulting, general management, and marketing. 

Ria:

What were some of the internal discussions that you had at these points in your life? What were some of the internal debates or things that you told yourself every time you were considering a switch? What were you looking for? What were some non-negotiables for you?

Rohit:

One, was the ability to work in agile teams, not to pick up something where there are already a hundred people working and trying to solve some problem. The second has always been to be part of a place that is trying to solve a problem. So for instance, and this you may find amusing, when I decided to go into education marketing and joined  Sharda University, I was the first marketing hire. This was 2010/2011. This was the time when private universities were coming up in large numbers in North and West India but none of them did marketing strategically. But I joined there because the university was actually trying to solve a problem -  can they create an affordable, high-quality educational space for a mid-range student. They were committed to solving the problem, which I found very interesting and I believed that digital marketing can amplify this value proposition

So, being  in a place trying to solve a hard problem has been important. And the other conversation I keep having with myself is, am I playing to my strengths when I'm joining an org at this point in time? And why this point of time, which again ties back to the previous point I made - there's always a great time to join an org and not-so-great time to join an org. A great time to join is of course when you are playing to your strengths and the org is solving a specific problem and those two converge. So yeah, those are pretty much the conversations that I've been having.

Coming to when I joined Blume - I think we had our first conversation towards the end of 2021 about this role at Blume. It didn't progress then, but now when I reflect on it, it would not and could not have progressed then because for Blume to happen, Sacra needed to happen. It's like, for Instagram to happen, Facebook needed to happen, For Uber to happen GPS had to happen, for Blinkit to happen, Flipkart had to happen. There is a certain chronology in the universe which is difficult to leapfrog. So these are macro things I'm saying, but even in our personal lives, I see there is a certain chronology that is very difficult to leapfrog. Sacra gave me a solid grounding in terms of appreciating deep content, sharpened my writing skills and also made me more closely aware of how startups work and how venture capital works. Of course, joining Blume deepened the understanding, but yeah, certain things only have a certain time - that is the other part of the discussion as to why now and why not before.

Ria:

Got it. So I'm going to take one more sort of step back, pulling in your theme around chronology and timing. And before we get into the nuts and bolts of the role in the work, one realisation I've had since I've met everyone at Blume and since I've brought in more folks also, is that everyone has had – there's a very strong alignment and resonance in values for folks who have chosen Blume at certain stages in their lives and their careers. So I would love to know if you feel there were certain sort of values that came through family, through experiences growing up that you have always held really close to you and that sort of form the base of what you feel your purpose is. I mean, it's a little philosophical, but one example for me was I went to a boarding school where there was a very high emphasis on community service and the idea that you should do things that impact people at scale. And I think I picked that up when I've gone to other places, so for me this role very much feels like that, that I'm making an impact at scale and I'm doing something. So we'd love to hear if you feel like there was anything that your parents would say or do, anything that happened growing up with people that you've been surrounded by that always sort of stuck with you in terms of, “This is what's important in life.”

Rohit:

Yeah, so interesting question. There’s one thing that stands out for me, that’s slightly different from the example you gave. This is a value – maybe not exactly a value, but there's a principle – about work which is the need to have a bias towards action, or to put it simply get shit done

Which essentially comes from the fact that, when I was growing up, my father wasn't around a lot. He had a job where he was travelling a lot and he was posted outside Delhi on many occasions. I pretty much grew up in Delhi, so me and my mom were there, I think for almost half of my schooling, maybe more. That was the time when I started taking charge of things and doing them on my own as there was no one else who would come and do it for me. It could be as simple as getting a telephone line or an LPG connection. We moved houses quite a bit and I was studying in school, so some of these basic quality-of-life things had to be done many times and I had to do it on my own. There is no guardian angel who will come and do it for me. 

Also, coming from the socioeconomic class that I come from, there were no household staff, there were no drivers, or maids to take care of you. So you have to figure out on your own, you have to do your stuff on your own, you have to clean your utensils, you have to iron your clothes, get your stuff done. It is like being the hen in the famous nursery story about the Red Hen where the hen says it's okay, I'll get it done, I'll get it done.  High agency is a double-edged sword honestly and it cuts both ways – one has to learn to know when to dial it back and when to take ownership.. 

Ria:

That's very interesting. I would also love to understand what were some of the options you were exploring when Blume came up? What was your first understanding of what this role would be? I know we had a lot of conversations before we got you on board. It was both for us to be comfortable about bringing on someone at a senior level, but also for you to understand the complexities and the uniqueness of this role. So we'd love to understand, based on the stage you are in your life and career, what were the other things you were looking at? What stood out for the Blume role and the culture and the people you spoke to? And since then, how has that understanding or definition changed?

Rohit:

The interview process or interactions were quite spaced out which helped me a lot in processing the information I was absorbing and understanding the role. I think I met pretty much everyone - obviously I had known Sajith for a very long time. So that gave me a good glimpse into who the people were, with whom I would work closely. This is great because on many occasions it's difficult to understand who are the people you’re going to work with, and almost 50% of the friction comes from that. 

Before I joined Blume I was at Sacra, which was a break from my marketing career, which is in itself a story. I had a successful marketing career before Sacra. I worked across multiple brands in the education sector, first at Sharda University and then at Shiv Nadar Foundation. Then I also got pulled into HCL’s corporate branding team. For those who do not know, HCL is the 3rd largest IT company in India with more than $10B in topline. I think in those 12 years I've done pretty much all types of marketing - ATL, BTL, digital, performance, TV, outdoors, and PR. I was at a point where I felt that I wasn’t learning anything new from any new marketing project and the learning trajectory had flattened. So I joined this early-stage startup based in the US,  Sacra. One career ambition at that point was – and this was I think partly also fueled by the newsletter and podcast boom of the pandemic – to become a creator. I could write half-decent stuff and analyse companies as well as some of the other creators who were charging for their content. So I got the confidence that I could also become one. Kevin Kelly made this notion of a thousand true fans very popular. You have a thousand true fans, everyone paying you $10 a month. This becomes $120,000, which is a very comfortable living salary anywhere in the world. So I was working at Sacra and I was looking for a career where I could become an independent sort of creator like say Packy Mccormick of Not Boring or closer to home, someone like Rahul Sanghi, of TigerFeathers.

But then I think what sort of clicked for me at Blume was three things. One, this role is a great overlap of content and marketing. So I can write and I can do marketing, which is great for me. The other part of course was when I met the people during interactions, I quite enjoyed my interactions. While obviously, I could understand that there was a judgment involved and everybody is going to judge me when I'm interacting with them, I think there was also a lot of transparency in me being allowed to quite explicitly judge the other person as well. So when there was Karthik judging me in the interviews, I'm also assessing him. It was fairly balanced. I've worked in many companies before, and I've interviewed with many more. I usually don't come across many recruitment processes where the interaction is balanced. It comes across as heavily tilted towards the person who's recruiting, the company that is recruiting. So this obviously helped me gain more trust in Blume.

Third, I think that Blume is at a very interesting point, growing from a $300 million AUM to a $600 AUM fund and in the process amplifying its identity as a solid founder-oriented home-grown fund, which sort of goes back to the point I made earlier about being at a place which is trying to solve a problem. So I think these three factors made me believe that it's an interesting role and something that I would enjoy doing. So that's how it started. And to your second question, of course, it's been a fairly interesting learning curve at Blume.

One thing that’s happened is that before I joined Blume, I thought I knew a lot about the VC business and now that I in fact know a lot more, I realize how little I know and how much more is there to learn. So obviously there's been this massive adjustment towards reality. More tactically, there are two things that I did not anticipate when I joined. One is the need to create an understanding and a shared vocabulary of marketing at Blume. I pretty much worked within the marketing teams at other orgs and my interactions were with other marketers at agencies or other BUs. There was a common language of marketing, which everyone understood and used to speak. When I came to Blume, there was no one else who spoke that language because while some people had an intuitive sense of marketing,  they weren’t trained in marketing.

So the language is very different. So one of the roles I see for myself in the first few years at least, is to educate everyone at Blume about marketing, what content evangelization looks like, and create a commonly shared language. The other thing which I did not fully realise when I was joining was that there is this high amount of independence that exists on the job. I was used to working in fairly structured environments, fairly hierarchal, top-down workflows. So when I came to Blume, it was like this sudden gust of independence that came my way, which I wasn't fully prepared for.

So it took me a while to rise up to the level of independence that the organisation gives you, and I’m still in the process of it. I can pretty much create my own space the way I want within the guard rails obviously, but this is something that I find very unique and very enabling to work.

Ria:

That's really helpful. Being on the other side of someone who is helping you through the process, I think that's always a goal of what we want to get through these roles. So I'm glad that that part of the role resonated with you. Since you joined, you said you have been doing the role of being both a creator yourself and leading the marketing efforts of Blume, and I think some aspects of the work are fairly clear. But what do you think it is that people don't realise that content and marketing are doing? What's a lot of behind-the-scenes work, or what's a lot of sowing-seeds work to get a harvest later? What do people not realise that you're doing?

Rohit:

I think there are three parts to it. In marketing, to put it in a simplistic way, the output is a single piece of content - could be a podcast episode, could be a print ad, could be a social media post, etc. This is what people see as marketing However, each of these pieces is created at the end of a journey of jumping through hundreds of hoops - finding the right partners for the content, what is the format, what is the tonality, who should be a part of it, who should approve, whose feedback is to be taken, what should it look like, when to release it, how to release it, etc - many many hours actually go into these decisions and steps which are completely behind the scenes. An average viewer of marketing output will find it difficult to understand that at least 2-3 hours of effort goes into crafting a social media post.

Thus a marketing leader has to bring alive that sentiment and behind-the-scenes activities for a larger audience to understand and appreciate as it will help them in collaborating better with the marketing team. Specifically in the context of  a venture capital firm, I think there are two things that marketing – content marketing, whichever way you want to paint it – does. One, is that it increases the surface area of attention.

While obviously there are a variety of levers a VC firm has to attract founders, none of them work when we are sleeping. For example, investment leads like Karthik, Sajith or Ashish can interact with founders only when they're awake and that's like 10 hours of their daily time. Another dimension is events. You can only do events when you're awake, you can't do them when you're sleeping. Content is the only thing that works when you're sleeping. So great content significantly and exponentially expands the surface area of attention. I think that is one thing that I've observed. I've observed it a lot in the case of A16Z and First Round Review. In fact, those are the conversations I had with Sajith before joining.

So if you look at First Round Review for example, it has expanded the attention and stature of First Round. I think the second thing is, I would say more fundamental to marketing , called positioning Marketing is all about positioning in any case but for Blume specifically I would say that what content marketing aspires to do is to position Blume as a substantially large venture fund. So I'll give you a couple of examples to explain what I'm saying. One is, whenever I meet someone who has some  understanding of the VC ecosystem, they always tell me, “Oh, Blume is always punching above its weight”, which I actually don't like actually, to be honest. I want Blume to punch at its weight, but I want the weight to be higher.

Why should I keep punching above my weight? Are you telling me I'm a lightweight player? But then I asked them, what is Blume's weight in your mind? Why don't you think I'm punching at my weight? At least, it’s resulted in interesting conversations, but of late I've heard less of that and I'm hoping that through content marketing, what we achieve for Blume is people say, “Hey, Blume is punching at its weight because Blume is now a large fund”. That is one thing that content marketing can do because it can hit scale. So that's the second thing I believe marketing has to do is to stop this notion of punching above its weight but elevate the weight itself.

Ria:

That's a very interesting point and I want to ask you if you feel like the impact of the work you're doing on content is tied to fund performance and what comes out of Blume's work is what bolsters the content or vice versa? And how do you see that relationship playing out? How do you feel like you have the power to influence something like that?

Rohit:

There’s two parts to the answer. First, I believe where content can influence is to attract a certain type of founder to Blume - ones that we believe have higher odds of building successful organizations and taking their orgs towards IPO. 

It can also work at a sector level. For instance, if there are any sectors where we are perceived as under-weight compared to our peers – could be SaaS, fintech, D2C – we can have more content on those sectors to elevate Blume’s stature and positioning. 

For example, if you look at the podcast, it is about building for the long term. This message becomes Blume’s house view. Then essentially, the founder is self-selecting and saying, “Hey, these guys actually believe in long-term building. So if I'm here to make a quick buck and sell a startup at the first hint of a problem to someone and get out, then Blume is not for me ”

Ria:

Or that they have the belief from the stories they've heard that Blume won’t easily want to let go of a founder just because they are floundering.

Rohit:

Exactly. So that's where marketing can influence. There is no way to fully control this, but as the surface area of attention expands, this should kick in at some point in time. I don't think that's kicked in as of now. 

Ria:

My next question was very related to this - Does how Blume's portfolio perform impact how your content may be consumed or viewed?

Rohit:

Yes, a hundred percent. The Blume marketing content, everything is eventually a wrapper on top of the fund performance, and I'm not saying it only from an LP perspective, but also from a founder perspective. Any potential founder would want to get associated only with a winning venture capital fund and the content can amplify the signal of that winning in various ways through podcasts, written content, social media newsletter. The story can be told in a variety of ways. The story can be told to more people as well, but the story exists in the first place. So the fund performance definitely has a hundred percent impact on marketing. If the fund is not performing, then adding a marketing layer on top will not help, at least not in the way we want. 

Ria:

Got it. So we've spoken about what some of the challenges were for you as you started out the role, you are still laying out the roadmap and strategy for the next few years for Blume in terms of content, and marketing. So I'm not going to ask about your challenges and things that you're working on but would love to hear in the time that you've been here so far, what do you feel have been some successes and wins for you?

Rohit:

I would say two things. One is a tactical win. We bifurcated Blume’s newsletter content into two newsletters and then launched it on LinkedIn, which has given disproportionate ROI. Earlier we had one newsletter, In Full Blume, go out to everyone. It had a complex roster of content - updates from portcos, Blume updates, our long-form writing, podcasts, etc. It was very long and not sharply positioned to either friends of Blume, who want to know what’s the latest with Blume and Blumiers or the larger ecosystem who want to read cutting-edge content on startups and VC. This limited its distribution. 

So we had the idea to segregate it into two newsletters. We launched In Full Blume on Substack and Blume Beacon on LinkedIn. Out of our approximately 30 odd thousand subscribers for Blume Beacon, 27,000 are on LinkedIn.

With a 40% open rate ~12,000 people every month are reading our articles, are aware of what we are writing ,they're clicking on those links, and they're coming to the website. This is perhaps the best way to leverage the 90-odd thousand followers we have on LinkedIn. Otherwise you just post and update and you pray that the LinkedIn algo is kind to it and it reaches a big chunk of 90,000 followers. Even if we follow all tips and checklists to make our posts LinkedIn algo-friendly, they will never reach more than a fraction of our follower base. Personally, I'm a huge believer in owning distribution, not only from a marketing point of view, but if you look at even FMCG, or D2C brands – the company that owns their distribution has a disproportionate advantage over a company which does not.

Ria:

What does that look like for a VC fund?

Rohit:

It means that instead of relying on social media platforms for distributing our content, we rely on our own channels to distribute content. Obviously, one is the newsletter, and the other is for example, events. Third is books, fourth is a podcast. So the more you own your distribution, the easier it is to ensure it reaches the right people because people are also self-selecting. So we are sending a message to people who want to hear our message, but telling them at a higher frequency, and the way we want to tell them. It makes the distribution more deterministic and less probabilistic if you think of it from a numbers perspective. Thinking more macro, the podcast has shaped up quite well. We are at a very early stage both in terms of Blume's content marketing engine as well as in terms of the podcast, but I think the early feedback, the early traction has been very encouraging. We have been able to forge good partnerships with people like Spotify who featured us in the top podcasts from the Indian startup ecosystem list. This does two things for us.

One, obviously the founders are reading it and listening to it, and  it provides Karthik and other leaders a new way to distribute what Blume’s thinking and what Blume believes is reflected from someone else’s voice. And that someone else is an influential person, a seasoned founder.  But what it also does for me as a content marketer – if my podcast series is heard by 30 - 40,000 people for example, that gives me a larger platform to reach out to a completely different set of potential guests next year. It's hard to say no to a platform that has got 40,000 people. Like Nikhil Kamath’s podcast. Obviously, he goes into millions of listeners. But if he'll ask someone, Hey, do you want to be on my podcast? Who's going to say no, you want to be seen by five - six lakh people, no one will say no. It gives us a foundational building block for next year. 

Ria:

I'm going to zoom out a little bit and ask you to now look at the forest and not the trees and I'd love to understand in the relatively recent amount of time that you've been here, how has a non-investment role worked out for you? You have a passion and deep knowledge of B2B SaaS.  You create content on that and have somewhat of an equal understanding to many of the investment team members who are working on SaaS. I know there's a lot of collaborations that you plan over there. We’ve seen that when people think about a VC role, they tend to think about investment roles. So you've come in a non-investment role. How do you think these roles add impact to a VC, why should people consider them and how can someone get ready for them?

Rohit:

There are three questions in this, right? One is what's the impact of a non-investment role, right? Second, you're asking why people should choose them? Third is how people should be ready for them.

Ria:

Yeah.

Rohit:

I think the answers are going to be very Blume-specific because I think Blume has a lead in terms of having non-investment roles, which many other funds of similar size don't have. And it's a conscious choice I think, made by the leadership over the years. For the first part of your question, I believe non-investment roles are crucial because they expand the surface area of attention for Blume.  You can use any different word for attention, but what I mean is they increase the odds of fund success.

For an early-stage fund like Blume, it is very challenging obviously to predict which firms will become massive or eventually do an IPO. The noise is very high at that stage. If you think of the entire ecosystem as a funnel, attracting certain kinds of founders, ensuring that they are being set up for success, things like that, that’s what non-investment roles do and that is hugely important for the startups to scale and become great companies. For example, market networks and community. These are all helping at the middle of the funnel. While marketing is more top of the funnel, these are more middle of the funnel and help portfolio companies get set up for success. So I will be surprised if someone says, “Hey, these non-investment roles are not playing a substantial role in the success of portfolio companies. I think they're playing a huge role. But to have that view, you have to have a ringside seat to see what is happening. Because these are not common roles and hence there aren’t great role models or antecedents to look at. These are not commonly understood, clear roles which exist.

So the impact that you can create through any of these roles is substantial. 

I will go back to personal experience. When I joined Sharda University in 2010, there was no framework of an MBA with marketing experience joining a private university. No one like me existed in the entire North Indian education industry for sure. People obviously didn’t consider that a great career move, but now a lot of people exist like that. Almost all good private universities, Ashoka, Krea, Palaksha, Shiv Nadar University, all have –

Ria:

Strong marketing professionals,

Rohit:

Yes, they have marketing professionals who have stellar academic backgrounds and stellar work experience. So I think it's a matter of time. Certain things will only become popular when there's a critical mass. I’m going to go back to the choice between being a marketer vs. an investor, especially since you mentioned having deep knowledge of SaaS. I think it boils down to your personal choice.  A lot of times, especially in India, our career decisions are not based on what we actually are interested in, but A, what is sexy and cool in media and B, what will probably pay me the most dollars –

Ria:

Correct

Rohit:

– which often sets us up for failure. And there are enough and more people whom I know who chose their professions at a young age on just these two criteria and have badly struggled to come to terms with what the profession is actually about. For instance, I know of some youngsters who pursued law because everyone around them was gravitating towards it. Big law firms like Amarchand Mangaldas and Trilegal and AZB pay top-bracket salaries and they were all pulled by that. That plus the glamor of being like the lawyer they saw in Suits. But they have struggled to perform every single day of their professional life.  They didn't realise that practicing law is going to be so rigid and hard work. They don’t like many aspects of being a lawyer and are not pivoting to an MBA or doing something else. This is fine, as career switches at a young age are quite common. But the point I am making is that while they were being swayed by Suits and bucketloads of starting salaries at big law firms they didn’t fully understand if they have the aptitude or the emotional grounding to become a lawyer. Do you have the patience for it? Do you have an interest in it? Right? But I think a lot of it also comes with a certain amount of experience – there is no substitute to making errors and mistakes and learning from your mistakes. 

Ria:

Yeah, I think there's no way to engineer the perfect set of choices. And I think the more we accept that and sort of surrender yourself a little bit, the more you may be open to what's coming your way.

I think the onus comes back to firms like us who have taken a lead in terms of creating these roles and the leadership having signed up for setting up these roles for long-term success, to tell more people that, “hey, this is what the venture roles are including both the investment and non-investment roles. Blume has always been very open about various people's playbooks and creating more awareness about different roles in the VC ecosystem also sits very well with what Blume stands for. The last part of your question is what people should do. I don't think it's any different from what you should do to be successful in general in any role. I would definitely say there are three things. I think one is to have a long-term orientation. By the way, this is also one thing I didn't fully appreciate when Ashish and Karthik told me when I was about to join to think about the long-term.

Ria:

They told me the same in my interview and they said, some things are going to be very slow – you will have to be patient. And I said, what do you mean slow? And then you realise…

Rohit:

Yeah, exactly. I thought I’d understood long-term – I'd worked in Shiv Nadar Foundation for eight years, so it's not that I don't understand long term. But the part about building for the long-term that got added to my mental models is that you may build for a long time say 8 years and may have nothing to show for it until maybe in the ninth year when suddenly things will start moving. So for eight years you’ll be building the foundational blocks. I'm using eight and nine as examples, it could be four or five, but for X number of years you need to build foundational blocks. And in X++ years you will see actual results. But you should be there to realise those fruits when X++ happens. 

Ria:

It comes down to the fact that building a foundation of any sort should excite you.

Rohit:

Yeah, yeah. It's the same as what Peter Thiel says in Zero to One, that if you're a software company, for 10 years, you're going to make limited profit or losses and all your actual windfall will start happening 10 years out. But can you build a business that will sustain for those 10 years? And as a founder, can you sustain for 10 years to realise those benefits or in a ninth year you feel that, okay, I've had enough of this , I'm done. This means you've wasted all the effort

I think that's one thing people should understand, that venture is long-term, long foundational period followed by results.  There is no immediate gratification. Second, obviously you have to be open to learn a completely new industry, which works very differently. And how it works is also evolving very, very rapidly. I thought I understood venture fairly well because of having worked at Sacra . But when I joined Blume I realized that there’s so much more to learn and also a large mental baggage of information that I need to unlearn.  I have learnt a lot by looking at people, how they're working, observing the leaders, observing the investment team, observing the IR team, observing community. There are all these facets to a venture fund, which I was completely unaware of. 

But you will only learn that if you're open to learning. So if you're coming with a mindset that, “Hey, I know marketing, I've done 10 years marketing, I have this playbook, I learned that playbook” you will fail miserably. There is no playbook. I think one is if people have mental playbooks, they should burn those playbooks and then come into venture and come with first principles, which is something, again, we talk a lot at Blume, and it's true. You only have first principles that will guide you in a new industry. None of the playbooks are going to work. I have a performance marketing playbook for example. I spent a lot of time on performance marketing in my marketing career. It'll not work. This is not performance marketing, this is content-based marketing. So I can only do it if I'm curious. So burn the playbooks basically is the second thing. Third thing is, goes back to one of my previous pointers about anyone who comes in, they'll need to come in with a high agency. They'll need to be in the mindset of get shit done.

This reminds me of the anecdote I heard from Ravi Gupta, who is a partner at Sequoia on the Shane Parrish podcast. When he was at Instacart, they used to evaluate potential recruits on having high agency. So they will ask them, “The fridge in one of their warehouses has broken down and so many things are going to rot and they just came to know about it. So what will they do?” He said that everyone who said they would do an analysis of lost sales, reroute delivery vehicles, change the app to push items from another warehouse, etc. were all rejected. The people whom they selected were the people who said we will fix the fridge or get the fridge fixed or find as many new fridges as we can and buy them. 

If something's not working, you can paralyse yourself into an analysis, or you can say  I'll go there and solve it. So I think given the trust and the independence a Venture Fund provides, if you're not a high agency person, I think it's going to be tough for you to find a home and feel comfortable working with people. Everyone else who is high agency, who is sort of working on their own goals, they own charters. If you're not doing that, you'll feel out of place and that will probably make you feel miserable. Yeah. Sorry, long answer to short question.

Ria:

I think it was a great answer because you touched upon a lot of other points that I was also going to ask. So I think, I hope that people listening to this get a really great sense of what it's like to consider VC. And I think what came out from what you have said – and what previous folks who appeared on this also said – is that a role in venture is not the end goal. It is a vehicle on the way to achieving something bigger. It's an instrument that you can use to bring in your passions, your interests, your skills, and make an impact at large, which is what came out from a lot of what you were saying. So I think that's important, particularly in light of the fact that right now, given the uncertainty in the startup ecosystem, a lot more people are looking at venture roles, assuming that there's a certain stability over there.

Not also understanding that as venture capitalists, we also have an obligation to grow or to wait until our companies are also doing well, right? We can't really compensate and grow phenomenally while the companies we've invested in or the ecosystem is at a standstill. So I think people don't realise the really crucial linkages over there, and I think it brings a very different sort of person. So Rohit, thank you so much for this. I want to end on a lighter note to bring in a little bit more of you and you know who you are. So I would love to understand a couple of things. How did you explain this role when you took it up to your family? Did they understand what you do or your parents and would love for you to also share? What are the sort of things that you do outside of work? What are some guilty pleasures for you?

Rohit:

My wife got it quickly, she's a corporate lawyer, and she works with VCs and also she understood broadly what I'm going to do. When it comes to my parents, I realized the importance of Shark Tank. Fortunately or unfortunately, Shark Tank has made startups and equity investing primetime national TV So So my folks said, is a VC firm like Shark Tank?. I said no, it's not like Shark Tank, but the underlying fundamentals are the same. You help a company grow with capital, with your time and with your counsel. But obviously it doesn't work like that. So they understood some bit of it. My father reads a lot, so he obviously reads some of these posts and all which we put out.

Ria:

Very cool

Rohit:

So it wasn't a difficult thing to say. And I think also because I think Blume has always been popular because of all the work which Karthik and Sajith and all of the folks have done over the years, Blume has always been a popular brand in the venture ecosystem. So my wife knew Blume even before I had joined. So I think it's always been very visible with a unique point of view and that was definitely helpful.

Second part of the question, so outside work, I think you all know by now that I read a lot, so I think it's a very boring answer to that question. Once in a while what I do as a guilty pleasure is,  I like to read a lot, but obviously it is difficult to read a lot with two clamoring kids at home and all household things happening. So once in a while, when I have half an hour squeezed in between a commute from office to home, I'll not go home directly, I'll go to a coffee shop just very close to my home. So I'm mentally comfortable. I'm very close to my home. I'll just park myself there, open my iPad, read a book, or read an article, which I could not finish earlier with a coffee, half hour, 45 minutes once in a while, say once a month or twice a month and all. But yeah, I mean that's something I've been doing for a while now. Definitely helps.

Ria:

That's awesome. No, I'm glad. I think it's really important to figure out, number one, what drives you and what you also need to continuously refuel, right? We're so passionate about work and life and everything, and the boundaries blur so much that it's great to hear that you take that time off for yourself. So it's not guilty at all. I mean, it's much needed. Rohit thanks so much for this – loved speaking to you. I think some absolute nuggets came out, some stuff that definitely that I enjoy that made me laugh, and I'm looking forward to putting this out and sharing it with more folks who are looking at both Blume as a venture fund content in VC as a career, and hopefully give them some things to think about as they figure out the next steps. Thanks so much.