Favcy 1st Cheque

Dear Reader, the biggest driver behind action is motivation. My 5 year old is really fussy about doing his homework. So I thought let me motivate him with some sweets, toys, some more tab time maybe. Turned out, the only thing that seems to motivate him to sit down and study is 10 minutes of one-on-one playtime with me. Awwww 

The point that I am trying to make here is that we all get motivated due to different reasons. Same goes with angel investing. We now have some 1000+ investors in our 1stCheque network (yaaaaay!) and reasons motivating them to invest are quite varied. Some are driven purely by high returns while for some it's genuinely a way to give back to the ecosystem.

Have you found your reason to angel invest yet? Apparently your choices will be influenced as a result of this realisation.

This week in our Angel Bytes section, Khushdeep Sethi spoke to Santosh Ankola, who is a 1stCheque investor, and explored his reasons for investing in startups. Santosh comes from a technology background and is based out of the US. Read on to see if you relate to his thesis.

Dear Reader, Art and collectibles seem to be in for a revolution and everybody from the Sotheby's to Mark Cuban are wanting to be a part of it. Basically, every digital piece of content ever created can be converted to an NFT and then traded. 

For example - Jack Dorsey, Twitter's founder and CEO, auctioned his first ever tweet as an NFT. It was originally uploaded on March 21 of 2006. The tweet was bought using ether cryptocurrency and had a final bid of $2.9 million. This basically means a great way for digital content creators (of course only the ones worth their salt) to make a lot of money.

How I see NFTs - its art/collectible that you pay tons of money to acquire but can’t hang on your walls. Uh oh. Well, but then it looks like that’s just me. Because the world seems to be going gaga over selling and buying NFTs (that’s non-fungible tokens btw) and these seem to be going mainstream.

Alright. When do you consider something to be mainstream? When it's on the front page of Times of India? Check. Or when none other than Amitabh Bachchan is endorsing it. Also check. Say whaaat?

Dear Reader, fintech is the talk of the town - what with two big fintech players announcing their p2p platforms in the last week. However, we all know, it's easy to lend and hard (very hard) to collect. I was speaking to a conventional business owner and an avid investor earlier this week. He was heavily invested in the p2p lending space up until mid-2020. 

Post which he pointed out, the domain largely collapsed. The reasons are fairly easy to figure out - lockdowns caused job losses for the average borrower, leading to higher NPAs, collections also became difficult again owing to the lockdowns, lenders suffered losses and eventually pulled out or didn’t reinvest.
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One of the women tailors that I work with as part of my social venture told me all about her husband’s joblessness who is a loan collection agent. Lockdowns were hard on them - while people are defaulting big time, it's almost impossible to collect over the phone. She said these days, nobody calls or responds to the phone to pay the loan.

In our Short Take section this week, we give you a sneak peak into the 'Buy Now Pay Later' scenario in India. Do you think this is a bubble and is gonna burst soon?

Dear Reader, you must have heard that earlier this week Blu Learning raised their pre-seed round from the likes of Lightspeed, Titan Capital and 2am Ventures. 

​However, what I want to highlight here is the other angels who participated in this round - at a much smaller ticket size as compared to the VCs but certainly at the same terms. One of the angels is the 23 year old founder of 6 months old startup Bima-pe, Rahul Mathur.

How, you should ask, did a young in-experienced angel investor (by his own admission this was only his 2nd startup investment) get a position on the cap table alongside the biggies. The answer is - the value he is bringing on to the table is perhaps much greater than just capital. 
There’s a term doing the rounds these days to describe these value angels - Operator Angels.

Who are Operator Angels and why are they a rising tribe? In our Favcy Review section this week, Pranavharan unravels the world of Operator Angels. Do give it a read if you are aspiring to have a career in VC or simply want to grow your clout as an angel investor.
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In our Short Take section, we look at the ghost orders that a lot of people are receiving from Meesho resellers.
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Want to know how does an angel investor think while assessing deals or how do they make their investment decisions? Angel Bytes brings to you this week excerpts from our interview with Kaushik Bagchi, VP at ASG Technologies  who is an investor on our 1stCheque network.

Dear Reader, the Olympics euphoria is definitely around us - especially with the medal in hockey after four decades.

​We have a chance to match or even beat the highest ever medal tally of six medals from 2016. However, a lot of us still wonder/ponder/debate on the reasons behind the below table 👇

While the debate on the reasons behind a poor medal tally is for another day, one thing is certain - if India has to be in the race to be a SuperPower 'ever', this tally has to definitely change. And we have hope with our athletes now going into the games with the winning attitude and not settling for anything lesser than the best.