All things in place. Yet, What’s the missing piece in startups for fund raising and to scale?

Srinath Mysore Nagendra
2 min readMay 25, 2023

A problem to be solved, good solution , decent to impeccable founders, large TAM, +VE Unit economics, different from competition with or without unique moat, scalable business model, part of an incubator/ accelerator ( some of them ), thought leaders/ corporate honchos as advisors and so on.

The pitch decks are good and some of them are perfect. Started the journey with a young tech entrepreneur in india and a second one outside of india to learn the ropes and both of them have survived past 4/ 5 years.

Have had the the opportunity to interact with excellent founders from India / USA and go through 1000 plus pitch decks last 4 plus years , got an exit and enabled a few startup’s to series A & beyond and still an apprentice & learning from all founders and successful investors/ VCs on a daily basis.

COMMON THREAD amongst majority of founders:

  • passion to solve a problem
  • - wiling to learn and go through the grind and perseverance to succeed
  • - capabilities to start, build. and willing to seek help where they need.

Yet a vast majority can’t raise serious funds beyond initial stage. It’s a different story that. number of startup’s have succumbed even with large. funding unable to SCALE.

My reading and may be I am wrong while the answers are unique to each startup.

The problem – was it really there in the first place. and even if it was there , will customers pay for it again and again?

Are the products / services being built in anticipation of figuring out the paying customers along the journey with certain assumptions ? Running out of the initial money. with no runway left and then realising the assumptions were wrong?

Was the large TAM which was initially projected really there ? Are we too early or too late ? Why is the burn rate increasing even with growth in revenues?

There are no right or wrong answers and has to be discovered as part of the journey. Yes, we can avoid some of the. mistakes by learning from others.

Fail fast, pivot and scale or move on a different journey.

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Srinath Mysore Nagendra

Srinath -Founder/CEO Firmus Ventures Bangalore, India - Management & Technology cons - COO of Champions accelerator which invests in early stage startup’s