Ashmeet Sidana, Engineering Capital on Technical insights and building a fund for Engineers

The Neon Show

Ashmeet started his career at HP in 1989. He founded Sidana Systems in 1995 (later sold to Doclinx in 1999).He started his stint as a VC at Foundation Capital in 2004. Eventually, he founded Engineering Capital in 2015, which focuses on investing in Tech startups, based on Technical insights. He is one of the few VCs to have been to the base of Mount Everest. In this podcast, he also shares his experience of climbing mountains, one step at a time.Engineering Capital is based in the US and majorly in the San Fransico Bay area, some of its notable portfolio companies are Robust Intelligence, Concentrix, and vFunction among others.In this podcast, Ashmeet shares his thesis of investing in Tech Startups and the approach he follows while evaluating them.Notes - 01:24 - His journey from growing up in Rural India to becoming a VC dedicated to Engineers02:43 - Purpose of starting a fund focussed on engineers04:04 - Difference between Market insight, Technical insight & Consumer insight06:43 - Investing in SignalFx based on its use case - “Enabling cloud-based monitoring and analytics.”08:18 - Investing in Robust Intelligence based on its use case - “Solving the issue of User Data contamination.”10:51 - Investing in vFunction based on its use case - “Allows users to take any legacy applications and break them into micro-services & benefit from the cloud.”12:35 - Is Technical insight alone a sufficient reason for a VC to back a Tech Startup?15:49 - Making an early seed-investment in Azure Power (India) as an Angel Investor20:50 - His perspective and view-point on Postman & potential of Tech Startups in India24:55 - Learnings about Market size with future entrepreneurs in B-schools29:36 - “Even though Venture Capital attracts the brightest and smartest minds all over the world, but still most VCs are not successful.”36:12 - “The magic of making a startup successful is to focus on an incredibly narrow problem, that has a wide application.”

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