René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Had a fully, yet excited day in Mumbai yesterday. Early morning at 8.30 am (and that's really very early for India) I met up with my friend Sasha Mirchandani from Blue Run Ventures and Amit Grover from Onida. Sasha is the founder of MumbaiAngels which I joined a few months ago, Amit is with highest efficiency and dedication taking care of operational matters with approximately 70 angel investors by now. Sometimes this seems to me like the challenge herding cats ;-)

We had an inspiring peer-2-peer exchange with respect to best practises on the entire value chain of creating deal-flow to closing a deal. In the context of funding I understood that some angel investors have become a bit hesitant since their stock-portfolios in India got destroyed whilst uncertainty has started to cover the entire economy. At the same time, as Google-founder Sergey Brin put it recently, "Scarcity creates Clarity. In my interpretation also in the sense that certain business ideas will thrive in a rather downturn economy as they help companies consolidate their act through cost savings when management attention is not just obsessively concerned with hyper-growth.

In the afternoon, like a year and two ago, I joined an invitation by INSEAD for its "globalization course" for a Danish Business School. The participants were all senior executives in Denmark who are undergoing an MBA-training. Three groups of companies presented to us their "India Business Concept" and we were supposed to give constructive feedback and share our experience on "founding and running a business in India".

Between the breaks, us panelists exchanged our current state of affairs when it's no point denying that we are in a recession:

1. One young entrepreneur told the story from above from the MumbaiAngels from her perspective (unrelated to MumbaiAngels, yet to investors in general): In spite of a signed MoU, the investors backed out in the last minute.
2. The head of a globally active petrol retail company lost a higher double digit figure of his revenues when the oil price hit US$ 140 per barrel a few months ago. Reason: His company is privately run and therefore fully exposed to the price fluctuations it has to pass on to the customers while the majority of petrol-retail in India is state-run and heavily subsidized. In the meanwhile the price has dropped and the company's revenue recovered. 
3. The India-responsible for a luxury clothing brand reported that two months ago, customer inflow into his stores has become incredibly lame. Understood that this sector gets hit first, as it is certainly not somebody's primary concern in uncertainty to spend EUR 1.800 on a new suit.

All in all quite eye-opening stories I wanted to share here, especially as they come from so many different angles: investment, consumption, government-spending where everything is related/looped to everything and we practically have the entire macroeconomic equation in front of us. Although one where the maths have recently become a bit shaky.