It's not very often that you have a venture investor at the peak of his career in Silicon Valley coming back to India. But Hemant Mohapatra did. In India, he's an investor at venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. He's already backed several entrepreneurs and built a reputation for himself as a thoughtful investor. In this episode of the podcast, Mohapatra tells us why he is bullish about the Indian startup ecosystem, the metrics he looks at when evaluating a startup, what red flags he looks for in a pitch deck, what qualities he looks for in early employees and why he always hires for skill rather than passion. 

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About the Guest

Hemant is a Partner with Lightspeed India, a global VC firm. Prior to Lightspeed, he was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a VC firm based in Silicon Valley and an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, and more. He joined a16z after 5 years at Google doing strategic partnership deals and investments. Before a16z and Google, Hemant was an Engineer at AMD, a microprocessor firm. He has a bachelor's and a couple of master's degrees in engineering, computer sciences, and business spread across India, the USA, and the UK.

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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian