{"id":5331,"date":"2022-09-12T06:02:41","date_gmt":"2022-09-12T06:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businessner.com\/?p=5331"},"modified":"2022-09-12T06:02:41","modified_gmt":"2022-09-12T06:02:41","slug":"balancing-the-scale-through-venture-investing-with-dhiren-chatlani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businessner.com\/balancing-the-scale-through-venture-investing-with-dhiren-chatlani\/","title":{"rendered":"Balancing the Scale through Venture Investing with Dhiren Chatlani"},"content":{"rendered":"
When the average consumer thinks about finance and technology, what often comes to mind is an image of streaming cash flows. Isn\u2019t that every venture capitalist\u2019s and entrepreneur\u2019s dream?<\/span><\/p>\n What people often don\u2019t see between the crevasses of venture investing, is a <\/span>long<\/i><\/b> game of patience and impeccable intuition that\u2019s only built from years of experience and observation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While it\u2019s tempting to associate buzzwords like fintech with some glamorous and exclusive endeavor, we shouldn\u2019t readily confuse trendy language with steady revolutions.<\/span><\/p>\n For one investor, the two most crucial components of investing are observations and patterns. As a young child, <\/span>Dhiren Chatlani<\/span><\/a> bore witness to several different cultures and environments; encountered dreamers like himself, and those that were just lucky to pay their rents on time. Though profitability is essential to any venture, the motivation behind the profit can drastically differ from one investor to another.<\/span><\/p>\n With Dhiren, we discussed the positive impact investing can have on societies, as well as dove into his rather unique definition of success.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: What inspired you as a child?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Dhiren: <\/b>I grew up having a blend of Indian and Spanish culture from my parents. One of the beautiful things is that each location is very particular, and sometimes you get to have your own language or dialect. Most of my time, I spent with my family in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n My enjoyment came from spending time observing different people’s cultural behaviors and trying to find opportunities within that. For me, the United States was always the \u201choly grail\u201d of opportunities. Since I was 10 years old, I had an interest in entrepreneurship; anything from how technology applied to sports, to general distribution and online commerce. I think the most discerning thing was drawing inspiration from observing people and trying to recognize patterns and always looking for opportunities in that.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: Can you tell us the process of getting into venture investing?<\/b><\/p>\n Dhiren<\/b>: I joined <\/span>Actyus<\/span><\/a>, the venture fund I\u2019m at now, after working for my startup of four years in the sharing economy space. I ended up spending some time in the U.S, Mexico as well as in Spain and India. After encountering people from different sides of the world, I think it\u2019s fair to say that a significant percentage of people in the world have to work in order to survive. Personally, my family struggled with finances at certain times, and that\u2019s how I understood the necessity of building capital through entrepreneurship, or other means.<\/span><\/p>\n Interviewer: Can you elaborate on your understanding of insurance, and how your first company prompted these ideas?<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I drew inspiration from the Airbnb model when it came out, thinking it made a lot of sense and I thought, “Why can’t we apply this to other sectors, for example, product rentals?”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Some people can’t afford to rent their room because there\u2019s not enough space in their house. The product rental model would mean you could make money by renting expensive gear, like an expensive camera or an expensive bicycle for a day or a week, so people could try it and have access to different products.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m intrigued by the concept of guaranteed income. Unfortunately, most governments don\u2019t have the liquidity to offer such services. This was my way of trying to accelerate guaranteed income, by allowing people to make $1,000 to $2,000 a month from what they had at home, thereby, reducing the need to work as much, or at least afford to be pickier about where they worked. This could incentivize people to have more time to find their passions and even become more productive and engaged in their careers.<\/span><\/p>\n That’s more or less what I did. Then I worked at a VC firm called Plug and Play which had invested in my startup, and we went through the accelerator program in Spain. I spent nearly two years there working on InsurTech, FinTech, and a little bit in HealthTech, learning mainly about the Latin American market. There I started to open my mind to insurance and its value.<\/span><\/p>\n Through my startup, we had to deal with insurance companies and build a product from scratch. Because no one wanted to insure a random person without any form of collateral we proposed a different type of solution. The key is you aggregate and store data from different and non-standardized sources\u2014which is now it’s called KYC (Know Your Customer).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n After spending a couple of years working with more basic SaaS companies, I wanted to pivot and go into something more related to deep tech, where I saw a huge opportunity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The main issue here is that investors don’t tend to be that patient. For deep tech to really manifest itself, takes around 15-20 years. The way venture capital firms are structured, their investments usually fall in a ten-year span. For around a year, I worked at GoHub, a deep tech fund focused on the water sector. Then I got this opportunity to join Actyus, which was verticalized in FinTech in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I realized one of my weaknesses pertained to not having a strong, specific financial background; I had always been a generalist. I knew about FinTech and InsurTech, but going into the nitty gritty angles is something that I wanted to strengthen. I think this was my opportunity to do so, as well as to work with top-notch entrepreneurs and executives.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>Interviewer: One of your pillars is financial inclusion, which is quite contrary to traditional venture investing. How do you plan to bridge the gap between people that don’t have access to that much capital and innovation?<\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>Dhiren: <\/b>I always thought FinTech was a dark world. I think as many economists, and even several US presidents have said, credit is the lifeblood of any society. Economically speaking, 70% to 80% of the world is still in development. These people need access to capital in order to get a mortgage, buy a car to work, and so on.<\/span><\/p>\n The issue is that since they’re not bank regulars, there’s not enough data on them. Banks don’t tend to lend to these types of end users. That\u2019s where fintech can become very helpful. I’ll give you an example, we invested in a company called <\/span>Boom Pay<\/span><\/a>, which is trying to help people report their rental payments, as a form of building credit. They\u2019re helping people who might not have a credit history to start building one. This is the first step and after, adding layers of embedded finance to cover certain needs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n My philosophy as it pertains to financially inclusive investments is investing in products and services that banks might not be interested in funding and helping those people develop them and profit from them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n