Kalaari’s Kola: Right now, every entrepreneur in India thinks that getting VC funding somehow is the right step. But it may not be the right step. A VC-model works in a certain way. VCs expect extraordinary returns and everything else is centred around that. That’s really where the friction happens.

When a company is growing great, everybody is happy. But when it stops growing as much, then everyone is in the kitchen to figure out what went wrong. And if the entrepreneur and the investor don’t have the maturity to handle such critical conversations, it can get hard.

I want to tell entrepreneurs to be judicious with the money they raise and when they raise it. When you’re raising money, you must know that it comes with a certain expectation. You can’t be signing up for a Formula One car and wanting to drive slow.

When you have an angel-managed board, it’s very nurturing and engaged, but when you bring hedge funds on board, they work differently. The maturity they expect from a company is different and often times companies are not prepared for that. If you have raised millions of dollars, but you still can’t get a board deck out on time or can’t close your books—and this happens really—it’s not done.

Blume Venture’s Reddy: When you are dealing with multiple investors, each of them has a different set of expectations. For angel investor, typically getting four to five times of their money as returns is fine. But that may be grossly insufficient for a VC. At every round the stakeholders change, the expectations change, and then sometimes the founder is not clever enough to separate those expectations.