Brotherly disagreements lead to healthy debates, say Investopad founders Arjun and Rohan Malhotra

The challenges of taking up a family business grow manifold for first generation entrepreneurs who have no backing in the form of an already existing business setup.

However, brothers Arjun and Rohan Malhotra, who founded early stage fund Investopad in 2013, think that such a setup offers some advantages as well.

"Growing up together, we tend to disagree on most things, but this turns out to be productive in business as it creates healthy debates," Arjun told ET.

"Small companies are naturally working under a limited bandwidth and hence, they need to get their priorities straight - having a partner you are comfortable with makes that process easier," he adds.

As of now, Investopad has its focus on ventures centred on solving India-centric problems, building relationships with these enterprises so that they can observe their thinking process and entrepreneurial capabilities.

"When we started off, the startup ecosystem was already brimming with indigenous as well as foreign funds which were deploying funds at later stages of a startup - few were focussed on early-stages of a venture," says Rohan. "So we tried to figure out what the pain points were for these entrepreneurs and not having a physical space to work out of turned out to be one of them," he adds.

It was then that the brothers created that space for early-stage startups and entrepreneurs, keeping it open only to a few selective enterprises that had the potential of being investment-worthy in the future.

"What we have tried to foster here is a community of like-minded people who work together and even help each other out, bringing in a more collaborative rather than competitive environment," says Rohan.

"For instance, if there is a company in the telecom space that is creating a new technology, we can bring in people at a CXO level within the telecom industry as informal advisors to them," Arjun adds.

Investopad has now become a layer between the emerging founder ecosystem and seasoned industry leaders, having managed to spread across cities like Delhi, Gurgaon and Bangalore.

"We never wanted to raise money in our own business - we put up that capital ourselves," says Rohan. "We have spent about half a million dollars across three physical locations, that is Gurgaon, Delhi and Bangalore. Above and beyond that, we have also invested personal capital in the companies that we found to be exciting at its early stage. We are fortunate to have a phenomenal investment committee led by Sanjay Kapoor, Rahul Khanna and Kashyap Deorah," explains Arjun.


(Image source Forbes)