Akshat Jain loves to play the devil’s advocate, leading to some of the most interesting conversations during internal brainstorming sessions at Lightbox. He thrives on independent thinking, is always excited to explore new and emerging business models in the consumer sector, and makes a conscious effort to stay away from the hype cycles that are all but too common in the venture capital business. His biggest motivation for investing in startups – making a tangible impact by collaborating with founders to build innovative companies.
Growing up, Akshat was always curious about how businesses work and investing in the stock markets. He actually chose to complete his graduation in finance from Bentley University because he found the college’s trading room inspiring! While in college, he realised that his interest lay in startups, which led him to the world of venture capital. Before heading back home, he landed a gig at venture debt firm Eastward Capital Partners during his last semester. An internship with Lightbox in 2019 ushered him into a career in India’s venture capital industry.
As part of the investment team, Akshat’s mandate is to find founders who are building great companies and assist portfolio founders in overcoming challenges that may arise. He works closely with portfolio teams and supports founders in identifying operational blind spots, facilitating hiring, and sharing data and research-backed insights that may enhance business performance. His approach to investing is defined by the people behind an idea and what drives them to build great companies, whether the product or service is compelling enough to sustain his excitement about working with the founder for a decade, and how well the founder’s narrative and the financial metrics align.
Investing is Akshat’s passion. When he’s not working, he’s often found reading about the cultures and strategies of leading businesses, various investing styles, and what makes investors unique. The preliminary learnings about venture capital early in his career were from reading blogs written by Fred Wilson and Bill Gurley. He’s also a massive sports enthusiast from cricket and football to F1 and loves trying out new board games.
“In the last year, I’ve been working closely with five portfolio companies. The engagements have included identifying a key challenge in a business that was a blindspot for the founders; providing industry benchmarks for another company; and introducing portfolio companies to strategic partners for collaborations. Another interesting project was building Lightbox’s thesis in the utility and discretionary categories, which was showcased at SuperReturn Asia.”
Zeno Health has proven its core business with its hyperlocal, omnichannel retail model. Buoyed by a recent capital infusion and the acquisition of TABLT, the company is well on its path to create mass impact and reimagine healthcare in India with a new distribution model, which it dubs assisted ecommerce, writes Lightbox's Akshat Jain, with inputs from Sandeep Murthy and Varun Varma.
We don’t have to wait till 2030 to see the effects of water shortage. In the last couple of years between Cape Town in 2018 and Chennai in 2019 we have come close to experiencing what this world feels like as water begins to dry up and we can assure you this is not a life you want. Why wait for Day Zero to give us a wakeup call? Let’s talk about what we can do fix it.
As we look to understand the opportunities in the job market, for this discussion we have broken down the labor force into three buckets – White Collar, Grey Collar and Blue Collar. It is estimated that close to 300 million workers (excluding agricultural workers) are in the Blue and Grey collar jobs in India and around 15-20% (50MM) of the workforce in white collar jobs.
This scorecard is an assessment of a business on six key parameters that we believe will determine how a business is able to cope over the next 12-24 months. Do try out the calculator that we have built for you
Neo Banking has been one of the hottest sectors in the startup landscape globally for a few years and lately in India as well. Over $5BN have been poured into this sector in 2019 globally. We put together some thoughts on this trending sector
According to Morgan Stanley, Global Recession in 2020 is a base case scenario. A recession is often defined as a period of decline in economic activity like trade, industrial output and consumer spending. As a recession is inevitable, we looked at the economic and financial downturns and recoveries in the past century to look for similarities with today’s COVID19 crisis.
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