Aditya Kothari

When I decided to start a VC fund, one of my earliest pitches was to a very well known (and respected) senior VC. After patiently listening to me wax eloquent about why investing in atoms and the frontier is important, he held up his hand and went- 1) You want to start a "Deeptech" fund 2) As a solo GP 3) In India 4) At the earliest stages 5) With a focus on defence, nuclear and space. Which red flag do you not have? It'll be a miracle if you can raise 20-30 crores for this strategy :) A reminder to oneself, that miracles do happen and that one should never let a VC tell you what you can or can't do. A big thank you to our founders, without whom none of this would ever exist 🫡 To our LPs, who saw green where everyone else saw red. To friends and family who believed in us when we couldn't, who pushed us to walk when we could barely crawl, who cheered when there was nothing to see. THANK YOU! It's surreal to feel that this is real and a sobering reminder that this is just Day 1.

31 May 2020: I was on the road, staring at failure at the start of my 40s. 1 June 2020: 6 years back, on this day I started my journey of building Raise (@RaiseTheBarHQ) from zero. The day before, I held a fancy title of Founder, Managing Director and CEO of a financial services company, was an industry pioneer and a leader, built and scaled a product that redefined how India invested online, that made mutual funds popular, and introduced direct mutual funds to the masses. Built a venture that managed few billions dollars and was possibly valued as much as. Next day, I had nothing. No titles, No power. No team. No salary, No stocks. Practically made no money from the venture I gave everything to for 3 years to make it a grand success. Founders like me are emotional fools & immature beings who trust easily and take a word as a word, only to realise one day - the world doesn't work the way one thinks it works. Tried to raise money from venture capital, which I thought would be a easy thing to do but it was not. Almost every VC out there rejected me. Few influential people made raising capital a bit difficult. Many VC & partners who promised term-sheets, stopped responding to emails / chats or just backed out. All of this happened during peak COVID times. I was staring at failure at the start of my 40s. I had no idea what the future would hold for me. Job was never an option, I am too practical and also much of a straight-talker to survive in a corporate life. I had started up 3 times earlier, and was more or less a failure. Somehow gathered courage to start-up again just because giving up again was never an option. Times have changed since then! Today we are a team of ~650+ builders and believers at Raise. Only thing we care about is building the best consumer experiences across all the products we are building - @DhanHQ @ask_fuzz @Upsurge_club @Stratzy_HQ @FilterCoffeeHQ and few more ventures in insurance, wealth and investing that we are building. 5 years back value of everything was Zero. Today for whatever it means, Raise is a unicorn valued at USD 1.2 Bn. At some point, I was offered good money as some sort of settlement which of course I never took. This is why I say that as founders, some of us are emotional fools who keep taking chances even after losing it all! Looking back, even after this crazy journey and tons of luck by my side, I am still more of an emotional & introvert founder fool. We are still in our early days of building and are far from where we want to be. Once again, there's no inspiration or gyan here for anyone. Tu tera dekh le bhai, yahaan mein khud bhagwan ke bharose pe hoon.. I post this just as a reminder to myself - never forget where & how we started from. More importantly to express my gratitude to all those who stood by me and supported us in my tough times - as co-founders, team members, colleagues, believers, supporters, cheerleaders, well wishers, investors, friends and most importantly as our customers. Thank you, I wouldn't have made it till here without you 🙏