Sramana Mitra: Our focus is on the early stage. Let’s double-click down on your early-stage work. How do you define early-stage?

Dheeraj Pandey: I don’t believe in spray-and-pray. I get to know someone over five to seven meetings and sometimes tenacity helps as well. They must succeed if they’re tenacious. In the world of sales, I basically call it fearless. Sometimes we would use the word shameless. You cannot have shame if you’re asking for something. We do Series A and Series B as well. We started out with biotech and life sciences, but we’re looking at software more and more. It’s across geographies – US and Bangalore.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some examples of your favorite investments, and the story behind that. It sounds like it’s mostly from your network of people whom you’ve worked with.

Dheeraj Pandey: On the growth side, we’ve written some large checks. I do have a bias for growth including my CIO. There, it was just doubling down on things that we really believe in. You don’t get as many opportunities in growth anyway even though we’ve looked at a couple of exchanges where you can go into the private growth side as well.

Companies in the space of healthcare analytics and how they’re applying the principles of Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (MAYA). This is one of the principles that came from a very famous American designer. His name is Raymond Loewy. He talks about the challenge of any innovation and how you bring something that’s really advanced. It doesn’t have social acceptance because people don’t like revolutions but you can give them something that’s evolutionary. Then you can, over time, disrupt something.

This idea of MAYA is applicable to pretty much anything that I’ve invested in. We have invested in companies at scale which manage cap tables for tens of thousands of startups. We have invested in Constant Glucose Monitoring companies. We have invested in biotech doing new drug discoveries.

We have looked at a lot of SaaS as well and we’ve invested in quite a bit of SaaS of late in the last couple of years. A lot of it is around design. How do they express themselves through design? Design is one way that endears your idea to people. I’ve been biased towards companies that have expressed their ideas through good design. Also, companies that have a plan B.

Sramana Mitra: What is an example in biotech or healthcare where design has been a very significant driver of adoption?

Dheeraj Pandey: For example this constant glucose monitoring company. I’ve used them as well just because I’m curious about my own blood sugar. There is a little half-inch pin that pierces your skin. It’s somewhat painful. It only does one thing. Then this company is trying to do this topically with this nanotechnology. It’s like a watch.

Now you have to think really hard about what else would people like to do. Could this get into cholesterol monitoring? It’s multi-purpose as well. I had an Oura ring for a long time. I gave it to my son. I would have loved to invest in Oura early on. There’s a lot going on in that space that is going to come down to design and reducing friction.