About
The thesis.
Why otherwise.
Most founder support in India was built for one kind of founder: the one whose company already legibly resembles a fundable company. The deck looks right. The team looks right. The city looks right. Capital, advisors, and accelerators have aligned around this founder for a decade, and they should — that founder is real and the work being done with them is good.
We are not building for that founder. We are building for the founder solving a problem the market has not yet priced in, in a place that is not on the map of where the next companies are supposed to come from. The founder whose company will take five years to look obvious. The founder for whom an accelerator's twelve-week sprint is the wrong unit of time.
The way to serve that founder is not to scale a program. It is to concentrate. Twelve ventures a year. Six months each. One partner in the room every week. The work is not interchangeable, the relationships are not transactional, and the calendar of a TOV partner is shaped by the calendars of twelve companies. Nothing more.
We come at this from inside the Northeast and from across the broader Indian startup machine. Both views were necessary to see what was missing. The firm exists to close that gap, one venture at a time.
What concentration means.
We are not better at the same thing as an accelerator. We are doing a different thing. The shape of the work is the difference.
Traditional accelerator
- 60+ ventures per cohort
- 12-week program
- One-to-many curriculum
- Demo day at the end
- Founders graduate
The Otherwise Ventures
- 12 ventures per year; 6-month engagement each
- One-to-one partnership
- No demo day; the company is the deliverable
- You stay a partner for as long as a partner is useful
Where we sit.
We are based across Guwahati, Ahmedabad, and Kolkata, and we travel to where the company is. The Northeast is the firm's centre of gravity — three of the four founders are based here, and the regional ventures we serve cannot be served by a generalist firm based out of Bangalore.
The Otherwise Ventures Pvt Ltd has a standing services agreement with theNortheast.xyz, a Section 8 non-profit working on ecosystem infrastructure across the eight states. The agreement is disclosed on our colophon.