Build local, sell global, and wait twelve years

Doraswamy's first correction is semantic and it costs money: SaaS is not deep tech, which is why Ideaspring spent eight years funding what it calls product innovation — a bucket wide enough for both — and why he rates the government's new deep-tech definition so highly, since it turns on whether a rival would need two to three years to recreate what you built. His second correction is aimed at his own fund. Fund one was structured seven plus one plus one; he now says this asset class in India needs twelve years, and calls the shorter life the rookie mistake of a first-time fund manager. The arithmetic behind that caution is the part founders should copy down: 18 million Indian enterprises, roughly 65,000 of them worth a sales call, and ₹40–50 crore of Indian software revenue dividing down to five or six million dollars — so build local, sell global, and he would be nervous funding any B2B company that intends to sell only at home. The operating rules follow from there. Positioning, not the product, decides the financial outcome, and fund two enforces that with far more rigour than fund one did. The first million dollars of revenue has to be sold by a founder, which is why he prefers companies with two or three. Deals under $15,000 close inside a quarter; six-figure ones want a US logo before they want your India logos. And fund one's own scorecard — six exits from sixteen companies, nothing shut down, ₹120 crore deployed, 45% already returned — is a record he refuses to call failure while knowing it will be judged on multiples alone.