On Friday, August 17, 2007, the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club and the Emerging Markets Club hosted Balaji Srinivas on campus. Srinivas is currently a Managing Partner, South Asia, with Aureos Capital and operates from their Bangalore office.

Some excerpts from his interaction with the Club members:

How does one identify investment opportunities?
A very insightful comment Srinivas made was about the fact that while economics were the primary drivers for most deals in the US, there are a lot of other factors proximate to deals in India – issues related to legal structures, regulation, cultural and social mores and constraints.
Srinivas has been in the industry for a long time, so a network exists that he can tap into for information about interesting developments. There are also more formal channels like banks and financial institutions that source this information.

To buy or not to buy?
Srinivas next organised a very interesting exercise. He held forth on facts from a situation he was facing currently – it was an investment opportunity that he was considering. He disguised the facts of the case, but brought forth the essence, and then asked all the available students what they would do if they were in his shoes. It was a role playing exercise, with Srinivas playing the entrepreneur, and the students playing the VC firm having to decide if they would go ahead with the opportunity or not. This was decidedly the most interesting part of the whole session, and made it very interesting for the audience.

Lessons learnt
Given Srinivas’ constant quest for satisfaction in his job, that has led him along a whole multitude of industries to the point where he is now playing the role of starting one of them; he is very keen to provide career related guidance and advice to interested students. The EVC and EMC Clubs have promised to invite him on campus again, to talk about this issue that is dear to his heart.

About the Speaker
Prior to joining Aureos, Srinivas spent one year with Skyzen Capital, where his team completed three transactions.  Between 2000-03, Srinivas was Vice President for The Carlyle Group’s investments in India, and he established the India branch of the Carlyle Asia Venture Fund. During this time his investments included Worldzen, Usha Communications and Sharekhan.

Before joining Carlyle, Srinivas was an Associate Director at Intel Corporation where he established the India Technology division. At Intel, he led investments in technology SMEs, including Sasken Software, Bharti Telespatial and Persistent Software. Before joining Intel, he spent eight years with Sterling Holiday Resorts and BPL Mobile Communications in their respective corporate finance divisions. He began his career with Tata Steel as a financial accountant.
Srinivas is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, India and has a BSc. in Commerce from the University of Madras, India.

About the Company
Aureos is a broad based fund looking at emerging opportunities that use relatively new business models. It is not a fund that does breakthrough technology funding, but primarily funds only established business models. Aureos has made three investments so far, one of them being Accutest, Mumbai which is a full service clinical research organisation that conducts clinical trials. Aureos does not differentiate based on sectors, but is investing in the India growth story right now. They also tend to constrain themselves to amounts of less than 10 million dollars in a single investment. This translates to an investment pool of roughly 10-12 companies in their portfolio.