Stellaris Venture Partners has stayed the path of backing with deep conviction and discipline. But is there a flip side?
Alok Goyal is enterprising enough to make a candid confession. “This (venture investment) is a business of making mistakes,” reckons the seasoned venture capitalist. Out of every 10 bets that we take, he continues, probably one or two will work. “So there is an 80-90 percent mistake rate in decision making,” says the funder who started his investment journey with Helion Ventures, where he led enterprise software and services investments. In 2017, Goyal teamed up with his former Helion colleagues Ritesh Banglani and Rahul Chowdhri to start Stellaris Venture Partners, an early-stage and sector-agnostic venture capital fund. “We believe that most of the outsized money in venture is made in contrarian bets,” underlines the former chief operating officer of SAP India.