6: Prashant Mehta - Part 6/7 The Million Dollar Instinct of a Venture Capitalist
In this latest edition of TalkCXOLife, Sunayana Nair, Editor CXO Life interviews Prashant Mehta, Partner at Lightbox, a venture capital firm in Mumbai. Now, Prashant is also known as the endurance man. Why you ask? Imagine pedaling from Mumbai to Pune and back, that is about 330km, for 13 hours, and (no don’t run out of breath as yet) then within the same week of pulling off that feat, trekking to the Everest basecamp! Well, that is Prashant Mehta for you ladies and gentlemen! Born in Mumbai, and having spent his growing years between India and Africa, Prashant studied biotechnology in the U.S. but ended up working for a bank, pursuing an MBA from Wharton School after which he headed straight to work for Lehman Brothers which helped him understand the art of investing in emerging markets. He subsequently moved to Silicon Valley to head Yahoo’s commercial operations for emerging markets. In this segment, we try to get into the mind of Prashant Mehta, the venture capitalist as we try and understand the bankable attributes he looks for in a person/team before partnering with them. Prashant shares how for him, instincts play a bigger role in arriving at such a crucial decision apart from weighing the leadership and the business opportunity. He lets his instincts guide him to recognize the possibility of building trust and being able to work together and work through things together in the long term. Which he says is the most crucial aspect of a partnership such as this. We also speak about how pursuing a parallel dimension one is deeply passionate about besides work helps one evolve.