Amit Somani – The Same Analysis Won’t Apply Every Time

BIO: Amit Somani is managing partner at Prime Venture Partners (PVP), a Bangalore-based, early-stage fund. For 20 years before this, he held leadership roles at Makemytrip (NASDAQ: MMYT), Google, IBM Silicon Valley Labs, and IBM Research. STORY: Amit’s company came across this company that had a great product but didn’t have a business model. Amit’s company decided to back it anyway. It didn’t go well. A few years later, they came across another company with a great product and a great team but, again, no business model. Having lost the first time, they decided not to back the second company. It went on to become a unicorn in three years. LEARNING: The same kind of analysis or rigor will not apply every time you’re investing. Don’t just extrapolate from a past pattern. Have repeatability in your investing process.   “You can’t borrow conviction; you have to get your own conviction because it’s subjective.”Amit Somani Guest profilehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/thesomani/ (Amit Somani) is managing partner at https://primevp.in/ (Prime Venture Partners (PVP)), a Bangalore-based, early-stage fund. For 20 years prior to this, he held leadership roles at Makemytrip (NASDAQ: MMYT), Google, IBM Silicon Valley Labs, and IBM Research. Amit was part of the leadership team that took Makemytrip public on NASDAQ in 2010. He was also the head of various teams focusing on search, mobile, and advertisement products at Google. One of his products, the search-based keyword tool, even won the Google Founder’s Award. Prior to his role at Google, he was the Director for the Enterprise Search and Discovery business at IBM San Jose, California. Worst investment everAmit’s company was looking at a great company around 2015/16. It had a phenomenal product in the women’s health space. They did their usual due diligence, spoke to the entrepreneur, and decided to back the company. However, one thing was missing, which was the lack of a viable business model. They decided it didn’t matter as long as the company was building somet