Jagdeep Singh, co-founder and CEO of Rhoda, shares his insights on raising a $450M Series A round and attracting investors.
Jagdeep Singh, co-founder and CEO of Rhoda, shares his insights on raising a $450M Series A round and attracting investors. He also discusses key strategies for building a successful startup and the differences between private and public companies.
Uh, the first is, you have to find a large unsolved problem. I mean, you you can't build a great company in a small space, right? So, it's got to be a big problem. And you define big by how many people have that problem times how much they're willing to pay uh, per unit for that for the solution, right? So, it's got to be a big problem. But, the second thing you need is you need it to be uh, you need to have a differentiated solution. You need to solve that problem in a way that has not been solved and not been done before. Now, if it's a big unsolved problem, then, you know, uh, uh, chances are it's been looked at by others because it's a big problem. Uh, and then the question becomes why have others not solved it? Uh, and you have to be able to do a lot of research and understand why previous approaches haven't worked. You got to come up with a novel approach that's different that does
solve the problem. Uh, and that that's key cuz if it's not differentiated, then you're kind of in a commodity business. And commodity businesses are just aren't fun cuz there's a lot of pricing pressure, the margins are low, you can't really reinvest in R&D, and so on. So, uh, the second key thing is a differentiated solution. The third key thing, obviously, goes without saying, uh, and this is kind of almost a cliché, but you really do need a world-class team, right? You need people who are the best at what they do, and you really don't want to settle there, especially with your co-founders. You really want to get people that are in really deep in the domain, that have the IQ points, uh, that have the people skills, ideally, uh, and have the history of getting things done, right? Getting results, not just talking, right? And the last thing that I look for in my companies, and this
is just this is not required for for every company, but for the kind of companies that I do, which tend to be more deep tech companies, I look for early customer validation, right? Before we even uh, spend a dime on on on building anything, uh, I like to engage with with the potential customers and say, "Look, here's what we're thinking. Here's what we see as your problem. Here's how we think we can solve it. Is this compelling to you?" Uh, and if they say if they say, you know, "Yeah, it's it's interesting. Come back when you have a product." Uh, Uh, that actually is not a good answer. The answer I want to hear is is uh uh well, this is so compelling that we want to help you get this to market. What can we do to help you make this thing real? That's when you know you got something interesting. And that's when you kind of you know, actually go off and do it. So, those are the four things
I look for. You look at um you know, my startups uh they've all to one extent or the other had those four things in common. So, I've been doing a lot of different spaces, as you know, you know, from telecom equipment to uh you know, solid-state batteries uh and now uh this um you know, AI-driven uh you know, robotics um uh you know, project uh but um the common things are with those four things. They all have attacked uh what I've seen to be really big on soft problems. They've all had very novel differentiated technical solutions. Uh they've had just exceptional teams. And in every one of them we got early customer validation uh to give ourselves comfort that we're solving a a real problem that needs solving.