Making sense of the madness in the startup world with Sriram Mani

The Rainmatter Podcast

2021 was a banner year for startups. According to Crunchbase, $643 billion of venture money went into startups, compared to $335 billion in 2020 globally. Investors poured $38 billion into Indian startups in 2021 compared to $11.1 billion in 2020, according to Fintrackr. The sheer amount of activity in the world of startups was maddening. 2021 will forever be remembered as the year when venture capital changed. We saw the rise of non-traditional investors like Tiger Global, who play by different rules compared to the vintage investors like Sequoia etc, a record number of unicorns, the highest ever early-stage rounds, a record number of new funds and much more.

Given the sheer amount of activity in the space, we caught up with Sriram Mani from Moneycontrol, who covers the startup and venture funding ecosystem. Sriram has published some brilliant pieces on the evolving startup world. In this conversation, he spoke about:

1. His personal journey and how he got to covering startups and VCs
2. The madness in the Indian startup world
3. How the size of startups deals have changed in India vs globally
4. Tiger Global and their investing style
5. Hottest and coldest spaces in terms of funding
6. The rise of direct investing vs through funds
7. Founder burnout
8. Where's all this money coming from, and what's driving this frenzy
9. Crypto

And a whole lot more. This was a fascinating conversation, given that Sriram spends his entire day looking at this space. You can also follow Sriram on Twitter; he's @manicontrol2020.

We hope you enjoy listening to this as much as we enjoyed recording this.