Meet the Investor

I have been lucky in many aspects of my life, and I am thankful for the same, lovely wife, parents and a great job as a VC! Its fun to be a VC  – you see the best in technology, meet amazing people and above all you help people realise their dreams! It is a position of power (in a way) and it does feel good – but only when one knows how to control this authority.
I started my career as a VC and then moved to the other side of the table as an entrepreneur. I strongly believe that only an entrepreneur knows how hard it is to build a company, and I would have never realised that until I built one on my own (and man it’s fuc$% hard!). Money is short, no one believes you, and the long sleepless nights – but an entrepreneur will forgo anything to bring his project to life!
It’s a lot of fun too and ever since my I moved back to the seat of a VC, I understand the challenges faced by an entrepreneur even better. I want to help them more as I know the pain it takes to bring an idea to reality.
Entrepreneurs are dreamers and want to change the world – and there are folks who want to exploit this! They exploit the need of entrepreneurs wanting to raise capital to scale their businesses.
Meeting an entrepreneur is the smallest support an investor can give. This is definitely something no VC ever charges for, as it’s his duty! My duty came under question yesterday when I started to see tweets that I was charging to meet entrepreneurs to give advice. I was shocked at first and but upon further investigation with the help from Mike Butcher discovered that an outfit had misguided me.
It started off with a simple dinner invitation to which I willingly accepted, as I want to support the cause to chat with entrepreneurs in an informal environment. The email excerpt is below:

I was very surprised to learn that the event organiser was charging entrepreneurs to attend this event, something that I wasn’t aware of as you can see from the mail above! This is unfair, to the entrepreneur(s) and to the investors who have been invited. I respect the fact that organising an event costs money but then the process should have been transparent and not the way it has been depicted!
I enjoy meeting entrepreneurs, giving advice or connecting them to relevant people (all for free!) to help them grow their respective businesses. Its something I love doing and I’ll continue to do so.
If you want to connect with me, get in touch on Twitter – @ashpuri, LinkedIn or apply to our Open Office at info@episode1.com and I’ll be happy to meet you…. See you soon!