Kanwaljit Singh Founder and Managing Partner at Fireside Ventures
Image: Vikas Chandra Pureti for Forbes India
Early-stage investor Kanwaljit Singh is credited with scaling-up dozens of new-age consumer startups over the past seven years. With unconventional strategies, the ‘kingmaker’, as Singh is fondly called, has bucked the trend and bet on digital brands to redefine the direct-to-consumer (D2C) landscape in the country.
“There was a way to disrupt how brands were built. But there was no real knowledge on the ground about how to do it. My conviction was we can build great brands, establish playbooks to help these companies succeed, and demonstrate that an early-stage fund can be built around this theme,” the founder and manging partner of Fireside Ventures says in a recent interview on Forbes India Pathbreakers.
In a free-wheeling conversation, Singh talks about why D2C is an interesting opportunity for investors and how Indian entrepreneurs can leverage this medium to build iconic global brands in the coming decade. Edited excerpts:
The kingmaker: ‘Entrepreneurs are the real heroes’
I think there is a very strong belief, at least for me, that the real heroes and heroines of our industry are the entrepreneurs. As investors, sometimes we get a little carried away by our own importance. I’ve always believed that our role is to be behind the scenes: How can we help entrepreneurs succeed? That is the ultimate success. I joke about kingmaker to queenmaker because it’s been a great journey for us at Fireside; 45 percent of our founders are women. It’s been a fantastic experience so far.
The idea of Fireside was born on the hypothesis that there is a market and there is a consumer, but there are not enough brands to consume. So, what will it take for these brands to come up and how can they be built into iconic brands? The experimentation and the practical implementation took place over the last 10 years.
Building iconic brands: ‘D2C is an interesting opportunity’
The opportunity in India is unique. So, what was really the trigger? This wave of what we call ‘digital-first’ brands really got impacted by the digital infrastructure that was built. It was a little bit of what came first. Amazon, Flipkart, and then of course Google, Meta and Instagram were the building blocks that enabled entrepreneurs in those early days to think about saying, ‘can we build brands using digital-first as the playbook?’ So, that was the start of the journey.
The business model has changed, the way you build the entire story with the consumer has changed, the channels and the media have changed. But the fundamental truth is you always start with the insight or understanding of where that opportunity lies. That’s where digital-first becomes a very interesting opportunity to engage consumers. The most interesting thing is that there are thousands and thousands of these opportunities. What you didn’t even believe was possible, say a few years ago, is now an interesting new exciting business that has already been launched and is successful.
D2C theme: ‘A real opportunity for investors’
When I started looking at it through an investor’s lens, what became very clear was that this opportunity was real. There was a consumer, there was a way to disrupt how brands were built. But there was no real knowledge on the ground about how to do it. My conviction was, not only can we build great brands, we need to establish best practices or playbooks to help these companies succeed. The platform of Fireside was born out of this belief that we can create very interesting, iconic brands and we can demonstrate that an early-stage fund can be built around this theme.
We believe that if you have the right consumer insight, the right product, and if you are executing it as per plan, you can still build many, many hundreds, if not thousands of brands in this country. There is so much opportunity.
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David vs Goliath: ‘A startup’s biggest strength is its fleet-footedness’
So, I would actually flip it and say that the biggest strength for a startup is in its fleet- footedness. In fact, one of the approaches that is often used is ‘launch fast, fail fast’. The processes, the systems, and the way large companies are organised makes it very difficult for them to follow this.
The internal organisational dynamics in a large company make it very difficult to launch new products, new brands, new categories. Their sales system will have such a large basket to sell, that putting one little thing on top of that will be a very, very tough proposition. One of the things we have seen as a trend, is that most of these large multinationals, large Indian consumer companies are becoming more acquisitive once a company has reached a certain size. Marico, Unilever are some examples.
Future trends: ‘Huge headroom to build global brands in India’
I’m really excited and am trying to figure out how can we build brands from India for the world. So, we have very few examples of iconic brands that have gone global. We have some very early successes in our portfolio.
Digital is still a great way to build a global brand. So today, apart from Amazon, which is a juggernaut, there are more and more platforms where you can do the product-market fit testing of the consumer. The good news is that India is starting to get acknowledged as an important country or an important region where interesting brands can be adopted in a global context.
We have seen some very early and beautiful signs of things like ayurveda and yoga. We are seeing a lot of work happening in the area of home decor and handmade artisanal products, even on the commodity side, things like tea. There is a huge headroom and hopefully one day we will see brands from India all over the world and we will be proud of them.