The Phirozsil Ventures team, our council, and advisory board comprises of individuals with eminent educational backgrounds and remarkable career successes. We are immensely grateful for our collective experiences, our capabilities, and our relationships. These have crafted us and allow us to make positive impacts. Yet, we practice and preach simplicity.
The sections below provide a glimpse into our guiding principles.
How we work
Our focus and mission are – To Grow Meaningful Businesses. We assist in commercializing great technologies with lasting significance.
We foster winners. We are enablers. We are in the company-building business, not the “deal” or “capital” business. We have a history of leveraging relationships to build phenomenal teams, attract partners, and customers, and then–together–build large, meaningful businesses.
We are active partners who do everything we can for our companies and have not forgotten how to hustle. We get our hands dirty. Just as we did when we started our ventures from skimpy beginnings.
We opinion on and help refine business approaches. We love working together to turn something good into something great.
We are prudent. We keep risks in clear sight and ensure they remain manageable. We leverage our upside through calculated risk-taking – we are believers of the risk-reward equation. We transform liabilities so they work as assets. When things are not good enough, we get outside the box and help change the rules.
Every business goes through pivotal moments such as cave-in on a term or lose a customer, retire a product-line, or keep it in the market, make a key hiring decision, etc. We value our experiences as we have made most of these mistakes before and learned from them. Now, we help or find someone in our portfolio who can help you think through what to do.
Direct and straightforward style. We prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness. We seldom vote against management teams in our board roles, but we can have strong opinions. We will challenge you without confronting you. Once we pick a management team, we back it and don’t second-guess it. We are less about the sweet talk and more about helping you build a business. We are not about controlling ownership in your business. We value candor as much as delivering optimal results.
We believe authenticity coupled with genuine, high-caliber capability and principled discipline emerges triumphant, each time, every time
What we work on
Phirozsil Ventures provides venture assistance, strategic guidance, and hands-on execution engagements to entrepreneurs and businesses with promising breakthrough technologies in the three core focus areas of energy, water, and air. Within and related to these focus areas, Phirozsil Ventures actively seeks out technological breakthroughs and investment opportunities that hold the promise of bettering humanity, improving lives, and increasing productivity.
At Phirozsil Ventures, we fundamentally like solving large problems that are amenable to technological and creative solutions. We support, promote, and grow meaningful businesses with significant commercial, humanitarian, and environmental improvement impacts.
We seek out advantages connected to technology, business model innovations, unique partnerships, extraordinary alliances, exceptional capabilities, and top-notch teams. We pay specific attention to unlocking value trapped in archaic industries, so-called ‘heritage companies’, and/or out-of-date processes. Phirozsil Ventures is supportive of re-configuring and optimizing value chains. We seek out unusual technology approaches, ventures into new markets, or contrarian approaches to existing markets.
“Black Swan” ideas with significant upside or a significantly better mousetrap. Black swans are high-impact innovations beyond the realm of normal expectations. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it, black swans are characterized by rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability. High-impact, creative engagements can change the dynamics of large markets.
We constantly poke around and go beyond normal expectations. Can we create, store, and utilize energy optimally, with the least environmental impact? Can we develop a cyclic consumption cycle wherein energy materials are utilized and recycled effectively? Can we measure and alter the design of an engine to substantially change its efficiency and make it more economical? Can we make water easily available and safe to drink? Can we optimize water consumption and prevent waste? Can we solve air pollution problems in an environmentally sustainable and efficient way such that the highest at risk and the lowest in the human chain – the slum dweller – can extend their life and maintain good health? Going beyond normal expectations means we take on the challenge of rethinking the familiar.
Disrupt a large existing market? Reconfigure value chains? Unlock value? We love finding creative ways to break monopolies.
We look for rapid innovation cycles so proof points and results are available quickly (whether good or bad). That said, we are invested in certain long innovation cycles because other factors reign supreme and are too compelling to discount – a cleaner environment, reduced wastage, and efficient use of resources.
How we decide
We are science and technology lovers, yet not scientific or technological fools. Allow us to explain – we categorize innovations, technology, and business ventures under two clear criteria. Type A) one where the venture is significant and can positively impact humanity, or Type B) one which has high entertainment value. When a venture does not qualify under either type we unabashedly put it in the round filing cabinet – the trash can. More seriously, we invest and engage in Type A ventures only. We judiciously look for “A” teams, technologies, innovations, and businesses.
We look at the problem being targeted for solving. We stack our advantages and market risks. We weigh in on the advantages of proven technology or scientific breakthrough, stellar teams, strong alliances & relationships, financial savvy, competitive landscape, and potential reactions, etc. We take a deep dive before engaging in any venture relationship.
“We project $xxx million in revenue in 2030. We will grow 3 times in 5 years. We have the North American license for XYZ technology. Our initial sales target is only 0.01% of the $3 billion market size, per ABC analyst report.”, etc. These are some of the stories and cliches that we have heard in our experience. Frankly, they do not impress us. What matters and we put supreme weight on are rubber-meets-the-road, bottoms-up substantiations such as – what key pain do we plan to alleviate? why would the buyer pick us? how are we rising above the buyer’s alternatives? where will our first sale come from? how do we plan to deliver an exceptional customer experience for repeat business? how do we scale up effectively from initial successful experiences? These are the factors that matter to us and in the real world. In short, we look for jaw-dropping value propositions and rational scale-up action plans – outlines and timelines.