Shubham Jhuria: Your Startup Is Underpaying Its Most Important Asset | The Big Blind Ep. 06

Shubham Jhuria is the Partner and CFO at Aeravati Ventures, a Bengaluru- based early stage fund he co-founded with Rishab, running now for four years. Before Aeravati he ran his own investment banking firm for four years, before that he advised early stage startups directly. He is a Chartered Accountant who took a completely different road from most of his CA peers and is now the rare thing in the Bangalore startup ecosystem: a fund manager who is actually from Bangalore. In this episode he says something most investors will not say out loud. 95% of early stage startups have their finance and compliance completely wrong. Not slightly off. Wrong. And most founders do not find out until they are mid-fundraise, the diligence report is 100 pages long, and the deal falls apart. He also makes a case that equity is expensive and if you do not need to raise, you should not raise. This from a man who spent four years in investment banking making money only when startups raised capital. And on how to evaluate founders: Aeravati's average evaluation timeline in Fund One was 7 to 8 months. Not because they are slow. Because they are watching. Founder consistency over time is the only thing that cannot be faked. No jargon. Just the honest version. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 00:00 — Introduction 00:27 — Shubham's background — from family business to the startup ecosystem 01:51 — The IB practice and learning what founders actually value 04:25 — Learning to invest by actually losing money 06:33 — Being a rare Bangalorean running a VC fund in Bangalore 07:20 — Breaking traditional VC walls and why he got into the ecosystem 10:07 — Why investment banking only gets you transactional relationships 11:11 — The Aeravati philosophy: relationships before transactions 12:52 — Fund One: average 7 to 8 month evaluation timeline, explained 13:47 — Why understanding the person takes longer than understanding the math 14:48 — Putting all cards on the table: the 100 to 700 crore journey conversation 19:09 — It is always the founder. Nothing else matters. 20:54 — The founder who answered a revenue question with a valuation target 22:08 — Founder decisions post-money that kill companies 26:48 — Investors cannot validate your technology. Only customers can. 28:47 — Finance and compliance: the conversation nobody wants to have 29:26 — If you do not invest in your finance team you will not get the results 30:01 — 95% of early stage startups have this completely wrong 31:21 — The virtual CFO revolution and why it is still not enough 33:20 — The 100-page financial due diligence report on an early stage startup 36:58 — Fundraising is not the objective of starting a company 37:20 — Even as an investment banker: if you do not need to raise, do not raise 39:06 — The CRED comparison founders keep making and why it is wrong 40:01 — When the tap of investor money stops, you are left parched 42:08 — Raising 16 crores with 8 crores of working capital from equity: why that is a mistake 43:56 — Debt vs equity and why founders unnecessarily avoid debt 47:01 — The one-line bet: it is always the founder and the founding team ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ THE BIG BLIND ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ A podcast for people who go all in before the cards are dealt. Founders. Angels. Fund managers. Real conversations, no PR answers. Hosted by Nandan Shetty and Rohit Salveru. Subscribe:    / @bigblindpod   Instagram: instagram.com/the_big_blind_ X: x.com/thebigblind_ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-big-blind/ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 👤 CONNECT WITH SHUBHAM ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ LinkedIn:   / shubham-jhuria-sj   Aeravati Ventures: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aera... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #thebigblind #venturecapital #startupfinance #aeravativentures #CFO #startupindia #founderadvice #fundraising #podcastindia #compliancestartup #earlystagestartup #startupecosystem