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Comment by ganeshkrishnan | Hacker News Reader

From 2014 by Nine Point Capital. Their tagline is "We invest all over the world" but when I reached out they said "they don't invest in India".

I am in Canada. smh

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Wait a second. Reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19540773 Does that mean they excluded you based just on name before figuring out where you are based? That would be more like "They don't invest in people from India" and I think it'd be good to red-flag them for that.

Christoph here from Point Nine.

No, we didn’t do that. I can confirm that with certainty even without having asked everyone on my team.

I’m trying to find out what was going on and will post more details ASAP.

Hey Christoph, here is a screencap of the email : https://screenshots.firefox.com/DCsDhXwfTXv0hsls/mail.google...

Sorry I don't want to come off as offensive and I didn't expect so much reaction to a simple denial. VCs have passed us on for far absurd reasons.

Hi Ganesh,

I would be interested in hearing the conclusion to this interaction. Do you have a point of contact where I could reach you at the end of this week?

-Tom

Tom, that was the end of the email trail; I didn't hear back anything.

It's no big deal really. A miscommunication between their tag line and my expectation. My email is ganesh @ aihello.com

Tom, please feel free to DM me as well.

christoph (at) pointninecap.com

(You might get an autoresponder but I’ll look for your email)

Hi Ganesh,

Thank you!

We’ll work on our website and email wording to try to avoid misunderstandings like this going forward.

Best

Christoph

Who were you talking to @P9? This sounds so far off from my experience working with their team.

Louis from their team left a very interesting article on Medium and I reached out to them.

Love your product, useloom, btw. That's what we use for customer onboarding.

https://www.useloom.com/share/41391b00def0408cada2056877cf36...

Thanks for getting in touch and this nice video response; really appreciate it. My disappointment and emphasis was solely the contradiction between the tagline vs their feedback.

Understood

With companies like Walmart and Amazon putting big bucks in India, and now Ycombinator conducting interviews here, I guess whoever you talked to hasn't really been keeping a worldview of investments globally.

Indian market is big and still relatively unexplored and ripe for disruption. The next generation ( and even the current one ) of Indians will be a whole lot more educated and will have more money to spend, and their number would be in excess of 100 million..

So you're only losing if you haven't got a long term India Plan Dear VC.

Edit: Grammer

India is also a little bit protective ( rightfully so in my opinion). Eg. A marketplace can't sell their own products -> Amazon

Usually I am very critical of Indian government messing in IT but here the main issue is that Amazon uses the data of marketplace sellers to have unfair advantage.

One can't 'invest all over the world' without including India?

I think the gripe is that they were extremely racist: As in they took one look at his name, decided he must be Indian, and simply told him off that they do not invest in India... or Indians (though not so direct).

Hi, Christoph from Point Nine here.

We do NOT do what you’re suggesting here - discriminate against Indians (or any nationality). This would be horrible and stupid. Our own team comes from various countries, and so do the founders of our portfolio companies.

As for countries that we invest in, we’ve invested in lots of different places. In fact, that’s one of the things we’re known for. We haven’t invested in e.g. India or China yet but that may change over time. Point taken that we shouldn’t say ‘everywhere’ as long as we’re not ready to invest everywhere - will make sure to change the website wording ASAP.

I'd hope so man, but the issue here wasn't that you don't invest "everywhere", it's that a man was profiled based on his name and quickly turned away. I'd try to figure out why that happened.

Probably somebody just had a brain fart.

My grip should be with the "invest all over the world" but "not in your country" tag, not that you got my country wrong. However I really was not looking for investment at all! I loved the medium article posted and wanted to network.

But I guess it's absurd to talk to VCs without the expectation of investment.

That's not necessarily racist. Yes, you can't just assume that everyone with an Indian name lives in India, but it's not that far off the mark, and I don't see how race comes into it at all.

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