How JioGenNext evaluates start-ups using the 10 Tenets of Leadership Capital Building

JioGenNext is a start-up accelerator programme supported by Reliance Industries Limited. JioGenNext aims to nurture and empower start-ups by providing them with mentorship, funding, and access to cutting-edge infrastructure.

JioGenNext supports entrepreneurs across various sectors, including agritech, healthtech and fitness, IoT, logistics, edutech, and fintech. It helps start-ups scale up their businesses, refine their strategies, and navigate the competitive landscape.

Amey Mashelkar, Head – JioGenNext, shares how the team evaluates start-ups using the 10 Tenets of Building Institutional Leadership Capital.

Can you take us through JioGenNext's journey?

JioGenNext is a mentorship programme for start-ups that supports founders in their scale-up journey.

JioGenNext was founded on the principles laid out by our Chairman: of nurturing start-ups and supporting them in their journey of achieving the impossible.

After eight years of the programme, we have nurtured 177 start-ups who have collectively raised more than $550 million in venture capital funding.

Twenty-seven of these companies have been acquired by global companies as well as well-known Indian technology players.

A majority of our start-ups have progressed beyond the seed stage.

We operate between the seed and the growth stage of companies and some have gone on to achieve more than $10 million in annual revenues with a sustainable business model.

Which of the 10 Tenets illustrate JioGenNext's journey?

JioGenNext is built on the tenets of Relationship, Trust, Cooperation, Empathy, Integrity, and Community Engagement.

Due to our focus on relationship-building, we have been able to build trust and co-operation between the start-up ecosystem and the Reliance ecosystem.
We are empathetic towards our founders, and also, towards all our stakeholders who engage with our start-ups, which increases the trust they have in us.
A high level of integrity is extremely important as we facilitate a win-win co-operation for both sides.
Finally, as we support founders in their scale-up, we look for ways in which the community pays it forward to other budding entrepreneurs.

How do the 10 Tenets guide your thinking while engaging with start-ups at JioGenNext?

We do look for early signals or reinforce the tenets as start-ups go through our programme.

1. People Capital

Start-ups are made up of people, their experiences, and unique insights they have about a market.
So, when you look at very large and globally successful companies like, say, Reliance, they all started with the founders' mission of satisfying a customer's need while changing an industry and in the process, capturing very large opportunities.
Founders also need other people to drive their business forward. Founders need to hire people who know more than them and can challenge their assumptions and hypotheses.

As our Chairman says, a “Founder's Mindset" is extremely critical. Founders don't need daily motivational talks or a pat on the back. Founders are inherently motivated.

They are also extremely self-aware people since they may have failed before they can actually see any measure of success. So, there is already a recognition of something that hasn't worked for them, and there is this unfinished business or an unfulfilled desire to succeed. So, we like to look for founders who first demonstrate these abilities and attitude.

2. Technology and Innovation Capital

Technology and Innovation are extremely important drivers of a start-up.
While a start-up might initially focus on the technology aspect, innovation is really taking the technology to market and making it commercially successful.
From a JioGenNext perspective, we have had many examples of Technology and Innovation. One recent example is of Swaasa AI platform, which uses the smartphone to screen and prioritise at-risk patients for pulmonary TB based on the cough sound as well as symptomatic information provided by users.
This has far-reaching consequences in a country like India, where access to sophisticated diagnostics equipment and personnel continues to be a massive challenge.

3. Capability Capital

Founders need to be able to successfully convert an idea into a business. This requires capability. So, when founders undertake large missions to change the world, it's equally important to demonstrate capability through execution. In JioGenNext, we look for founders' ability to solve hard problems at some scale.
Capability is what separates the thinkers from the doers.
One of our shining examples of capability is our alum - LogiNext. The founders are graduates of Carnegie Mellon University in the US.
They came back to India and they wanted to build something in logistics and data analytics. They demonstrated incredible capability in bringing data analytics to the logistics industry at a time when data analytics was still a buzz word.
Today, they are a $100 million-plus valued company with global customers and offices.

4. Achievement Capital

The ultimate achievement from a start-up perspective is to satisfy a customer's need in a sustainable way. We see several start-ups that are building to solve customer pain points but at the same time building a sustainable business model.
We look for founders who want to achieve something big.
But in their quest to achieving big things, are they customer focused?
Do they have the right values of achievement - which is not about raising venture capital and burning cash, but in helping their customers achieve more?

5. Relationship Capital

Relationships are important for all start-ups. Their relationship with all their stakeholders [is important], whether it is customers, shareholders, suppliers, employees, or the society at large.
Successful start-ups embed the culture of relationships which can help them during tough times which are always unavoidable. One of our alumni, Lavelle Networks, a B2B start-up in the telecom networking space, has been able to engage with a wide variety of stakeholders in their ecosystem to survive during the downturn.
I'm sure as the market recovers, they will be in the best position to leverage the relationships they have built over the years.

6. Trust Capital

One important aspect of evaluating a start-up is if they are trusted by their stakeholders.
If you look at the financial services industry, for example, which involves some form of movement of money, trust is the only capital.
When we look at fintech start-ups, we look deeper for trust factors that founders exhibit and check if they are building products that exude a high degree of trust.
At JioGenNext, we believe in backing our founders early and trusting them with big opportunities.

7. Cooperation Capital

One of our companies, BharatAgri, has built technology that provides advice to farmers on the purchase of farm inputs that are customised to their requirement.
They source this farm input from input suppliers based on the requirement of the farmer.
Hence, in some sense they have built a co-operative platform that facilitates a transaction between two unknown parties.
Today, BharatAgri has more than 100,000 farmers on their platform who are buying farm inputs from them.
But it took them five years to get to a point where farmers started trusting their advice on their purchases, and input suppliers started giving them competitive prices.

8. Empathy Capital

Founders are often put in difficult situations as they build their start-ups: to cut losses, cut corners, or cut jobs. It is in these difficult times that their character is tested.
Successful founders have always been able to demonstrate a very high emotional quotient.

9. Integrity Capital

When founders put themselves ahead of others, it shows that they have no integrity. Hence, this is an extremely important trait that we test for early on in the age of a start-up.
We see several start-ups misreporting revenues, or misguiding investors and we look for early signals of such behaviour.
One of our start-ups imploded due to internal factors and they had to stop building their start-up.
So, instead of burning through the rest of the investor capital they decided to return it and do something else. This demonstrates a very high level of integrity.
The next start-up that they build, I'm sure the same VCs would be more than happy to support them.

10. Community Engagement Capital

In the context of the start-up ecosystem, successful founders should ideally pay it forward.
In the early stage, a founder can provide time to other founders by mentoring them and connecting them to investors and potential customers.
Once a start-up is successful, and the founders have, let's say, made a great exit or they have done an IPO, or they have bootstrapped and become extremely profitable whatever the outcome is, they can support other budding entrepreneurs with capital, time and expertise.
Towards achieving this goal, we are introducing an academy, where founders will initially contribute their time to mentor first time founders and then selectively back these founders with capital and other forms of support.
We have looked at all the Ten Tenets. We use them to evaluate start-ups to infuse the right principles and values in founders who are starting off and doing it for the first time. It's an extremely important framework for us at JioGenNext.

Could you share a few leadership lessons from your journey heading JioGenNext?

Firstly, I think knowing what your stakeholders want and delivering it to them when they need it is the most important lesson that I have learned. It continues to be my personal goal for JioGenNext, and as a team we continue to learn how to do that.
We have a team of 7-8 people and giving the team the space to express themselves and take full ownership is extremely important. In the process, if they try something new and fail, it's my responsibility as a leader. If we succeed, then we all take credit for it.
The third lesson is to get your team to work with each other and respect a very clear and common goal.
The fourth one is conflicts because there are always conflicts when you have a team.
But they are best resolved with authenticity.
The fifth one I would say is success comes out of repeating the same process consistently over a long period of time.
We have done the same thing for the last eight years and because of that, we have seen an amazing compounding effect.
Finally, I think personally, one learns to be more patient with time. Like in tennis, you have to first prepare your stance let the ball come to you, and at the height you desire before you can hit a winner.