Edition #12. Nitin Sharma has spent roughly half his adult life in the US and half in India, and built his investing career across both markets. He started off at New Enterprise Associates in Washington DC and returned to India to invest at Lightbox in Mumbai. Later, he moved to Bangalore and experimented with solo investing through First Principles.

For the last five years, he’s been building Antler’s ‘Day Zero’ investing platform in India. The firm backs founders before there is a product, revenue or data. It works closely with founders through a residency model. The goal is not demo-day polish. It is to understand and back the right founder.

In this episode of Unscripted (click on the video link above), Sharma spoke about the path that led him to Antler, why India needs a venture capital model that’s distinct from Silicon Valley, the thought process behind the Antler model, and a new programme, called Embark, to help AI-native Indian founders build and sell in the US.

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Edited Excerpts

The Runway: Nitin, where are you in life today as a person?

Nitin Sharma: I think it’s work in progress. I’m still a student of investing. A student of venture investing. I have had some success, but I feel like I’ve not reached the level of excellence that I aspire to. I hope that whatever we are doing (at Antler) creates impact because that is very meaningful to me.

TR: I’m curious to know what kind of kid you were growing up. And, what kind of India did you grow up in?

NS: My dad worked for the government, for a bank. So very typical middle class upbringing and also the experience of living in different places because of his job. Part of my childhood was in Bombay, but not SoBo (South Bombay), more the suburbs. I’m that kid. And, part of it was in Ludhiana, which is where my ancestral roots are.

Then at the age of 15, I left for Singapore on a scholarship. The Singapore government and Singapore Airlines used to sponsor kids from India after grade 10. I was very much the quintessential nerd who was always trying to excel in school and was gobbling up general knowledge books.

But I really cared a lot about impact in India from a very early age.

All I wanted to do from grade four was become an IAS officer. I didn’t care about engineering. I would need to go to IIT and then I’d come back and become an IAS officer.

TR: Where did this interest in public service, making an impact at a social level, come from?

NS: Fairness matters a lot to me. In the 90s, India was a very different place. So any time I saw what seemed like injustice or what seemed like people being denied opportunity, that really viscerally got to me as a kid. I don’t think that there was any one experience I can remember. It was the entirety of my childhood growing up in small town India and feeling there was just inefficiency, corruption, injustice everywhere.

TR: After Singapore, you went to study at the University of Southern California (USC) where, apart from studying, you also took teaching jobs. Was teaching also accidental?

NS: The big part of my college experience, which I think makes the American system very unique, is how much, how often you actually work while you’re in school. By the time I graduated, I had maybe two and a half years of work experience. I just had to make ends meet. I paid for my entire education with scholarships, but still there were so many jobs I had to do. There were semesters when I was working in four jobs. Teaching happened because of that. I did it in grad school as well and really enjoyed that.

TR: You started your venture capital career with NEA (New Enterprise Associates) in DC. And one of the things you did there is that you developed a thesis for edtech. That was in 2010. Was India part of the thesis at the time? And, what’s your assessment of why edtech went sideways in India?

NS: After going through the rites of passage for the first 12-18 months (at NEA), I was encouraged to look at what the firm hadn’t looked at. And NEA was the biggest venture fund in the world at that time but hadn’t looked at education seriously and there were good reasons for it. Sales cycles were long. Regulation was a huge problem.

The way education funding works in the US is very unique. Technology hadn’t touched it. So you would not think venture capital would be a good fit. But I felt a lot was changing. I started to follow some online education companies and I started seeing the green shoots of that coming into K-12. Edtech was not a word yet. For about a year, I did a lot of work. Met every single stakeholder, teacher, principals. Went to the first ever ASU+GSB conference, in a tent. Today it’s probably a big concert. But when it began, it was a hundred people who cared about education in a tent in Phoenix, Arizona. Finally we invested in one company called Everfi, which I actually ended up working at as well.

But the reason education appealed to me was it was a giant part of the economy, alongside healthcare. And it just hadn’t been touched by technology. With cloud at that time and mobile and social kind of coming together, you could see that it would really be destructive. And of course, it has made a huge dent in the last 10 years, whether you look at Coursera or Duolingo… all of these companies, by the way, were NEA investments later.

India was not part of my initial thesis. But it would very quickly jump out as a very good market for edtech.

The reason edtech hasn’t worked out as well as people thought it would is because most of edtech has neither been ed nor tech. And so you are not actually teaching, you’re not delivering learning outcomes and you’re not actually using technology in a very robust way.

It’s a hard problem. I’m not saying people haven’t tried, but I think in India, the challenge has been that most of it has gotten caught up in the pushing of sales. And the way education is sold in India is so related to outcomes, not the learning. So when you combine all of that alongside greed and opportunism, you get a space that is very broken.

I actually think AI could finally solve the things that have been very hard to solve. What were the problems? Engagement, retention, monetization, right? I think AI could solve them in ways we haven’t really explored yet. Edtech in India is not going away. The spend is not going away. If anything, with AI, I think parents and learners are going to be even more worried about what happens to them. So I think anybody who is bearish on edtech is missing that.

TR: After NEA, you came back to India and joined Lightbox. Then you decided to get into micro or angel investing with First Principles, and now you’re doing Day Zero investing with Antler. Walk us through this part of the journey.

NS: I’ve always been driven by curiosity, impact, a sense of wanting autonomy and wanting to build something. I think I’m not cut out to be a single product founder, unfortunately. Otherwise I would have more impact in the world. But the next best thing I guess is to enable entrepreneurs. And I tried to do that in a little bit of an entrepreneurial way.

The first journey was Lightbox. At that time Sandeep (Lightbox founder Sandeep Murthy) was in the process of transitioning from Sherpalo. The idea was to create a unique model by acquiring assets from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo, and adding a new fund to do a concentrated portfolio strategy. I enjoyed that we went deep into fewer companies. I learned a lot about influencing founders and companies without authority. And, having the patience to work through some tough problems and not just chase the next hot investment.

After that, I realized that my heart was closer to earlier stage (investments). I also wanted to take a few more bets. The first four years (after moving to Bangalore) were First Principles. I didn’t have a plan. I started to angel invest. I started to help founders. Blockchain and Web3 is something I went into very early.

I just felt that blockchain and Web3, not the trading of Bitcoin, but the technology behind it, could be game changing for India.

I wrote a paper on what regulation could enable startups, advised Niti Aayog, created a community of Ethereum developers and made a number of investments. When the RBI regulations made it hard to scale anything in India, I said, okay, well, we’ll just continue to invest in other things. So that’s how Kutumb, Third Wave Coffee, Mudrex, and a bunch of other good investments happened.

But First Principles was really a small like solo GP (general partnership) operation with the idea of being very thesis driven and going into completely new ideas early. And I loved that journey. I think we ended up backing some very amazing founders, but I also realized the limits of it because I felt you were one more party on the cap table. And often I was spending a lot more time on each situation. I realized that after 30, 40 companies, I can’t scale myself and I didn’t think I was actually solving an important problem.

That’s when Antler happened.

TR: What is it that you saw in the market that convinced you that India needed this kind of a platform, dedicated to Day Zero founders and startups?

NS: Three things. One, in my journey with First Principles, I realized that the process of ideation, it’s still very inefficient. Some people start with a clear idea and a clear co-founder. More power to them. But many give up. Why do they give up? Because sometimes there isn’t the intense community that they need. Or they may be from an underserved market. Many women go through this pain of not finding that environment. Sometimes, despite your best effort, you don’t find the right co-founder.

So there were four or five problems that kept coming up in my conversations when I was talking to people who were looking at starting up. And they do get solved. Don’t get me wrong. But you can do much better, right?

The second thing I think that became clear was that if we could create this platform and scale it, we felt that that scale could have a lot of impact.

And the third thing that became clear to me more from an investor hat is that if you make it work, it’s like the highest risk, highest reward strategy. Venture itself is very risky. Early stage venture is very, very risky. This takes it even higher in a way because you are doing a lot of hard work very early. But that is also where the alpha is.

TR: So what was Day Zero like at Antler India?

NS: Rajiv (Rajiv Srivatsa) jumped on board in June of 2020. I had my First Principles responsibilities. So we kept talking and I jumped in early 2021. Day Zero, COVID was still raging. So one of the challenges was if you want to do this in a way that’s cohort based, you couldn’t run physical cohorts. So we did a digital one and we thought we would start working with solo founders. But at that time, because of COVID you could not connect people easily. So for the first year we focused on existing teams that had just gotten started.

We had six people in the first year and we still managed to work with maybe something like, if I remember correctly, almost 10,000 applications and the start of the fund. Starting a fund is a huge amount of work which people don’t realize. So the first year was just a lot of that.

TR: Antler is often compared with Y Combinator (YC). What is the one principle that differentiates Antler from YC?

NS: YC has succeeded partly because it met an important market need at a certain time and with a certain very unique group of people. The question to ask is what does the world need today? In fact, anybody who has tried to copy YC hasn’t really worked out. We actually don’t even think that we necessarily compete. There are different founders at different stages that both can be a good fit for. We’ve had founders who’ve done Antler and YC.

YC started in 2005 and solved the problem really well, in a way that works really beautifully, it’s centralized. There’s one YC. Antler is the opposite.

We are going earlier than YC would in a typical case. We are also very decentralized because each country has differences in terms of what’s right for the market. We are trying to do this in a way that the teams are there on the ground in each country, helping the founder day to day as they’re getting off the ground and starting a business.

Also the way the partnership works is very decentralized. Each of us is an employee, but we are also owners in a sense of what we are creating in each country.

TR: If you were to walk me through the Antler residency like I’m a founder, what happens in Week 1 that doesn’t happen anywhere else in India?

NS: We focus in Week 1 on the mindset. Go deeper in the mindset and ask what are the two or three most important things that have to be psychologically understood before you start the journey.

The first thing is the why.

Most people are unclear about why they’re actually doing a business. Or a venture-backed startup. If you don’t know your ‘why’ really well, it will translate to everything else.

So we try to focus on really making the person clear about the ‘why’. Could be defining where your motivation comes from, why would you do this for 10 years and so on.

The second thing is the who… the co-founder and the team you’ve built. Most startups fail because of some form of co-founder misalignment or conflict. When you’re looking for a co-founder, the most trivial way is to look at skills. That’s a wrong way to think about life, I think. What you really have to look at is values. We spend a lot of time making people understand what you need in a co-founder, based on your values.

The third thing is the how, which is really asking the question are you building something that will be venture scalable? And are you the kind of founder who is venture scalable? I spend most of my effort on that question.

I think there is a huge gap, despite all the content out there, in making founders understand what the math of venture capital is. It’s just fuel. Different fuels work for different journeys. So a lot of what I do is to make them understand whether this is even the right fuel for you. Which goes into the conversation of can you be a non-linear growth business? Can this idea or this plan lead to a large outcome potentially in five to seven years? And are you then up for the challenge? What does it mean for you as a founder?

TR: Moving on to the Embark programme, what did you learn from spending three, four months in the US that changed or reinforced how you think about Indian founders going global?

NR: I’ve spent half my adult life in the US and half in India. What makes Antler different or unique, one of the other pillars, is being the best partner for someone just starting out with a very global ambition. Antler has offices in 30 countries. So one of the things we want to do over time is for any founder in India, on Day Zero, being able to tap into this vast global network for employees, advisors, investors and knowledge.

Embark was a response to our founders asking us for more help on this topic. And with AI, the last couple of years has become even more important. There is an epicenter effect right now.

Every technology shift, there is this epicenter effect. For the first few years after that happens, you want to be close to the epicenter. The density and the intensity that you can benefit from is quite real.

It’s sad that there has been this mini brain drain in the last two years. A lot of really strong AI-native founders have moved to the US. So we created Embark to solve GTM (go-to-market), not fundraising. Because, if you can get traction in the US, capital is not an issue.

The idea is we fund people very early if they are truly thinking about a global product, could be consumer or enterprise, mostly enterprise, of course.

We want to create the best experience for you to land in the US very quickly and find traction. Even for strong firms, in the past, it’s taken 12 to 18 months. We want to compress that to three to six months.

How do we do that? We did 95 sessions this year (in 2025) for two different groups. Interactions with founders, operators, and a few investors who’ve gone through this journey, mostly the diaspora folks. And some patterns come out. We put that together in sort of 12 points. I’ll give you a few samples.

One, whatever created your PMF (product market fit) in India, it does not translate to the US. In India, we don’t follow lanes (while driving). Basically, we don’t stick to one type of customer. India rewards sort of breadth. Companies are trying to go after six different types of customers. The US is the opposite. People prefer depth. So if you’re a founder who picks a narrow definition of customer and goes very deep and solves that problem, people respect that more. And that’s the right way to get more traction in the US.

But it’s a mindset shift for founders to develop that muscle, that discipline of saying I’ll be very focused. Mindset wise, in the Bay Area, going and presenting an idea which is incremental is not going to go anywhere. But what people are looking for is to add meaning to their lives by thinking of what is the next big disruption. What is the next trillion dollar company? So I think that’s very hard for a lot of founders who have not been exposed to that.

Then the way you build relationships is very, very different. I think most Indian founders struggle with that. They end up having a really hard time going outside the diaspora to build good relationships. But the US rewards authenticity and curiosity and interestingness in a different way. Those are some of the learnings that came out.

TR: You recently also wrapped up the first AI residency in India. Was this the first time you did a domain-specific residency? What did you learn about how AI innovation is unfolding in India?

NS: Yes, it was the first. We were expecting about a thousand applications. We got 2,500. We picked 1 % of them. They came in. We doubled our check, $500K given upfront for the ones we fund. And we halved the time. We really tried to focus on AI first and truly AI native.

We made six investments so far out of this residency ranging from dating, which is a very broken space, to a team of a 15 year old, 18 year old and a 19 year old, one of them from Kashmir, who have actually shown metrics that are beating DeepSeek. So, we’re seeing some amazing talent come out of India.

The learnings are many. Speed of iteration matters a lot more right now. We are over indexing the founders who are just iterating much faster. The good thing is you don’t need the old template of a business founder and technical founder. You don’t even need a large founding team to get started. You can delay some of the hiring because AI is doing so much for you. But that also has meant that the business founder also has to be very hands on, has to be very technical and if not technical, just insanely curious to dive deep. Those are the kinds of founders we realized we want to back.

The question of what the moats are keeps coming up because it’s so hard for anyone to see right now. But I think founders who are thinking about distribution earlier in their journey with some sophistication… You just have to have that mindset of iterating fast, thinking AI first and viewing distribution as a moat.

TR: You’ve done nine residencies so far. What’s the typical conversion rate per residency into actual deals?

NS: We don’t start with any such number in mind because we want to fund anyone who we align with. In general, one out of three to one out of five is probably where things have been in the past.

TR: Antler, you’ve said in the past, is the opposite of spray-and-pray. Why is a 100-company portfolio not spray-and-pray?

NS: Because a 100-company portfolio, developed over five years, with a team of 15-20 people does not feel like spray-and-pray to me. Compared to the idea that as an angel or as micro-VC you often do many more per year per person. We have crossed 75,000 applications. We would like to think it’s very selective, like 100 out of 75,000.

But the main reason I would say it’s not spray-and-pray is because of the time we spend per company and because of the residency method. We make some investments outside of the residency, but most of our investments are through the residency. In a typical residency, even the fast track AI one, we have spent on average about a month, but in the past almost three months working with the founder.

Spray-and-pray is when you hear the pitch, you like something, you invest or your friends are investing so you invest. You don’t really study the founder or the thesis that deeply enough. I think if you spend one month to three months working in our office with the team, you really get to know them inside out. You’re much better informed about the main asset which is the founder.

TR: What has been the portfolio success rate so far in terms of raising follow-on capital?

NS: We look at the one-year mark. At the one-year mark, have they moved to the next stage and raised further capital? About half of them have. The other half are not dead. They are taking a little bit longer. The loss ratio is quite low, much lower than we expected, but that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is just how many of these companies break out into massive successes.

We’ve seen three or four Series As this year. This (2025) was the year that the portfolio started to mature to a point where 32 companies raised money and that was triple the number of last year. We are feeling good about this right now.

TR: Globally, Antler invests in mature startups as well through the Elevate fund. Have you invested from Elevate in India?

NS: Yes. For those less familiar, Antler has 14 or so funds, which again, people like me and my peers have set up and run on the ground. We are all connected as part of Antler on the same platform. We also have set up a separate fund-of-funds called Global Access Fund that internally pools capital for (regional) funds.

We also have Antler Elevate, the continuity fund, which is to support companies from our local funds that get to Series A, B, C, with the right checks, between $1 million and $10 million, co-invest, not lead. And so it’s largely meant for continuity. In some cases they can make investments outside of Antler as well. So that’s a $300 million fund which we have deployed in the last three years or so. Some of it has come to India. More will in the next year or so. In Namma Yatri we invested from Elevate and there are two other companies, where Antler Elevate also came in with sizable checks.

TR: What’s the venture-shaped bet that investors in India are still reluctant to make with respect to AI?

NS: As an ecosystem, we obviously have lost out. When you hear stats like all of India has maybe 70,000 GPUs right now and Meta itself has 2 million. Or, you see just how much talent has flown to San Francisco… I meet so many more Indian AI founders there than I meet here, which is ironic. Or the fact that every Indian fund is going there to fund these founders. It’s sad.

In general, I think, the reason venture hasn’t produced consistently high venture type returns is because venture risk hasn’t been taken and you cannot have one versus the other.

So for a long time, in the first… decade or so after I came back, I actually didn’t think that there were many true venture type risks taken. I think in a small way, we are trying to be one of those people to do that… take venture risk when things are unclear.

As investors, we ask for too much information and too much consensus viewing and too much traction. We forget that that’s not what VC is about. People overpay for a little bit of traction, which doesn’t mean anything. But they don’t take a risk on someone just before that traction, which actually means a lot.

We will always be behind Silicon Valley. That’s just not the right comparison. Indian VC has its own flavor. The main thing is to find the right timelines and capital structures. Perhaps India needs longer funds. Maybe we need 15 year funds, not 10 year funds. Maybe we need a different portfolio construction. Maybe we need to think about ownership slightly differently. We’ve just aped Silicon Valley math onto India, which is just not going to work very well for the most part. So this is a much longer discussion, but those are my quick thoughts.

The original interview has been edited for readability

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