As cliched as it may sound, but my blogging debut was actually an accident (not just figuratively, but literally too). A friend of mine damaged his smartphone screen and decided to buy a new top-notch Chinese phone as a substitute.

Much to his surprise, the first image he flaunted on our common WhatsApp group from his 48MP camera was greeted with sarcastic and subtle chants of “betrayer, betrayer”. The participants in the group felt that my friend should have purchased an Apple or Samsung phone instead, to exemplify his “patriotism credentials”. My initial assessment, that the “stop trading with China” lobby, was limited to belligerent television news anchors, has been disproved over the last few days, as many of my friends, from different cross-sections of society, have echoed similar opinions.

I try and explain why such a mindset is self-defeating, and why we are better off in creating a conducive atmosphere so that Chinese goods are substituted “naturally” by creating a better ecosystem for Indian manufacturing. Also briefly touched upon why “Make in India”, in its current form, is a toothless tiger. Feedback and critical inputs are welcome!

Someone I know via an angel network had invested 15K USD in an Indian e-commerce startup. He exited with a cool 18m USD a few years later in a global buyout. Rob Hayes, a seed round investor in Uber, saw his investment of 510K USD swell to a valuation of 2.5B in 2019 (almost 5000X).

Partners at VC firms and top angel investors are busy people who get 100s of business ideas every week. They often make pencil commitments to invest millions of dollars in startups based on a mere 15-minute presentation. Many VCs claim it’s more of an “instinct”, and less of number crunching and deep analytical frameworks.

However, with time, I have realized that these “snap judgments” are often the result of a deep subconscious process that runs parallelly in a shrewd investor’s mind, while he/she is listening to the presentation. This parallel processing is so deeply ingrained in the investor’s mind, that they may not even be consciously aware of the mental algorithm that’s running.

Over the last couple of years, in advisory roles for VC and angel investments, I have been fascinated by this superfast, “heuristic” process. In an attempt to demystify it- I have created a possible framework that describes the different (and often subconscious) aspects of this mental evaluation- called 10P.