VCCircle

California-based Clearstone Venture Partners is upbeat about early stage deals in India. It has a partner stationed in India - Sumant Mandal (right). Here is an interview of Jim Armstrong, Managing Director, Clearstone, who talks about India too. He says:

We're already halfway through that new fund—we've been really active. We're doing a lot in Southern California. We have two offices, one in Southern California and the other in Northern California, with the portfolio pretty evenly split between the two.

We also have a person on the ground in India, and are making investments in companies selling to the Indian market. We're still learning how to do companies that do business there. Sumant, my partner, has built companies over there, and he's helping to manage that effort. It's not that we have a confirmed point of view on what the opportunity is there, but if you think about media—and think think about half the population of India and China, 1.2 billion each—is under the age of 35.

It's pretty incredible how youthful that culture is, versus Europe, which is aging, and other countries, which have dominated youth, media, technology in the past. Historically, things have shifted to where the youth are. Most people there think that the opportunity in India is later stage, but we're actually doing early stage deals there.

In general we're really doing lots of early stage deals—we'd love to do later stage, but just don't see that many opportunities. There's lots of money out there flowing into later stage deals quickly, so we tend to do early stage companies. Everything except one investment we've done in our new fund has been a Series A.