Startup Story: Scaale

This article is written by Clinton James, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Kaushal Chokshi spoke at Startup Istanbul as Founder and President of the Scaale Group of Companies and Cross-border Angels where they have about 150 investors worldwide. They have 150 investors worldwide and what they do is spread out as industrial but also look at the global deal flow. They do about $1 million to $10 million in the series rounds and is exciting to democratize and flatten the world of the global investment.

His first venture was within one year after college with four co-founders, they decided to open a company that after his graduation, was able to exist, ‘sold the company’ giving 12 times the input.

The second company he started was a manufacturing company, formed with 2 co-founders and 8 investors, and in four years they could take the company to the public and opted to exit with a 10-times growth.

India likes and understands that Turkey is a diving culture in history. It has about 19 main languages within different scripts which got Kaushal frustrated in terms of what he could do, because at that time more than 60% of the budgets were government oriented.

He’d just completed reading a book, ‘American Dream’ and a survey asking what it means emphasized that it’s about Freedom, Passion and Potential. Thus, you gain big achievements through freedom to work on your passion to reach your potential!

He was getting suffocated in India because of the restricted freedom. He felt he had a very successful career and moved to UK. He was humbled when he did not realize that when he was committing his burn rate in pounds, it was not Indian rupees, and that was his first failure.

Majority believed that it was a fantastic learning curve and moved to United States, ventured into the manufacturing industry, got into numerous joint ventures in Germany, had manufacturing plants in Sharjah and continued the business in India.

Kaushal had created seven very successful ventures in form of brick and mortar companies, but while at Chicago, he realized that he was making money from information, where one country wanted enough information about the other country, and he could use that to his advantage as arbitration of information.

He sold all the companies he had between 2000 and 2005 and started the Scaale Group of companies mainly because he was being more of technology. He realized that technology was going so fast and focused new technology.

From his lessons, first, made a decision to become an entrepreneur. Secondly, he was exposed to failure and failed fast enough to know how to deal with it. Thirdly, he considers cash as king where he understands that most start-up companies do not have cash neither traction. And fourthly, your friends may not be the best people to share your idea with.

Parting shot, skill is when a company that applies global context to leverage all the benefits that every market offers for innovation, sales, traction, access to capital, talent and eventually exit.

https://youtu.be/fEg1umPcSyU