Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame — an early e-mail service which he co-founded and eventually sold to Microsoft — says his current venture ShowReel will be seen in an updated version and replicate the ‘Y Combinator’ model to fund at least 100 start-ups in the next 12 months.
ShowReel, in its present avatar, is a video platform built to help people make professional video profiles to get jobs. However, it has had weak traction and, therefore Bhatia, has decided to reinvent the company.
“The new version is built on the idea to create an online ecosystem, where we plant seed funds in ideas, which eventually would lead to creating more jobs,” said Bhatia while speaking to BusinessLine. The entrepreneur said he is inspired by ‘Y Combinator (YC)‘ model, an American technology start-up accelerator, which has launched more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase and Reddit.
“We will fund but more like a ‘Y Combinator model’, where the start-ups would get one-time funds of $5,000 to $10,000 to start the company,” he continued, “basically, do what Y Combinator did, but on a mass scale”. Bhatia said the new version of ShowReel would be live in three to four months.
The new re-invented venture would invest in companies that are trying to solve ‘local problems,’ he added without specifying what sectors he was looking to invest in. Bhatia added “the whole plan is to find startups that solve some local problems and have a social impact and not necessarily those that are there just to make money,” he added.
Initially, the venture fund will invest in start-ups in India and eventually look at other markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Bhatia, however, did not comment on either the size of the fund or whether he would raise external money for this reinvented version of ShowReel.
Commenting on the layoffs in the start-up sector in India, he said: “I think a lot of the start-ups were heavily funded and overfunded to some extent, So in that sense, the layoffs is a good thing as it will create a whole pool of talent that we want to fund, which will result in the creation of new start-ups.”