Masterly mentor

ICE PEOPLE: Vishnu Varshney

Chalk up another first for Vishnu Varshney. For the last two months, the managing director and CEO of Ahmedabad-based Gujarat Venture Finance Ltd (GVFL) has been teaching a fresh course at Nirma University's management school that is close to his heart: New Venture Creations.

Having nurtured no fewer than 50 start-ups as an angel investor over the past 15 years, Varshney sure knows what he's talking about.

Varshney was working with Gujarat Industrial Investment Corporation (GIIC) when he was selected by the World Bank and GIIC to start GVFL as an autonomous body in Ahmedabad in 1990.

An electrical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Kanpur and an MS and MBA from Louisiana State University in the United States, Varshney is proud of the companies GVFL has helped midwife and nurture.

They include companies like Icenet Ltd, today Gujarat's biggest ISP, and software ventures Net4Nuts and EcCube Solutions Ltd. "I don't believe in fads and never invested in any dotcom venture even during the year 2000 boom."

Varshney's current concern: raising the corpus of his Gujarat IT Fund from Rs 26 crore to Rs 36 crore.

The fund earlier raised Rs 10 crore from Sidbi and Rs 16 crore from state-owned Gujarat Informatics Ltd. "The latter has agreed to pay us another Rs 10 crore," says Varshney. Some of the money will be used to fund new start-ups, probably in the mobile-commerce space. "We haven't signed anybody on yet, but there are a plethora of proposals in this space," he adds.

When he's not evaluating start-ups, Varshney is on the advisory board at IIT-Kanpur, IIM-Ahmedabad, the National Institute of Design, Nirma University, as well as the Mudra Institute of Communication & Arts. He also reads books on management and history in his spare time.

Clearly, this is not an angel with gossamer wings.