The Man Who Keeps a Spreadsheet of His Misses: Alok Goyal of Stellaris Venture Partners
A failed PhD, a dot-com wipeout, and 13 years of backing Indian founders - how Alok Goyal built one of India’s most disciplined early-stage funds by cataloguing what he got wrong.
Somewhere on Alok Goyal’s second monitor, there is a spreadsheet. It does not track portfolio valuations. It lists every company that went on to become great - that he evaluated and passed on.
One name on that list is Postman, the developer tooling company now valued in the billions. Alok understood APIs. He just could not imagine the market getting large enough. That failure of imagination, he says freely, was the lesson.
This is the unusual thing about Alok Goyal, co-founder and Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners: he treats his misses as primary data.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From Broke Consultant to COO to VC
Alok describes his career as “Brownian motion,” and the description holds. He started a PhD in video streaming at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, quit midway, came back to India to start a company that failed, then pivoted into strategy consulting at McKinsey India and later the McKenna Group in Silicon Valley - a firm born alongside Intel and Apple. When the 2001 dot-com crash hit, the NASDAQ fell from 5,000 to 1,000, and his firm, which served only high-tech clients, ceased to exist. He spent 18 months unemployed and broke, carrying the weight of two MBA loans.
He finally took a sales job he didn’t want.
It’s like an experience. Until you try, you don’t know whether you like something. I really loved the kick of doing a deal.
That accidental discovery led to nine years at SAP India, eventually as COO, closing roughly 2,000 enterprise deals a year. When personal circumstances brought him back to India and SAP began pushing him toward Germany, he worked with a coach to ask what came next. One hypothesis: early-stage tech investing. In January 2013, he joined Helion Venture Partners, barely knowing what Flipkart was.
Helion was, by Alok’s telling, among the best firms in India at the time - home to MakeMyTrip, India’s first venture-backed IPO. But venture firms are not corporations. Partners develop different views on economics, decision-making, and succession. In 2016, Alok left with Ritesh Banglani and Rahul Chowdhri to start Stellaris. They were the first to break away from a first-generation Indian fund in nearly a decade, and four independent funds ultimately emerged from Helion’s diaspora, including Fireside Ventures and Fundamentum.
Stellaris launched with $100M in Fund I (2017), grew to $225M in Fund II (2021), and closed a $300M Fund III in 2024-25, with up to $150M earmarked for AI-native startups. Total AUM now exceeds $600M.
Three Mistakes, Repeated
The investment philosophy at Stellaris is built on focus: 8 to 10 deals a year, over 60% at inception stage - before a product is built, sometimes before a line of code exists. But Alok is more interesting on what he has consistently got wrong than on what he has done right.
After 13 years and roughly 4,000 companies evaluated (the firm invests in approximately one out of every 400), three anti-patterns keep showing up.
The first: over-indexing on market size. Great founders expand their market’s definition over time. Trying to size it at inception is often the wrong question.
The second: weighting market over founder when the category is undefined. In technology, many markets don’t exist yet at the time of investment. In those spaces, the quality of the person is the only real variable.
The third is the one that has cost him the most: fearing large incumbents. The question changes costume across eras - “Why can’t SAP do this?” becomes “Why can’t Google?” becomes today’s version: “Why can’t OpenAI?”
Large companies have so much baggage, friction, low decision-making speeds. Even when the answer is obvious, it never really happens. Almost always, when I have over-indexed on large competition, I have been wrong.
The 22 Believers
The clearest illustration of Alok’s founder-first thinking is Axtria, a pharma analytics company founded by Jassi Chadda. When Alok backed him, Jassi had zero revenue after 18 months, a misread market, and a high-pressure investor. His response was to return the investor’s capital. The recapitalisation vehicle: all 22 employees put in their own savings to fund the buyback. Most had followed Jassi from his previous company. They quit their jobs to do it again.
How insane a belief those 22 people would have had in that founder. He is a guy you follow to war knowing you might not make it. That was the prime part of my investment thesis.
In September 2025, Kedaara Capital invested $240M in Axtria via a secondary transaction, delivering significant returns to those early believers.
The broader Stellaris portfolio reflects the same conviction. Whatfix, backed when there were only two founders - one building, one selling - raised a $125M Series E led by Warburg Pincus in 2024, reaching approximately $900M in valuation with a 4.5x increase in ARR since 2021. Mamaearth became India’s first D2C brand to go public in 2023. Stellaris was in at Series A.
Work, Not Humans, at the Centre
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Alok recognised the wave but misread its pace. He had seen cloud, mobile, and the early internet. Those pattern libraries, he says, became liabilities. His response was deliberate: he wrote no new checks in 2024, using the year to understand the shift rather than react to it.
The insight he arrived at is structural. Old software made humans better and charged per seat. New software does the work and charges per outcome - what he calls the move from co-pilot to agent.
A human was still at the centre of my imagination for software. But I think work is at the centre today. It is not necessarily the human.
Portfolio bets like Pibit.ai reflect this: an AI-native insurance underwriting platform that raised $7M in Series A in November 2025 and claims to cut underwriting cycle times by 85%, charging for work delivered rather than seats sold. With the US-India Interim Trade Agreement announced in February 2026 creating cleaner market access for Indian SaaS firms, the macro conditions for this thesis are better than they have been in years.
Alok is still willing to hold his own framework up to scrutiny. Asked whether his US-market preference contradicts his stated belief in backing founders over markets, he doesn’t deflect.
Both our assets and our liabilities are our experience. All learnings are biases by definition.
That willingness to name his own blind spots, in public, after 13 years, is what makes the spreadsheet of misses worth paying attention to.
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