Family office portfolios should have exposure: Kris Gopalakrishnan

Hyderabad: The newly instituted Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Centre of Excellence for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Start-ups (CIES) works to increase the odds of success of every stakeholder group in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Being an Industry-led initiative, it has the reach, perspective and mandate to work on different components necessary to build and sustain this ecosystem. Knowledge is one such area. The centre organises master classes for different stakeholder groups to bridge the knowledge and capacity gaps, exercising its convening powers to bring experts to these classrooms.

With an intension to sensitise the importance of investing in start-ups and the expected outcome to the family offices, a master class was organised by CII CIES recently, titled 'Why investing in start-ups should be a part of your portfolio'. The faculty comprised Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, CII CIES, co-founder, Infosys and chairman, Axilor Ventures; Tulsi Jayakumar Prof-Eco and chairperson, Family Managed Business, S P Jain Institute of Management and Research; Vikram Gupta, founder and managing partner, Ivy Cap Ventures Advisors Pvt Ltd; Prof Rohan Chinchwadkar, Associate Faculty, Desai Sethi School of Entrepreneurship, IIT Bombay; Sanjay Mehta, founder and partner 100xvc; Paula Mariwala, founder/co-president, Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs India; Ganga S, mentor-in-residence SINE IIT-B; Sharda Balaji, founder, NoVoJuris Legal, and Ranjith Menon, Executive Director, Chiratae Ventures, Indian Advisors.

The master class built the case for start-ups as an investment option for family offices and explored how one could make these investments. R Dinesh, chairman, CII FBN India said, "As family business, it's absolutely important to work with the start-up ecosystem. We as family businesses, can provide entrepreneurial support by business mentoring and if the start-ups are adjacent to our businesses' portfolio, it will be a good value add other than our investments."

Gopalakrishnan shared his reason for choosing to invest in start-ups; from our family office 15 per cent goes into investing in start-ups. I also invest in research which precedes the innovation step because I believe that if you want to create a knowledge economy, the knowledge creation and the ownership of the knowledge is equally important.

The centre has a masterclass lined up in September titled, 'Why corporates should work with start-ups on innovation and R and D'.