Mensa Brands: Screening 200+ Founders for the Investments Team
Ran structured intake calls with hundreds of founders, summarizing findings weekly and shaping which deals advanced to the next stage.
Yash Haralalka
Associate at Cumulative Capital Private Limited
From their time as
Investments Team
Mensa Brands • 2022 - 2022
Overview
Yash joined the Investments Team at Mensa Brands as an intern, where his primary responsibility was running the initial screen on inbound and outbound founder conversations.
The Story
Yash joined the Investments Team at Mensa Brands as an intern, where his primary responsibility was running the initial screen on inbound and outbound founder conversations.
Each call ran 45 minutes to an hour. He covered business model, revenue model, GTM, market size, competitive landscape, unit economics, future plans, and the differentiation of the product, building a structured picture of each company from a single conversation.
Over the course of his time there, he spoke with over 200 founders. Each week, he summarized his findings across all conversations and presented them to the team in a weekly review. The team would then collectively decide which founders warranted a second or third call.
The criteria he applied were a mix of quantitative and qualitative: companies needed to be doing north of 15 crore rupees in annual revenue, be profitable, and be open to the Mensa Brands acquisition model. He also screened for portfolio conflicts and made subjective calls on scalability, which he backed with market precedents when challenged by the team.
When his view on a founder's scalability differed from the team's, he grounded his case in comparable outcomes: naming companies in the same category that had reached significant scale, establishing that the market had precedent even if the specific outcome was uncertain.