[YSTV] "Indian mobile startups need to be really lean for the next 18-24 months," Dev Khare, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Dev Khare is an investor with Lightspeed Venture Partners in India since 2011 and invests primarily in the Internet and mobile sectors. Previously, Dev was at Venrock, a leading Silicon Valley-based venture firm, where he served on the boards of Aha Mobile (acquired by Harman), Appia, Lavante, Slideshare (acquired by LinkedIn) and Turnhere. An MBA from Harvard Business School, Dev has had a luminary career and here, we talk to him about some of the key areas in the mobile space:

Dev begins with an introduction to Lightspeed and their focus areas as investors. He talks a bit about "MobiSparks- The Discovery Platform for NextGen Mobile Startups" (2012 list) and goes on to talk about App Discovery and App Monetization.

"Going forward, we're less optimistic about startups that rely on carriers for distribution and more interested in ones that are going directly to consumers," informs Dev. In the B2C model, app monetization becomes an issue for which Dev says that in the near future, the model that'll evolve won't be very different from what we see in the US currently. He also talks about how different categories of apps have different revenue models.

Dev details on what mobile startups should focus on and the areas they're looking at. 2014 is when the monetization part might really pick up... Watch the video to know more...

 Dev Khare was also in our list of prolific investor tweeps and he blogs at NextWala.