What does it take to find alpha in the markets everyone else writes off?

Most investors compete for the same deals in the same few geographies. Varun Rekhi built his career doing the opposite — investing across the emerging economies of the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, where returns supposedly don't exist and where reading the context is the whole game. In Episode 8 of CVCism, he joins hosts Shashvat Somany and Sriharsha Bandaluppi for a wide-ranging conversation on how the world's overlooked markets actually work — and what that teaches you about investing anywhere.

From Delhi to New York, Singapore and London, Varun's journey shaped a simple conviction: the edge in venture isn't a better model, it's seeing what others miss. The three of them trace that idea across fintech, crypto, AI and the mechanics of the asset class itself.

The conversation runs from why public fintech rails can become an "inheritance trap" for the founders who build on them, into how stablecoins are rewiring cross-border money and why that shift has been slower to reach India. It moves through the "broken flywheel" that stalls venture when real exits don't come, what India genuinely got right — starting with its diaspora — and the difference between Bitcoin as an asset and Bitcoin as infrastructure. From there it turns to where the next edge is forming in AI and frontier technology, from compute bottlenecks to photonics, before closing on an honest exchange about what it really means to have a corporate VC on your cap table: when it adds value, and when it doesn't.

For SIG Tattva, it all comes back to one idea: we invest as strategic capital, not tourist capital — with the conviction to back what the crowd overlooks, and the integration to help those companies scale inside real businesses. Varun's instinct for finding value where no one else is looking is the same discipline that drives how we build.

Chapters:

0:00 - Introductions

3:06 - Delhi to Emerging Markets: Varun's journey

5:58 - Finding Alpha & Recalibrating Across Markets

8:43 - Fintech, UPI rails & the "Inheritance Trap"

16:08 - The Stablecoins Sandwich

21:00 - IPOs, liquidity & the Underrated Founder

24:20 - Building Acquirable Businesses

28:06 - Closed rooms & the "quiet middle"

32:14 - Reading founders: the 2-2-2 rule

37:26 - The Broken Flywheel: the "tap," exits & LPs

41:37 - What India Got Right

44:20 - Bitcoin: Asset vs. Infrastructure

47:12 - AI, tokens & frontier tech

50:11 - Reading a CVC on the cap table

51:59 - What makes a great CVC

Hosted by Shashvat Somany and Sriharsha Bandaluppi.

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