Tejas Jahagirdar is an Associate on Lightspeed’s India & SEA Growth team and an All-India Rank holder in the Chartered Accountancy exams. For him, numbers aren’t just arithmetic it’s the current chapter of a company’s story. A growth investor’s task, he believes, is to grasp what that chapter really says and to ask whether the next ones can break free of the past. Numbers show momentum and discipline; the outlook reveals ambition. Tejas works to hold both in view so he never mistakes yesterday’s data for tomorrow’s potential.   Tejas learned that tension first-hand while juggling CA finals with a bootstrapped marketplace for pre-owned goods personally delivering orders during COVID lockdowns. The experience didn’t make him an overnight expert, but it did give him a visceral respect for how hard (and how exhilarating) company-building can be.

He began his career in Deloitte’s Strategy & Business Design practice, helping redesign the IT economy of India’s largest state. A data-backed proposal he worked on secured industry status for IT firms, slicing their energy costs by ~20 percent.

The takeaway: rigorous analysis, paired with long-term conviction, can move even heavyweight institutions. Eager to get closer to founders, he joined Alteria Capital and tasted venture for the first time—whiteboards and conversations with entrepreneurs who explain their moonshots so clearly that a layperson feels the spark. He especially admires builders who pair unwavering self-belief with India’s trademark jugaad-resource- savvy inventiveness that turns constraints into launchpads.

Outside the office, Tejas draws inspiration from athletics and archery. Drawing a bow forces everything but the target to blur, reminding him that disciplined focus – on one metric, one customer insight, one shot – often matters more than seniority.  He tries to bring that same focus to every founder conversation, aiming to be the partner who balances what the numbers say today with the scale a determined team can achieve tomorrow.

“The world was built by people not much smarter than us, so, stay hungry, stay foolish.”