Nitin Pachisia is the Founding Partner of Unshackled Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in immigrant founders while providing visa and employment support. Originally from India, he immigrated to the US in 2005 and built a career that spans Deloitte and experience as VP of Finance at ed-tech startup Kno, Inc., acquired by Intel. In 2014, Nitin co-founded Unshackled Ventures to help entrepreneurs overcome immigration barriers and accelerate growth. Under his leadership, the firm has invested in startups across AI, climate tech, and healthcare, closing multiple funds, including a $35 million Fund III.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [4:26] Nitin Pachisia’ on working in his father’s plastic coloring business from age 12
- [6:38] How trauma shaped Nitin’s work ethic and efficiency
- [12:48] The importance of prioritizing and learning from both good and bad experiences
- [15:14] Why was Nitin eager to leave India and explore global opportunities?
- [20:39] Challenges of balancing a full-time job with starting an e-commerce startup
- [28:17] Why immigrant founders offer unique perspectives and strong risk-taking potential
- [30:44] Launching Unshackled Ventures to unlock entrepreneurial talent stuck in visa limbo
- [35:16] How Nitin evaluates pre-seed founders’ obsession, curiosity, coachability, and velocity
- [40:20] Emotional impact of recent backlash against immigrants
In this episode…
Many ambitious entrepreneurs arrive in the United States with bold ideas but face significant obstacles when trying to start companies. Visa restrictions often force them into jobs unrelated to their skills, limiting their ability to innovate and create jobs. How can these driven individuals turn their vision into reality while navigating a system that seems stacked against them?
Nitin Pachisia, an expert in early-stage investing and immigrant entrepreneurship, shares how determination, clarity of vision, and calculated risk-taking can overcome these challenges. Nitin explains the importance of identifying opportunities aligned with personal goals, building resilience through adversity, and seeking partners and investors who believe in your mission. He also emphasizes evaluating founders based on traits like obsession, curiosity, and self-awareness rather than just industry trends or current traction.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures, about empowering immigrant founders to launch and grow companies. Nitin discusses overcoming visa-related barriers, the mindset needed to identify and invest in high-potential founders, and the value of unconventional career choices.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “Work ethic is the one thing fully in my control, and I can outwork anyone.”
- “It’s the poorest form of disguised unemployment, keeping brilliant minds locked by visas.”
- “I had to learn to prioritize at age 15 to keep my family afloat; that shaped everything.”
- “The best way to learn startups is to build one, even if it’s imperfect.”
- “Immigrant founders bring obsession, velocity, and a new lens to solving big problems.”
Action Steps:
- Support immigrant entrepreneurship through policy or business: Entrepreneurs stuck in immigration limbo are an untapped talent pool. Creating pathways for them not only fuels innovation but also expands job creation exponentially.
- Invest early in founder potential — not just product traction: Early-stage investing should focus on founder obsession, self-awareness, and drive. These traits often outlast early metrics in predicting long-term success.
- Open up deal flow beyond warm intros: Nitin Pachisia’s team accepts pitches directly via their site to remove gatekeeping. VC firms should consider similar practices to democratize access to capital.
- Build founder-first VC models: Beyond money, immigrant founders need infrastructure like visa support and community. Providing this upfront fosters stronger loyalty and startup longevity.
- Reframe trauma as an asset: Nitin used hardship to develop prioritization, clarity, and emotional awareness. Founders and leaders alike can transform personal adversity into strategic strengths.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we are talking about the intersection between immigration and entrepreneurship. I’m talking with a venture capitalist who founded a VC firm that’s focused on investing in immigrant entrepreneurs. His name is Nitin Pachisia. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:18
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:35
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of the show. And you know, every week we talk with smart entrepreneurs, founders and investors in all kinds of companies. We’ve had Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes.
So check out the archives if you want to see more of these types of content. And before we get into this episode, this interview, this episode is brought to you by Rise25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping B2B companies to run their podcasts. We are the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast.
We do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution. And we even invented what some are calling the Wix B2B podcasting. It’s our platform Podcast Co-Pilot, so if you want to learn more about it, you can go to our website or email our team at [email protected]. All right. And my guest here today, as I mentioned, is Nitin Pachisia.
He is the Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures. It’s a VC firm based in Silicon Valley that invests in early stage, immigrant founded startups. And I thought, now is such a great time to have this conversation, given the general conversation that we’ve had about immigration over the years. I think it’s a fascinating look at a VC firm that is really focused on that. And he has an amazing story coming over from India, you know, working, you know, so hard during the year.
Over the years to build a startup while working a full time job. It’s an amazing story. So I’m really excited to have you here. And first of all, let’s go back to your upbringing. You grew up in India, raised in a one room house.
I read, and your father was a hard charging workaholic focused on building up the business when you were born. And you, like many of my guests on this podcast, had a side hustle at a young age, and it was organizing a Diwali fair. So it was kind of like a Christmas fair with games and entertainment. So tell me a little bit about that.
Nitin Pachisia: 02:35
Yeah, it’s good, and thanks for having me. It’s if you’re absolutely right. I grew up in a one room house where everything except the bathroom was inside that one room. And, you know, the way out of that one room into an actual house with separate rooms was my dad’s entrepreneurship. And so I got to experience the benefits and to learn about entrepreneurship from that firsthand personal experience, which then led to this, this festival fair that I organized when I was about 11 years old.
We used to live in this community, kind of like a condo community, and Diwali, which is like Christmas in India. It’s the biggest festival of the year. Yeah. And so I got together with some of my friends within the community who were all older than me, which was kind of common. I usually hung out with older friends.
And we organized this fair for three, three nights, three evenings where we brought in entertainers, people who were running games, food stalls, drink stalls and whatnot. And the goal we had was to have fun, create happiness for, for our society. and in the process, at a minimum, not lose money, but hope that we would make money from it. And it turned out we all, we all left with some Diwali present in terms of savings that we created out of doing this fair. That was truly my very first entrepreneurial as well as community building type effort.
John Corcoran: 04:17
That’s great. And you ended up, I guess, at a young age, starting to work in your dad’s business. What was that like?
Nitin Pachisia: 04:26
Yeah, business. You know, calling it business is pretty glorified. It was truly a workshop type setup where he and, you know, with a couple other workers who work with him had created this business of coloring plastics effectively. So if you’ve ever bought a plastic product, the color that you see comes from a combination of chemicals mixed into raw plastic pellets.
John Corcoran: 04:52
So mixing them together. Okay.
Nitin Pachisia: 04:54
Yeah. And so my dad’s business was figuring out what specific chemical combination gives the specific color to a plastic product. And he was not a chemist, but he got very, very good at figuring this out. And so I started working with him when I was 12. Just helping him got to learn how he composes those, how they’re packed, how they’re delivered.
The money part of it costs. And fortunately, unfortunately, just the way life twisted. When I was about 15, we had a tragedy in the family. And my dad did not want to run the business. I didn’t want my dad to be as motivated about financial success or even financial security as he had been for the first 15 years of my life. And so that was when I had to. Sorry.
John Corcoran: 05:54
Well, I was just going to say, I mean, you know, it’s crazy how sometimes we try to shield ourselves. I don’t know if you have children. I have four kids, but if you try to shield your kids from pain, right? But looking back on my life and, you know, the painful experiences were probably what shaped me the most. So my father lost his job three times.
He was unemployed for a number of months after that, up to a year. And each time we had to move really far away from family and friends. And I think back and it really shaped who I am today. So if you reflect back on this experience for you, you lost your younger brother who died in an accident, a tragic accident. That must have been just horrifying and just really shaped who you are.
Nitin Pachisia: 06:38
It’s amazing how any of these experiences, good or bad aside, just any experience is the way they the way they shape us is in both intellectually as well as emotionally. It’s kind of fascinating to learn, and I had no idea until, like the past couple of years, how much trauma I was carrying from that. Right. So the learned experience of becoming very clear sided because I at 15, having to take over responsibility for the household, just having now, you know, if my dad’s not interested in running this, somebody still got to pay the bills. We still have to run the house.
And that shaped a lot of my efficiency that came in my life. I became very good at prioritizing. I became very clear minded in terms of what I can’t waste time on. I learned a lot about business from that experience, and at the same time, I also learned as a coping mechanism of being a very cerebral person versus being an emotional person. And it’s only in the last few years that I’ve, I’ve gotten the resources and the support to accept the trauma, to accept the emotional effects that took place as well and accept them or address them, learn from them.
But you’re absolutely right. I have two kids, 16 and 14, and I’m sure that the experiences they’re going through right now are going to shape a lot of their life. Yeah. Right. So I can’t change, I can’t control everything that happens around me.
But it gave me from an opportunity standpoint. It gave me the opportunity to muster up the courage and take care of the people that I needed to take care of and in the process learn a lot about business, which is much more than what I could learn.
John Corcoran: 08:54
Yeah, I was going to.
Nitin Pachisia: 08:55
Ask you or MBA or whatever.
John Corcoran: 08:57
I was going to ask you about that. You know, as you think back on this period of time before and after the tragic accident, are there lessons that you bring to the work that you do today that come from, you know, hearkening back to that time that you were in your father’s workshop mixing chemicals and selling?