The several success stories of Zoho, Freshworks, Browserstack, Icertis who have all reached several hundred million dollars in ARR with most of their product built in India give proof points for the possibility to build large scale SaaS companies coming out of India. Unlike the 90s when software was a one-time sale, the subscription nature of SaaS pricing ensures that the interests of the customer and the software vendor are well aligned. Today, there are over a hundred thousand software companies serving over two thousand categories with over five hundred billion dollars spent on software purchases. The SaaS industry is just one hundred fifty to two hundred billion dollars, so there’s another three hundred billion dollars of traditional on-prem software that needs to be replaced. Another opportunity exists in creating a product for the customers currently being served by custom software solutions built by the large IT services companies. At the same time, new industries are seeing digitization, creating more opportunities for building software. In terms of liquidity as well, SaaS as a sector offers significant options- from an active M&amp;A market and active interest from venture capital and private equity to fund growth to several examples of companies going public. Krish ends by quoting Jason Lemkin, “In a SaaS business, once you cross $10M with good momentum, you basically become unkillable because of the recurring nature of the business”

The several success stories of Zoho, Freshworks, Browserstack, Icertis who have all reached several hundred million dollars in ARR with most of their product built in India give proof points for the possibility to build large scale SaaS companies coming out of India. Unlike the 90s when software was a one-time sale, the subscription nature of SaaS pricing ensures that the interests of the customer and the software vendor are well aligned. Today, there are over a hundred thousand software companies serving over two thousand categories with over five hundred billion dollars spent on software purchases. The SaaS industry is just one hundred fifty to two hundred billion dollars, so there’s another three hundred billion dollars of traditional on-prem software that needs to be replaced. Another opportunity exists in creating a product for the customers currently being served by custom software solutions built by the large IT services companies. At the same time, new industries are seeing digitization, creating more opportunities for building software. In terms of liquidity as well, SaaS as a sector offers significant options- from an active M&amp;A market and active interest from venture capital and private equity to fund growth to several examples of companies going public. Krish ends by quoting Jason Lemkin, “In a SaaS business, once you cross $10M with good momentum, you basically become unkillable because of the recurring nature of the business”

INSIGHTS Podcast Series

INSIGHTS#46 - Building SaaS business out of India for the global market: Shekhar Kirani & Krish Subramanian

In the first episode of 2020's&nbsp;#InsightsPodcast&nbsp;series, we take a look back to round up the learnings that 2019’s series left us with.We kick-start 2020’s&nbsp;#InsightsPodcast&nbsp;series with a special episode that offers a quick roundup of our 2019 podcasts and presents the top 12 highly recommended insights for entrepreneurs.&nbsp; Finding the right opportunity&nbsp; The bare essential task of identifying the right opportunity is something that every founding team must go through.&nbsp; 1.Farid Ahsan of Sharechat shares how he and his co-founders went about discovering the idea. “We started observing why people were making WhatsApp groups and sharing content on them.”&nbsp; 2.Ritesh Arora of Browserstack shares the importance of thinking global from early on, helping expand the opportunity set for the startup.&nbsp; 3.Kunal Shah of Cred shares his framework on how startups can validate whether their idea is creating a delta change in consumer behaviour and emphasises the importance of picking a market opportunity with good tailwinds. “Great product-market fits even with mediocre founders create a lot of value while terrible product-market fits with great founders can never create value. Fighting headwinds only burns fuel.” Building a team and culture to go after that idea The team forms the building block of any organisation and is an integral contributor to the success of a startup. A good culture keeps the team motivated to keep going after the problem.&nbsp; 4.Naveen Tewari of Inmobi talks about the importance of having a co-founder in the roller-coaster of a journey that entrepreneurship comprises. “Most of the moments in the journey are low moments. The co-founder’s role is to bring you out of these low moments that you’re in and vice versa.”&nbsp; 5.Binny Bansal of Flipkart shares about the importance of being willing to ‘let go’ and empowering your team. “We realised that only way to scale the company was to hire people like us, to do the things that we do - there were going to be hundreds of things to do and we would need hundreds of people would need to work like we work, every day.”&nbsp; 6.Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks talks about focusing about culture and building a work environment that motivates and inspires the team. “Anybody can create a happy work environment, but the real happiness is when people really feel that they’re playing to their strengths, the job is tapping their potential and giving them an opportunity to learn, and that they have managers who they see as role models.” Raising money and building a sustainable company With a boundless vision comes the need to find the right support, and finding the right investor can really help a startup.&nbsp; 7.Harsh Jain of Dream11 talks about the advantage of meeting investors ahead of fundraising. “Meet VCs six months or a year before raising money and get honest, open feedback. When the journey and progress is shared with VCs, they’re much more vested.” &nbsp;8. Deep Kalra of Makemytrip talks about the importance of unit economics and scaling sustainably. “Irrespective of the kind of business, you should not be losing money on a variable cost basis.” Key lessons for founders’ growth In the greater scheme of the startup journey, the founder’s individual self often gets ignored. Here are some key insights on keeping a founder’s growth on track. 9. Shradha Sharma of YourStory talks about the founder’s growth journey being more internal and how entrepreneurship is a journey of patience and perseverance. “You have to internally reflect very deeply on what you want.” 10. Nandan Nilekani of Infosys and the man behind the Aadhaar programme talks about the importance of being execution-focused. 11. Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo talks about the importance of perseverance. 12. Dheeraj Pandey of Nutanix shares his valuable insights on balancing family life along with running a startup.

In the first episode of 2020's&nbsp;#InsightsPodcast&nbsp;series, we take a look back to round up the learnings that 2019’s series left us with.We kick-start 2020’s&nbsp;#InsightsPodcast&nbsp;series with a special episode that offers a quick roundup of our 2019 podcasts and presents the top 12 highly recommended insights for entrepreneurs.&nbsp; Finding the right opportunity&nbsp; The bare essential task of identifying the right opportunity is something that every founding team must go through.&nbsp; 1.Farid Ahsan of Sharechat shares how he and his co-founders went about discovering the idea. “We started observing why people were making WhatsApp groups and sharing content on them.”&nbsp; 2.Ritesh Arora of Browserstack shares the importance of thinking global from early on, helping expand the opportunity set for the startup.&nbsp; 3.Kunal Shah of Cred shares his framework on how startups can validate whether their idea is creating a delta change in consumer behaviour and emphasises the importance of picking a market opportunity with good tailwinds. “Great product-market fits even with mediocre founders create a lot of value while terrible product-market fits with great founders can never create value. Fighting headwinds only burns fuel.” Building a team and culture to go after that idea The team forms the building block of any organisation and is an integral contributor to the success of a startup. A good culture keeps the team motivated to keep going after the problem.&nbsp; 4.Naveen Tewari of Inmobi talks about the importance of having a co-founder in the roller-coaster of a journey that entrepreneurship comprises. “Most of the moments in the journey are low moments. The co-founder’s role is to bring you out of these low moments that you’re in and vice versa.”&nbsp; 5.Binny Bansal of Flipkart shares about the importance of being willing to ‘let go’ and empowering your team. “We realised that only way to scale the company was to hire people like us, to do the things that we do - there were going to be hundreds of things to do and we would need hundreds of people would need to work like we work, every day.”&nbsp; 6.Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks talks about focusing about culture and building a work environment that motivates and inspires the team. “Anybody can create a happy work environment, but the real happiness is when people really feel that they’re playing to their strengths, the job is tapping their potential and giving them an opportunity to learn, and that they have managers who they see as role models.” Raising money and building a sustainable company With a boundless vision comes the need to find the right support, and finding the right investor can really help a startup.&nbsp; 7.Harsh Jain of Dream11 talks about the advantage of meeting investors ahead of fundraising. “Meet VCs six months or a year before raising money and get honest, open feedback. When the journey and progress is shared with VCs, they’re much more vested.” &nbsp;8. Deep Kalra of Makemytrip talks about the importance of unit economics and scaling sustainably. “Irrespective of the kind of business, you should not be losing money on a variable cost basis.” Key lessons for founders’ growth In the greater scheme of the startup journey, the founder’s individual self often gets ignored. Here are some key insights on keeping a founder’s growth on track. 9. Shradha Sharma of YourStory talks about the founder’s growth journey being more internal and how entrepreneurship is a journey of patience and perseverance. “You have to internally reflect very deeply on what you want.” 10. Nandan Nilekani of Infosys and the man behind the Aadhaar programme talks about the importance of being execution-focused. 11. Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo talks about the importance of perseverance. 12. Dheeraj Pandey of Nutanix shares his valuable insights on balancing family life along with running a startup.

INSIGHTS #45 - 2019 Roundup - 12 Insights for Founders

In this edition of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, we have with us Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, both of whom were early members of Facebook's engineering team. Aditya was the first Director of Product Engineering at Facebook. He also co-founded Cove, a modern collaboration software company that was acquired by Dropbox, where he went on to join as the VP of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer. He was also on the board of Flipkart. Ruchi was the first female engineer at Facebook, and went on to co-found Cove along with Aditya and Akhil Wable. Cove was a collaboration, coordination and communication product for organisations and communities. On acquisition by Dropbox, she joined in as the VP of Operations. She also established South Park Commons, a residential and professional tech space that functions similarly to a hackerspace. Ruchi graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in electrical computer engineering in 2004, a time when it was tough for international students to find a job in the US. While extending her stay at the university so she could interview with more companies, Ruchi became a power user of Facebook, was fascinated about what they were building and went on to join them as their first female engineer. Growing up in Southeast Asia, Aditya graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in computer science and joined Facebook as one of its first five engineers. Facebook's hacker culture Aditya and Ruchi share their Facebook experience, including being part of some of the earliest architecture - the Facebook search engine and the News Feed. Giving a glimpse into Facebook's hacker culture from the early days, Ruchi and Aditya share how the engineers were always into building something- a minimum usable version- much before the concept of MVP was talked about. Aditya talks about the importance of focusing on tooling and infrastructure to be able to deploy faster even at scale with a conscious effort to improve iteration speed and tracking it just as closely as the business metrics. Ruchi speaks about the importance of adding light-weight processes that are built for the work environment of your company, and updating these processes every four months to make the product management practice in the organisation stronger. After Facebook, Ruchi and Aditya decided to start up on their own to change the way organisations communicate and collaborate with Cove. The startup went on to become Dropbox's first acquisition. Culture of original thinking Discussing the pros and cons of starting a company with your partner, Ruchi highlights the importance of being cognizant of each other's strengths and weaknesses, making sure that one partner isn't dragging the other along and that both want to participate, and finally having a clear understanding from the start on who's taking the lead. On the hiring front, Ruchi says, "When companies find product-market fit, everything feels like it is falling apart. You need to hire enough people to keep things going. At that point, most people are often looking for the unicorn hire - someone who is perfect when the company is just 50 people but can also scale with the company when it gets to 100 people, is an individual contributor, and an excellent manager. It becomes impossible to find this unicorn hire at that stage. People need to reset expectations on how this person can help your company today and in the next one to two years, and be comfortable that their roles might evolve over the next few years." Aditya and Ruchi end by sharing tips on how they manage their personal lives and their excitement for the way the Indian startup ecosystem is shaping up.

INSIGHTS #44 Aditya and Ruchi share their experience from early days at Facebook and Dropbox

In this episode of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Chairperson and MD of Biocon, talks about starting up and her strategic shift to the biopharma industry, and gives young entrepreneurs advice on innovation, problem-solving, and mentorship. We continue with the #INSIGHTSPodcast series and on this episode, we have with us Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Chairperson and Managing Director of Biocon. A pioneer of the biotech industry in India and the head of the country’s leading biotechnology enterprise, Kiran is a highly respected business leader and has been named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. She’s a recognised global thought leader in biotechnology and has been awarded the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan, two of India’s highest civilian honours. Today, Biocon is one of Asia’s largest biopharmaceutical companies — 12,000-people strong with 30 percent women, most of whom are scientists. It focuses on diabetes and cancer as thrust areas and has a vision of making global impact on healthcare by providing affordable access to life-saving drugs. On this podcast, Kiran talks about her journey, building Biocon, how she started out, built a great team, and went on to take the company to IPO. She also shares insights on how founders can find a good work-life balance by prioritising what matters most to them. An accidental entrepreneur Kiran calls herself an “accidental entrepreneur”, starting Biocon when she was discriminated against as a woman while applying for the job of a brewmaster. She set up Biocon in 1978, initially focusing on the enzyme industry, and made a strategic shift to the biopharmaceutical industry as it was a much bigger opportunity — riding the shift in cancer care from chemotherapy to immunotherapy. Starting up at the age of 25, in a field that was not understood by many, raising capital was not an easy task. Especially at a time when a woman entrepreneur without collateral was considered a high financial and business risk. Hiring talent was another challenge. As Kiran started building her company, she aggressively pursued building the team, hiring people with complementary skills to form the core team, and incentivised them with rich stock options. A bottomline-driven business In 2004, Kiran did a lot of roadshows and went IPO, to raise capital for the business. She wasn’t concerned about raising the value of the company, but made sure it was profitable in the last four quarters before going public and had clear visibility on profits in the foreseeable future. She says today’s companies are topline-driven in contrast to her business that is “bottomline-driven”. Opportunities to learn On her personal growth, Kiran says she used her team as a think-tank and used her mentors to draw inspiration and for brainstorming. “Mentors in an entrepreneur’s journey should only help stay focused. I don’t think any entrepreneur should keep going back to a mentor asking ‘what should I do next’? That is not entrepreneurship,” she says. “Entrepreneurs need to script their own journey, figure out their own things, and solve problems. If you keep running back to your mentor at the drop of your hat, you’re not an entrepreneur. A true entrepreneur is a risk-taker, problem-solver, a person who’s willing to face challenges and failure.” Kiran says she encourages young entrepreneurs to not worry about making mistakes and see them as opportunities to learn. Adding to her advice, she urges them not to wait to develop the perfect product and to instead go to market first. Continuing to reiterate how AI can help transform healthcare, she also gives her take on work-life balance. Kiran believes the answer to this question is only one: “Prioritisation”. Tune in to the podcast to hear more interesting insights from Kiran’s journey of launching and growing Biocon.

INSIGHTS #43 — Kiran Mazumdar Shaw shares her Biocon journey

INSIGHTS #42 Madhavan Ramanujam of Simon-Kucher gives his take on monetising innovation by Accel

INSIGHTS #42 Madhavan Ramanujam of Simon-Kucher gives his take on monetising innovation

In this episode of #InsightsPodcast series, we have Dheeraj Pandey, Chairman and CEO of Nutanix, taking us through his journey of building a generational company, its IPO story, and how he built a culture of reading and learning at his organisation. As we continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, we head to Silicon Valley to meet Dheeraj Pandey, Chairman and CEO, Nutanix. The company helps customers modernise their data centres and run applications of any scale on the cloud. Dheeraj co-founded Nutanix a decade ago and took the company public on NASDAQ in 2017. Today, the company trades at a $5 billion+ market cap. Dheeraj’s entrepreneurial spirit has been recognised with several prestigious awards including Dell’s Founders 50 and E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, Silicon Valley. On this podcast, Dheeraj takes us through his journey of building a generational company, his vision of making computing invisible, and the Nutanix IPO journey. Dheeraj grew up in Patna, finished his undergrad as a Computer Science major at IIT Kanpur, and then decided to pursue a PhD at UT Austin. He completed his master’s and dropped out of the PhD programme to pursue a career in the computer science industry. Before starting Nutanix, Dheeraj spent a decade working in the industry with stints at a couple of startups and one large company (Oracle) building software for data servers. Read to grow Talking about his transition from engineering roles to that of a CEO to build a business, Dheeraj gives an analogy of how the product and the go-to-market strategy are like the heart and brain of the business and over time he learnt to straddle both ends of the spectrum driven by his passion for building the bridge between technology and business. Dheeraj has always believed in learning from the experiences shared by his advisors and is an avid reader. Learning from other entrepreneurial journeys, he believes, gives one precedence and courage to deal with the highs and lows of the roller coaster ride that building a business can be. He explains that as a company, Nutanix has built an organisation culture that cares about reading. “It gives you courage, parallels, frameworks, and principles to think about. It’s a great de-stressor,” he says. Disrupt to stay relevant Switching gears and sharing lessons for entrepreneurs, Dheeraj starts by talking about the importance of disrupting yourself with a long-term view versus becoming irrelevant. He says, “You should act as a competitor to yourself because if you don’t, someone else will, and it will be a lot more uncomfortable to deal with the unknowns of a competitor.” This was realised at Nutanix when they decided to give away their software to their hardware partners allowing them to compete with Nutanix (shaving of 26 percent of top line) and again when Nutanix made the shift from software to subscription. Both the times involved a complete change in business model at the scale of a publicly traded company. These bold moves allowed Nutanix to disrupt themselves and extend their reach, stay more relevant as the customer’s tastes changed. Dheeraj talks about how businesses/entrepreneurs who postpone gratification and think about long-term gains mostly constitute large outcomes. The largest companies have taken long-term bets, something that the mob doesn’t have the courage or fortitude to do. That said, long-term goals must be check-pointed with short-term ones, without losing sight of the larger picture. This for Nutanix came out in the form of the 5Hs- Hungry, Humble, Honest, Heart, and Humour. On a closing note, Dheeraj shares how at the end of the day, family is as much a partner in the entrepreneurial journey as you are. “You are at war out there and when you go home you don’t want to be at war. Hence it is so important to reduce that friction. You have to believe that your professional goal is something that you share with your spouse.”

INSIGHTS #41 — Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix on thinking long-term to build a generational company

As we continue with the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, on this edition we have with us Hans Tung, Managing Partner at GGV Capital. Hans, who is a seven-time Forbes Midas Lister and has invested in 15 unicorns over the last decade-and-a-half, leads the US operations of GGV Capital. Some of his investments include shopping app Wish, second-hand marketplace OfferUp, Chinese social commerce company Xiaohongshu, workplace tool Slack, electronics maker Xiaomi, Chinese super app Meituan-Dianping, scooter sharing company Lime, among others. On this podcast, Hans shares his journey of witnessing first-hand the three phases of the Chinese startup ecosystem: from PC to mobile phones to high speed internet powered smartphones. Born in Taiwan and having immigrated to the US at 13, Hans went to college at Stanford and took up a career in finance. After stints in banking and growth investing, and spending a few years as an entrepreneur, Hans saw the value in moving to China where he could make use of his understanding of both the East and the West. He joined Bessemer Venture Partners marking the start of his career in venture capital. He went on to spend a few years with QiMing Venture Partners before moving back to the Bay Area with GGV Capital. Recalling his China days, Hans talks about how the time he went to China (mid-2000s) was seen as being either five years too late - as the PC internet era started in 1999 - or five years too early - as the iPhone was yet to be announced. He did learn though that the Chinese startup ecosystem was fiercer in terms of competition than the Silicon Valley, contrary to the popular belief that the discrimination against US companies made China a protective turf for starting up. The Chinese ecosystem grew hand in hand with the consumption pattern of the emerging middle class, urbanisation, and government initiatives focused on improving the infrastructure. By working with internet companies across both the PC era (the likes of Baidu and Tencent) and the smartphone era (the likes of Xiaomi), Hans learnt the importance of providing solutions that are cheap in terms of cost but high quality in terms of customer satisfaction and serving the mass market. While those forming the mass market have lower disposable incomes, they bring in the advantage of having more time on their hands, hence spend more time on a company's services. This was true in the case of Alibaba as well. Jack Ma's belief was that offline marketplaces existed because everyone didn't have everything. He focused hard on getting more suppliers than anyone on his platform so that over time consumers came to his shop not for cheaper prices but for higher choice of selection. Having worked with several successful founders, a common thread that Hans has seen across them is that they are all extremely driven, passionate about things they do, and have a vision that is transformational and inspiring for others to be willing to join the journey.  "They tend to be extremely thoughtful and analytical, are level-headed, and open-minded to try a lot of different things and iterate quickly," he says. On his thoughts on India, Hans shares his excitement for the Indian ecosystem, expecting to see many more companies from India that go global following the lead of OYO. On a closing note, Hans has a movie recommendation for Indian founders in People's Republic of Desire, and quotes Kobe Bryant:  "A lot of people think like 'if I have to choose between vegetables and ice cream'. I love eating vegetables. I don't mind getting up four o'clock in the morning to train for 20 years in a row. That's the fun part and always being in the heat of the NBA championship year after year. That's what makes me happy." The best founder has that characteristic in them.

INSIGHTS #40 - Hans Tung on learnings from the Chinese start-up ecosystem

We continue with the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, and on this edition we have Hari Menon, Co-founder and CEO of BigBasket, India’s largest online food and grocery store, which serves 10 million customers in 30 cities today. In this podcast, Hari takes us through the journey of starting and scaling BigBasket and gives a behind-the-curtain glimpse of the years of grocery business experience that led to building an expertise in grocery supply chain and culminated in building India's leading online grocer. Starting up in the 90s: too early to market Born and brought up in Mumbai, Hari graduated from BITS Pilani and chose to start working right away. A few jobs old, and exposed to the internet boom during his stint at Wipro, Hari decided to start Fabmart in 1999, an ecommerce company that started by selling cassettes online, and quickly diversified to books, jewellery, toys, and groceries. This was at a time when the Indian consumer was still wary of transacting online, there were no payment gateways, and deliveries were difficult. The business model was too early for the market and the dot com bust made it difficult to raise more capital from investors. The team decided to leverage the platform developed and the existing warehouse set up to pivot into a physical grocery chain built on a franchisee model that they scaled from 15 stores in Bangalore to 200+ stores in South India before getting acquired by Aditya Birla Group. Bigbasket: timing it right the second time The founding team went on to do different things before coming together again half a decade later, when the market had caught up with their initial vision- broadband had picked up, payment gateways were there and Flipkart was demonstrating serious traction in terms of online transactions- the time was right for ‘BigBasket’. Calling upon the supply chain expertise in the complex grocery business from Fabmart days and with a focus on setting up a robust backend technology, the team’s second bid at making Indians shop for groceries online picked steam very quickly. “We expanded fast because one thing we told ourselves was that if we did get into a city, we would do the entire city. Secondly, we would start with fruits and vegetables because that was the toughest one to solve for in terms of supply chain (due to the highly perishable nature).” Today Bigbasket is the fifth largest grocer in the country after offline giants D-Mart, Reliance, Big Bazaar, and More. Hari’s near term vision is to take it to top three. Talking about personal growth as CEO, Hari talks about how valuing trust and attitude over skills and knowledge while getting people to join, obsessing about process (BigBasket’s head of HR has authored a book called ‘Say No to Jugaad’) and being passionate about the grocery business has helped take Bigbasket to where it is today. He says that knowing when to pivot and when not to pivot is something every entrepreneur must learn- instead of being emotional about the original idea which at times goes against the company's interests. Last but not the least, he emphasizes the importance of having an unshakable conviction on the business, something that helped BigBasket survive the test of time and emerge as a successful business today. “It's all about getting that emotion out and saying, you know let's pivot ​but you won't get it because you're so emotionally attached to the idea that you're not even thinking right. Then it's important to believe in your model in spite of giants and large investors coming in and pumping money. The whole world was talking about SoftBank, Tiger backing asset-light models but we stuck our ground on the need for inventory control. Since then, there really has been no looking back.” On a closing note, Hari shares his fondness for cricket and music, something that is well known in the startup ecosystem. Tune in to the podcast to learn more about Hari’s roller coaster journey.

INSIGHTS #39 - Hari Menon on scaling Bigbasket and disrupting the grocery industry

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition we have with us Manu Kumar Jain, Managing Director of Xiaomi India- a leader in smartphones, televisions, and many other products. Manu walks us through the journey of setting up Xiaomi in India and scaling it to become one of the best mobile phone brands in India in a very capital efficient way. Starting by talking about his childhood days, Manu remembers growing up in Meerut in a large family with a business background, where the ultimate aspiration was to set up shop- the larger the shop the more successful one was. Unlike most of his cousins, Manu decided to pursue engineering from IIT Delhi and then did his MBA from IIM Calcutta, post which he worked with Mckinsey for five years before co-founding Jabong. He ran Jabong for 2 years before moving out and then joined Xiaomi to start their India business. Talking about Early days at Jabong, Manu gets candid about how his first thoughts on selling fashion online was that “it was a stupid idea”, but after some persuasion from his co-founders he was able to take the leap of faith, only to get pleasantly surprised that a lot of people were willing to buy shoes and clothes online. Riding on the wave of mobile first online consumers, Jabong grew from thousand orders a day to ten thousand orders a day, to become a top two player in the online fashion space. Hugely fascinated about mobile as a category and having heard about a Chinese company trying to do things differently by online as the primary channel for sales, Manu connected with the founders through his network out of pure interest to learn more about the company’s journey. After multiple exchanges between Manu and the founders, sharing learnings with each other on the China and India landscape, Lin Bin, Co-Founder & President of Xiaomi, offered Manu to join them to start their India business. At a time when India had more than 300 smartphone brands, Xiaomi went ahead with an online only sales strategy when everyone else was spending huge marketing dollars on advertising and sponsorships. From very early on, the expectation from the board was to be profitable and not burn at a day-to-day operations level. This led Xiaomi to take a product focused approach and leverage social media to take its consumer delight story to the masses. What others spent on marketing, Xiaomi spent on quality of the phone giving the customer a better hardware and a better camera. “We can’t make more than five percent margin from any of our hardware products by board resolution. We believe in a concept called as honest price. We cut down all possible costs like marketing, distribution, working capital, inventory cost and pass on that benefit to the user without keeping a profit margin for ourselves.” The social media angle that bolstered Xiaomi’s rise to the top continues to be a core part of today’s focus. Mi community today has more than 70 million MAUs and physical fan clubs in more than 25 cities. Finally, sharing learnings for young entrepreneurs, Manu talks about the importance of having mentors who do not have a vested interest in your company or you, so that the conversations are brutal and honest. Last but not the least, Manu stresses about the importance of investing in the team and ensuring that good performers grow within the company, from both and equity and cash perspective. Spending time with the team has always been in the top three priorities for Manu. “One-on-one or group sessions are not only meant for year-end appraisals but should be a part of your weekly and monthly schedule time. And these are not performance reviews but to ask how they're feeling, how they're growing and for discussing about stuff informally too, within work and outside work.” Tune in to the podcast to hear more interesting bits and insights from Manu’s journey of scaling Xiaomi to its today’s scale.

INSIGHTS #38 — Manu Kumar Jain on scaling Xiaomi and disrupting the India electronics space

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition we have Deep Kalra, Founder and Group CEO of MakeMyTrip, India’s leading online travel company. Today, the company has become the go-to-site for majority of Indians looking to book flight tickets, hotel reservations, rail and bus tickets. In this podcast, Deep takes us through his journey of building MakeMyTrip at a time when internet adoption was still early. He talks about how he helped sail through challenging times to eventually list MMT on NASDAQ in 2010 and finally grow it to today’s scale of $2.4 billion market cap. Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug Born in Hyderabad and grown up in Delhi, Deep graduated from St. Stephen’s College and completed his MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. Later, he took up a career in banking where he spent three years before taking the bite on his first entrepreneurial pursuit- setting up bowling alleys in India to tap into the expected boom in family entertainment. Not tasting much success, Deep decided to go back to the corporate life, joining GE Capital as VP of Business Development, when he was introduced formally to the internet and the enormous potential it had to significantly impact our everyday lives. Deep decided to take the plunge into entrepreneurship again, and in April 2000,- MakeMyTrip (MMT) was born. Convinced that his internet venture was bound for success, Deep looked for business verticals that were ripe for internet disruption. He arrived at travel as the industry that was poised for an upstart to take over using the power of internet and because- “travel is fun”. Lessons from the dotcom bust Early into the journey, the dotcom bust happened, making it extremely challenging to raise external funding for a business model that was purely built around the internet. At MMT, the team was constantly working with two to three months of runway in terms of expenses, salaries, rent etc. However, this tough phase turned out to be a blessing in disguise in retrospect, as it forced the team to focus on unit economics from very early on. Another learning from that phase was the importance of patience. “No great company has been built very quickly. It takes time to set up a decent company in India, and probably 10 years to become something. So be patient. Don’t look back for the first 4-5 years. Once you are onto something tweak, pivot, keep your ears to the ground, pick up messages, do the right thing but at the first sign of winter do not back up. It takes a lot of courage to do it all over again. You probably won’t do it all over again”, Deep says. Through the tough phase, MMT focussed on the NRI segment who were early adopters due to previous experience of transacting online, but in 2005, thanks to IRCTC, the Indian consumer became more comfortable with the idea of purchasing online, which combined with the advent of Low Cost Carriers in India offered MMT a unique opportunity to revolutionize the travel booking industry. Going public in the US Having raised four rounds of institutional funding from 2005 to 2009, Deep decided to take MMT to IPO in the US market, where it was a huge hit, appreciating 90 percent on the first day taking MMT to almost a $1B valuation. The listing enabled MMT to enter the hallowed league of Booking.com, Expedia, and the others. More details on the IPO journey in the podcast. On a closing note, Deep shares his views on how the Indian markets are opening up making it easier for companies to go public, but that companies need to fundamentally focus on building for scale and not look at IPO as an end goal. “So, I would encourage all entrepreneurs, when they are deliberating an IPO to ask themselves a very odd sounding question- Why do you want to IPO?”, Deep ends with a question for scaled founders to ponder on.

INSIGHTS #37 – Deep Kalra on building India’s first consumer internet success- MakeMyTrip

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series with a path-setter: Naveen Tewari, Co-Founder and CEO of Inmobi, India’s first unicorn. Naveen started a product company at a time when most people weren’t thinking about it, went global and cracked the China market, and is now starting a group of companies under Mobi. In this podcast, he shares a number of great lessons for first-time founders, from how to go through pivots successfully and the role that co-founders play in maintaining morale in an organisation, to scaling internationally and building a culture that is deeply enriching for the employees who’re part of your startup journey. Naveen kicks things off by talking about the three businesses under InMobi Group: InMobi Marketing Cloud, Glance, and TruFactor. InMobi Marketing Cloud, the group’s business that everyone associates the brand with and that has been built over the last decade, has a strong presence across the US, China, and the rest of the world. The second business, Glance, is an AI-led content discovery platform at screen zero (ie the lock screen) that hopes to change the way content is consumed on mobile platforms. The third business, TruFactor, is a platform for data scientists, a bet on a future where data will drive business strategy, oftentimes requiring data scientists to solve complex decision-making problems for the company. The outlier Rewinding back to the early days, Naveen talks about being born in an intense academic environment with many family members taking up teaching roles at IIT, and how he took a whole different path of joining management consulting instead of the expected PHD or exploring further studies. Post three years at McKinsey, Naveen did his MBA at Harvard Business School, which he calls “the most pivotal two years” of his life, enabling him to go beyond the restrictive thinking of a middle-class boy by establishing belief in his own abilities and that anyone can do big things in life. After business school, Naveen dabbled in the startup world for a couple of years before starting a venture in the SMS-based search business only to realise that the world was headed towards internet usage with mobiles becoming more prevalent. The beginning He speaks about how this phase, before hitting upon the final idea that led to success, was a very tough one — beset with societal pressure and self-doubt. The failures brought in lots of personal learning, but the phase was nevertheless a painful one, especially in the first two years when Naveen didn’t have co-founders. He adds, “Always have a co-founder because you know in these journeys there are a lot of low moments. Actually, most of them are low moments and the co-founder’s job is not to really go ahead and hit you on strategy. It’s far more important for a co-founder to bring you out of these moments that you are constantly in, and vice-versa.” On the early days of InMobi, Naveen talks about how he saw the need for businesses to invest in advertising systems once internet became prevalent, and this is the use case that they went after. They quickly realised that India was a small market at the time and expanded to Asia, before going global. The first markets that they entered were ones where they garnered contacts in, expanding from one new market to another, solving for the immediate next step that was planned out for the next 6–12 months.

INSIGHTS #36 Naveen Tewari on building InMobi as a global leader in mobile advertising

In this episode of the #InsightsPodcast series, we have Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder of Infosys and the man who put in place India’s Aadhaar identification system. He tells us about how his time at IIT-Bombay honed his skills, growing Infosys, working on the UIDAI project, and why the ‘thinker-doer’ approach works. We continue with our #InsightsPodcast, and on this edition have with us one of India’s biggest business legends, Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder of Infosys, its current Non-Executive Chairman and the brain behind Aadhaar while serving as the Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India. He is a Padma Bhushan awardee and was listed by TIME magazine among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006 and 2009. In this episode, Nandan shares experiences from both, his business days and from his more recent journey of public service. Nandan starts by giving a glimpse into his formative years - of growing up in Bengaluru and then Dharwad, and making it to IIT-Bombay without access to any coaching classes. He credits his IIT days with the social skills and confidence that helped him take risk and build a large company like Infosys. While at the college, he dabbled in the many social activities and played a key role in organising IIT-Bombay’s cultural fest, ‘Mood Indigo’. Talking about his early days, from meeting Narayan Murthy while interviewing for Patni Computer Systems to co-founding Infosys in 1981, building India’s first software campus in Bangalore in 1992 and going public in 1993, Nandan says the vision to build a globally competitive technology company out of India and the planning for scale by focusing on building an aspirational brand for employees and setting audacious goals for growth helped scale the way Infosys did. “When we were a $3-5 million company, we talked about becoming a $100 million company. When we were approaching $100 million in revenue, we asked what it takes to reach a billion dollars in revenue.” Nandan talks about how having a five-year blue sky plan, three-year strategic plan and one-year operating plan helped ensure the right mix of nimbleness of a startup and the professionalism of a large corporate. More on the entrepreneurial journey at Infosys, and reimagining it as a cloud service, in the podcast. Thinking and doing Talking about his next entrepreneurial stint as employee #1 at UIDAI, Nandan elaborates on the unique experience of building a team that was an amalgamation of stalwart bureaucrats from the public sector and top tech talent from the private sector, working together to successfully roll out Aadhaar. Citing the famous “thinker-doer” approach, Nandan mentions how his experience in thinking and executing roles in both public and private work settings made him uniquely positioned to achieve UIDAI’s mandate. Opening up on the personal front, Nandan says that his curiosity to learn new things, being open to learning from others in an attempt to constantly stay relevant, desire to do something new, and willingness to live with uncertainty are all part of the core beliefs that define his value system. Be frugal with time Nandan talks about how the dual approach of being execution- obsessed while being able to step back and think big picture is something that’s helpful for founders to think clearly. On scaling as a founder, Nandan has a simple tip: “Being frugal with your time is important. I am generous with my money, but frugal with my time. Money, you can give it away and make it again. Time is a perishable resource.” Talking about the present-day startup ecosystem, Nandan is excited and hopes to see the next generation of Kotak, HDFC, TCS, and Infosys emerge to create jobs for millions, and leverage India’s growing $2 trillion economy. He hopes to see leaders spread their power, by delegating, empowering, and sharing the glory. Tune in to listen to Nandan Nilekani as he speaks about the startup ecosystem, leadership, and the future for India.

INSIGHTS #35 - Nandan Nilekani shares his journey from building Infosys to rolling out Aadhaar

In this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we have the man of the hour, Ritesh Agarwal, founder of OYO, largest hotel chain of India that is now operational in more than 60 countries. Ritesh talks about the early days of OYO, how he always had grand plans for OYO and was able to execute them with his able colleagues to scale his company to today’s levels. Ritesh remembers his childhood self as being the kid who always wanted to do different things. At the age of 13, he was selling sim cards just for the heck of it; at 18, he dropped out of college to start his first company Oravel, and got selected for the Thiel Fellowship, receiving a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel, Founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. Spending time staying at friends’ places for a few months opened Ritesh to an exciting opportunity in the hotel industry. On the supply side, most hotels were passive investments for owners and had a fundamental problem of yield generation, with the asset owner wanting to get away from the daily headache of managing the asset. On the consumer side, there was a clear gap in availability of clean, well-organised, and well-designed hotel rooms at an affordable price. Ritesh saw absolutely no reason to not invest himself into solving this problem, and there has been no looking back since then. “Whenever I have two opportunities, risking it versus regretting it, I would always invariably choose risking it, because I never want to regret that I did not pursue something that I really wanted to do. So that’s sort of what inspired me to start the first OYO hotel”, he says. Building the right team OYO today has expanded to beyond just budget hotels, with its offerings featuring upmarket luxury resorts, a chic mid-market accommodation brand (Townhouse), and others. The core principle though has remained the same: “bringing beautiful living spaces to middle income persons world-wide”. Leveraging technology to scale Ritesh has always had a focus on leveraging technology in his business. His 700 engineers in China and 700 engineers in rest of the world are constantly building new products and features that help OYO break the boundaries of language and culture through a superior experience. This, along with access to large capital and resources that come along with it, helped Ritesh understand the challenges and opportunities while entering new markets. Local talent has been a game changer, he says. One of the most distinctive thing about the OYO story is the fact that Ritesh is all of just 25 years old today, which makes his feat seem even more incredible. He credits much of his personal growth to the management team he spends most of his time with who bring in years of experience across venture capital, consulting and operations. Always curious to learn Continuing to be field-oriented by learning from people who’re on-ground has helped Ritesh stay true to his entrepreneurial self and bring value to the table. Having a common mission that everyone was working towards, a transparent work environment that held each one accountable, and empowering his team members helped Ritesh keep age out of the picture when it came to team management and decision making. On a closing note, the OYO founder talks about how he considers perseverance as the most valuable learning from his journey so far. “I feel that perseverance has no replacement. Remembering that there is always light at the end of the tunnel and continuously investing in the same direction for a long period of time is the most important.”

INSIGHTS#34 Ritesh Agarwal on building OYO – decacorn in the hotel industry

In this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we have Harsh Jain, founder of Dream11, India’s largest fantasy sports platform with 70 million registered users and 10 million paid users. Harsh talks about how he achieved product market fit after multiple pivots while persistently following his passion. After answering a quick round of rapid-fire questions that reveal his loyalty for Manchester United and Mumbai Indians, Harsh gives a preview of the scale Dream11 has grown to today and the journey that led up to this. He reminisces his high school days in London when he first picked up fantasy football and how it helped him keep in touch with his group of friends in Mumbai over the course of 2 years in London and 4 years of college in Philadelphia. Unwilling to join family business in real estate, Harsh’s itch to do something different and the hype around IPL at the time led to starting Dream11 in 2008, not the version we see today but more of a cricinfo++ with too many features and too little traffic. They moved to an ad driven business model only to realise that CPM rates in India were too poor to build a large business out of it and reached a stage where they ran out of money and had to run a services company on the side to keep the engine running at Dream11. Finally in 2012, they moved to the version of today, removing everything except the core business- fantasy cricket! It was the time when Airbnb, Paypal and Facebook where in their growth phase and ‘growth hacking’ was a buzzword doing the rounds. Harsh left no stone unturned as he read up everything he could put his hands on around growth hacking, learning about A/B testing, cohort analysis, retention etc. along the way to finally understand what product-market fit was for his business, Dream11 would be an entertainment, fun product rather than an ROI driven product, a platform to multiply the fun of watching sports manifold at a nominal spend. Harsh adds about the importance of founders knowing their numbers in and out and being crazy about a problem. “If you jump into a market when it’s hot, there is going to be a time when it’s not and you will be the first one to leave as well, because you never came in with passion, you never woke up every morning saying that this is what I want to do with my life, Founders need to enter this journey only when they wake up every morning thinking about this problem and they have a tough time to sleep at night because they’ve not had a crack at it. You have to have that passion because the journey is full of potholes and barriers and if you don’t have that passion, you won’t be able to survive.” As a last thought, Harsh says, “Just fail, just go for it. Stop sitting, stop thinking, just start. Fail early, fail fast and be open to continuously pivoting and finding your way. Don’t wait for that big idea and more importantly do NOT not share your idea, speak to others and get feedback.”

INSIGHTS#33 Harsh Jain on building Dream11- India’s biggest fantasy sports platform

In this episode of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, Divyank Turakhia, Founder of online advertising business Media.net, speaks about why entrepreneurs should focus on the right things, keep risks in mind, and must always be nimble. We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition we have with us Divyank Turakhia, Founder of Media.net, one of the largest online advertising businesses worldwide, which he bootstrapped till he eventually sold it in 2016 for $900 million. Divyank starts off by talking about his early days growing up in a small apartment in Mumbai, and how he started reading his dad’s collection of books at the age of five. This love for reading is something he attributes his success to.“I spend somewhere between 800 to 1,000 hours a year reading, and I’ve done that for the last 20–30 years of my life”, he says. The learning goals became more specific as he progressed along his entrepreneurial journey, but even today, you’ll find him trying to get every bit of information possible on a topic that is relevant to a business problem he’s solving. On being asked how he went about picking ideas for his startups, Divyank stresses on how it was never about coming up with a truly original ideafor him, but about coming up with a large space to focus on. Being a techie, Divyank was looking for a large industry that had something to do with the internet: ecommerce and online advertisingwere the most obvious businesses that came to mind. He went ahead with online advertising as it was closer to his domain experience (the fact that he didn’t know much about logistics, which was at the heart of ecommerce also influenced the decision). He started with the niche space of domain advertising, leveraging his knowledge on domain names from his previous startup, as well as the relationships he had built. As he expanded from domain advertising to mainstream online advertisingat Media.net, he made sure he used the same strategy: owning a nichebefore moving to the mainstream part of the online advertising industry. “If I directly started competing with the giants on day one, I would obviously fail because I don’t have the same resources in any form. The idea was to pick a nichethat some of the giants were not paying as much attention to, so that once you grow in it, you know enough,” Divyank says. Sharing tips for young entrepreneurs, Divyank talks about the importance of keeping an eye out for the risks that the business faces. “As you build a business, you need to keep thinking about what are the top 10–20 risks that exist in your businessthat could wipe you out entirely and have a very rough plan to tackle them.” He adds that having success metrics and measuring them on an ongoing basishelps prioritise efforts and resources on the most important problems. Talking about dealing with failures, Divyank mentions how he keeps working on the problemuntil he’s solved it. That said, he urges entrepreneurs to reprioritise when needed. “Whenever you come across something that is more meaningful and that deserves your time and the time of your team a lot more because it’s a larger opportunity, you need to have that nimblenessand you need to be okay to let go off certain things that you’ve been working on. The industry changes all the time, events happen all the time, the marketplace changes all the time, needs change all the time, newer tech comes in. You need to benimble to change and constantly change.” Towards the end of the podcast, Divyank urges entrepreneurs not to fuss about market timing. “There’s no such thing as perfect timing. All timing is perfect. The more important thing is to get started.” Tune in to listen to Divyank share his views about startups, growing them, and the need to be willing to change.

INSIGHTS #32 — Divyank Turakhia on building one of the largest online advertising business

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