In this episode, Nishchay Ag, co-founder and CEO of Jar, talks about how there is a massive addressable gap in India's middle class with financial products that go beyond the top 30 million that everyone is targeting. Nishchay talks about how he and his friend Misbah Ashraf went from a few WhatsApp group pilots to 10 million users at Jar, in just two years, helping people save money by investing in gold, every day. With close to $65 million in funding, Jar is changing how millions of small-town Indians save, one user at a time
In this episode, Bala Srinivasa, managing director at Arkam Ventures, talks about experiences from the firm's first set of 14 investments so far from their $106 million inaugural fund. Over the last four years, Srinivasa, and his fellow founding partner Rahul Chandra, have backed entrepreneurs who have successfully applied technology to create business innovation in areas including financial services, agriculture, modern staffing and augmented reality. A second thesis at Arkam is software-as-a-service and Bala also talks about why Indian SaaS companies mostly prefer the US as a market
In this episode, Nitin Chhabra, co-founder and CEO of Ace Turtle, a tech-enabled retail business that's the force behind brands like Lee and Wrangler in India, talks about how the company started out as a SaaS business, selling software for the so-called omnichannel retail. Nitin and co-founder Berry Singh then decided to risk that entire business, convincing their board and investors, to transform Ace Turtle into a retail operator, even as the Covid pandemic was unfolding. They are now looking at more than doubling their sales to become a $100 million company over the next 12 months
In this episode, Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO of OrangeScape, better known for its product Kissflow, talks about persevering for over 15 years, before he found himself at the right place at the right time offering the right product. Suresh now dreams of making his company at least one of the top three in the world in its category. He also talks about his optimism for India's cloud software sector and why he believes it can really deliver a trillion dollars in value—an idea that he says was dismissed by many when he aired it at a conference in Bengaluru some four years ago
In this episode, Ben Mathias, managing partner at Vertex Ventures for Southeast Asia and India, talks about how he decided to leave behind a nice life in the software industry in Silicon Valley, to come to India as a VC investor. With over three decades in the tech and VC industry combined, Ben talks about what investors did to startups over the last two years, distracting them with too much money from the real purpose of building lasting businesses. He also talks about why Vertex is very bullish on India, how the firm invests, and what his investment plans are in 2023
In this episode, Anjani Bansal, partner and India country head at Global Brain, a Japanese VC firm, talks about why certain opportunities in small-town India are ready for startups to grab and create disruptive innovations. The time is also right for Global Brain to step up its own operations in India, Bansal says, who is looking to grow his team and go beyond the "outbound" investments that the firm has largely relied on so far. Bansal talks about his own "meandering" journey starting from a chance encounter with a book on Rwanda and the path that it set him on
In today's episode, Rahul Garg, founder and CEO of Moglix, talks about what's next for the company, which he says is knocking on $600-700 million in revenue. He also talks about his love of solving not just difficult problems, but difficult and large ones, which feeds his entrepreneurial decisions. Aspiring founders must understand this, and prepare for the long haul—from the existential challenges of the early years to facing the question 'can you scale profitably,' later on, he says
In today's episode, Cody Friesen, founder and CEO of SOURCE Global, talks about his dream of putting to bed one of humanity's biggest and most urgent problems—the lack of access to clean drinking water for billions around the planet. Friesen is a scientist, engineer, teacher and entrepreneur. In this conversation, he also reflects on his approach to knowledge transfer, the "vibrancy" of India's startup ecosystem, and his hope that we'll see many entrepreneurs willing to challenge and break the status quo to solve some of our biggest problems
Our guest today is Anand Lunia, general partner at IndiaQuotient, a well-known domestic VC firm that backs entrepreneurs attempting to solve large problems for the Indian market at even "concept stage." In this episode, Anand talks about how 2021 was an exception, and for the startup ecosystem to come back to its mean, two-thirds of the startups may not be able to raise money, going forward. He also talks about how, as a nation, we ought to prioritise software independence, backing local entrepreneurs developing intellectual property, and not just software jobs
Our guest today is Madhu Shalini Iyer, a partner at Rocketship.vc—a Silicon Valley-based fund investing globally. Iyer started out with an engineering degree from the University of Sydney. In her 20-plus years as an engineer, operator and investor, her previous roles include chief data officer at Gojek, which she helped to grow into a business valued at $10 billion at the time, and a founding member of Intuit's Quickbooks Lending Platform. Rocketship's portfolio in India includes Apna, Moglix, Khatabook, Uravu Labs, Mad Street Den and Agnikul, and several other companies
Our guest today is Sriram Viswanathan, the founding managing partner at Celesta Capital. In this episode, Sriram talks about his long association with technology and investing in deep tech companies, and Celesta's strategic focus on the US-India corridor. He also has some experience to share with deep tech entrepreneurs, in areas including product-market fit, growth and scale, the value of strategic investors, and exits