The Startup Fridays Podcast
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Startup Fridays S4 Ep3: 'Small-town India remains a largely untapped opportunity for startups' — Anjani Bansal
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
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Startup Fridays S4 Ep2: 'Find difficult and large problems and prepare for the long haul' — Rahul Garg
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
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Startup Fridays S4 Ep1: 'I wish for India, many unreasonable entrepreneurs' — Cody Friesen
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
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep13: Anand Lunia at IndiaQuotient on why we need 'Hindustan Big Tech' to level the playing field
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
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep12: 'Established entrepreneurs from the best startups in India must step up as mentors' — Madhu Shalini Iyer
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
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_sm.jpg?impolicy=website&width=360&height=270 "Startup Fridays S3 Ep11: 'Strategic investors can make or break a deep tech venture, choose wisely, time it right' — Sriram Viswanathan")
Startup Fridays S3 Ep11: 'Strategic investors can make or break a deep tech venture, choose wisely, time it right' — Sriram Viswanathan
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
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep10: 'From doer to enabler, I'm optimistic about innovation and inclusion in India' — Sanjay Jain
Our guest today is Sanjay Jain, partner at Bharat Fund and chief innovation officer at CIIE.co. Sanjay, who played a leading role in building Google's Map Maker, and later was the founding chief product manager at UIDAI, talks about his journey going "from doer to enabler." With a master's in computer science from UCLA, and experience as a serial entrepreneur himself, Sanjay also talks about how the fund, a Rs. 600 crore corpus, attempts to straddle intellectual-property-led innovation and an inclusion mandate for the Bharat segment of India
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep9: 'For your company to last 100 years, empower everyone to singularly focus on the client' — Srikanth Velamakanni
Our guest today is Srikanth Velamakanni, cofounder, group CEO, and vice chairman of Fractal Analytics, which as the name suggests, provides deep analytical insights to customers in a range of verticals, including retail, financial services, and healthcare. Srikanth co-founded Fractal in 2000, and it turned unicorn earlier this year. The real aspiration, Srikanth says, is to have the company outlast its founders
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep8: 'Climate tech is cause for optimism but we're just not doing enough' — Grace Sai
Our guest today is Grace Sai, co-founder and CEO of Unravel Carbon, a company that is making it easier for businesses to track and reduce their carbon emissions, with a focus on Scope 3 emissions and Asia. Grace is a serial entrepreneur and also a VC investor as a Kauffman Fellow. She has an MBA from the University of Oxford (where she was a Skoll Scholar) and a Masters in Change from INSEAD. She speaks 6 languages and lives in Singapore. She co-founded Unravel Carbon with Marc Allen, about a year ago, and the venture is backed by investors including Y Combinator and Sequoia
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep7: 'If you are among the top growth drivers in any company, why not build your own' — Ajeet Singh
Our guest today is Ajeet Singh, cofounder and executive chairman of ThoughtSpot. In 2009, he co-founded Nutanix with Dheeraj Pandey and Mohit Aron. Today, it is a listed company in the US with $1.2 billion in ARR. In 2012, he co-founded ThoughtSpot with Amit Prakash. The company is seen as a leader in enterprise data analytics. At its last funding round, announced in November 2021, ThoughtSpot was valued at $4.2 billion dollars, with total funding of $674 million. ThoughtSpot plans to invest $150 million over the next five years in India
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep6: 'Choose your stakeholders, investors wisely, and you won't get pulled in different directions' — Smita Deorah
Our guest today is Smita Deorah, co-founder and Co-CEO of Leadership Boulevard, better known for its edtech business LEAD. Smita and her husband Sumeet Mehta started LEAD in 2012. Today the company reaches a million students in 3500 schools in more than 400 cities in India. It is now a unicorn, privately valued at more than a billion dollars, by investors including WestBridge, Elevar Equity and GSV Ventures