The Startup Fridays Podcast
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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
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep5: 'Think big; one launch a day is aspirational but possible' — Pawan K Chandana
Our guest today is Pawan Kumar Chandana, co-founder and CEO of Skyroot Aerospace. Pawan and Naga Bharath Daka, both former ISRO engineers, started Skyroot in 2018 and over the last four years they—and their team of 200—have reached a point where their next big step will be the space flight of their first rocket, Vikram I. Earlier this week, they also made headlines for the biggest funding round at any Indian space tech startup so far, raising $51 million from Singapore's GIC. Perhaps this will also prove to be a pivotal moment for India's private space ecosystem
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_sm.jpg?impolicy=website&width=360&height=270 "Startup Fridays S3 Ep4: 'To win in startup investing, bring differentiated value to founders' — Ashutosh Sharma")
Startup Fridays S3 Ep4: 'To win in startup investing, bring differentiated value to founders' — Ashutosh Sharma
Our guest today is Ashutosh Sharma, head of investments in India for Prosus Ventures, one of the world's biggest technology investors. In this episode, Sharma, who has led Prosus Ventures' investments in India for some six years, talks about how an emerging trend in the country's startup ecosystem is led by entrepreneurs "building in India for India." That is reassuring, even amid a slowdown, because it augurs well for the long-term growth of entrepreneurship in the country, he says
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep3: 'If your conviction is strong, follow through, as there's rarely a right time' — Bobby Balachandran
Our guest today is Bobby Balachandran, founder, president, and CEO of Exterro Inc., which provides a sophisticated tech platform for global corporations to better manage their governance, risk, and compliance needs. Bobby started out with a BSc in computer science from Government College of Technology in Coimbatore in South India, and an MS in from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon in the US. He started Exterro in his garage in 2008. Today, the company is privately valued at more than a billion dollars
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Startup Fridays S3 Ep2: 'Deep tech founders need tech-biz grasp, patient money, and stamina for the long game' — Krishna Rangasayee
In this episode, Krishna Rangasayee, founder and CEO of SiMa.ai, a 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, with more than 25 patents to his name, talks about why the edge is the new battleground. He also delves into the reasons that compelled him to take his first entrepreneurial plunge after a long corporate career, building a cross-border deep tech company and what such ventures need to succeed