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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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

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...

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.

Our guest today is Grace Sai, cofounder 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...

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...

Our guest today is Smita Deorah, co-founder and Co-CEO of Boulevard Leadership, 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

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...

Our guest today is Ashutosh Sharma, head of investments in India for Prosus, one of the world’s biggest technology investors. In this episode, Ashutosh, who has led Prosus’s 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.

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...

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

Our guest today is Aditya Prakash, co-founder and CEO of Skidos Labs, an award-winning maker of a children’s educational apps company headquartered in Denmark. Aditya co-founded Skidos in 2013, which today offers a software development kit that can infuse math education for children into any game. Before Skidos, after an MBA from the Indian School of Business Hyderabad and The Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth, Aditya had a successful corporate career, including work at Bharti Airtel and HT...

Our guest today is Rajesh Jain, founder and group MD of Netcore Cloud. In the world of entrepreneurship, he is best known for selling one of his earliest ventures, IndiaWorld Communications, to Sify—then Satyam Infoway—for $115 million, in 1999, one of the biggest internet deals of the time in Asia. Jain founded Netcore in 1997, and has bootstrapped it to a profitable $100 million ARR SaaS company that is preparing for an IPO

Our guest today is Vinay B Nair, Founder and CEO of TIFIN, which is a fintech venture in the US that provides technology and expertise to business clients to apply AI to personalise their financial products and services to their end customers or consumers. Vinay has a chemical engineering degree, and a doctorate in finance and economics. He founded TIFIN in 2018. Previously he has been a hedge fund manager and sold a startup, 55 Institutional Partners, an investment advisory, to JP Morgan. He...

Our guest today is Sunil Thomas, co-founder and executive chairman of CleverTap, which provides a software platform that a large number of brands around the world use to better engage with their customers. Sunil started with a computer science degree, and in a career that spans more than 30 years now, he has held several top jobs in tech and business. He and two of his friends—Anand Jain and Suresh Kondamudi—started CleverTap in 2013, in Mumbai, and since then, they’ve expanded their...

Our guest today is Sandeep Farias, founder and managing partner at Elevar Equity, an early-stage VC firm that backs entrepreneurs who are solving large problems for the low and middle-income communities in India and Latin America. In this episode, Sandeep talks about the ‘Elevar Method’ for identifying ideas that could become enduring businesses with significant societal impact

Our guest today is Madan Padaki, founder and CEO of 1Bridge, which provides a host of services in small towns and villages, linking brands and businesses with India’s rural economy, and creating micro-entrepreneurs from among the rural youth. In this episode, Madan, who is an entrepreneur and angel investor, talks about how rural youth have the same aspirations for a better life as anyone else, and how that represents a massive entrepreneurial opportunity

Satya started life in a village, some 80km north of Jaipur city, in Rajasthan. He earned a chartered accountant’s qualification and attended an advanced management programme at Harvard Business School. In a career that spans more than 30 years, he rose to become a top executive in private banking, first at ICICI Bank, in Singapore, and then at Barclays, where he was chief executive of private banking in India for more than 10 years. He started Blue Ashva in 2019 and the firm is investing...

Our guest today is Pratap Raju, founding partner of Climate Collective, an organisation that is building a platform to accelerate climate tech startups in India, by catalysing stronger linkages between the startups and large corporate buyers and users of their solutions. He is also the founding partner of a VC fund, Climate Seeds Fund, providing seed-stage funding to climate startups. Climate Collective also has a dedicated programme to encourage women entrepreneurs in climate tech. Pratap...

Our guest today is Rajiv Srivatsa, partner and investor at Antler India. Rajiv’s career spans going from software engineer at Infosys to product developer at Yahoo! to entrepreneur as co-founder of Urban Ladder to VC investor. In this episode, he talks about how each stage was the realisation of his overarching desire to always mentor people and take a deep passionate interest in helping them develop their careers.  (00:40) Introduction to Startup Fridays (01:00) Our guest today — Rajiv...