Listen now | with Sundeep Khanna, Author Subscribe at turnaround.substack.com

Few brands inspire the kind of devotion that an Enfield does. Its distinctive look and feel, the sound of its engine and the image that it creates of its rider have all contributed to putting the brand on the kind of pedestal that others could only dream of. But the story of how Royal Enfield became the brand it did today is filled with ups and downs, from its robust origins in the early 1950s to the rock bottom that was the 1980s to the lifestyle bike it is today trying to make a presence...

Manish Singhal of Pi Ventures on how they evaluate and fund deep tech startups.  Get on the email list at turnaround.substack.com

There is a saying that debt is often cheaper than equity. Our topic for today is venture debt, which has become mainstream in the Indian start-up ecosystem of late. Get on the email list at turnaround.substack.com

Listen now | How valuations work, types of rights put in SHAs & more! Get on the email list at turnaround.substack.com

One of the most common things you hear in the world of startups is “We weren’t able to monetise.” The theme that often plays out is this - the team gets excited about an idea - they start working on it - they talk to customers and if everything works out, they build a great product with an obvious demand in the market. However, in this entire journey as engineers and product enthusiasts we first build the full product and then, almost as an afterthought, decide what to price it at and how...

If you’re a data driven professional, in all likelihood this episode is for you. There are also some interesting analysis techniques I came across this week, that I thought I’d share. Check them out at the end of this email below !!! On the show today JPK and I got a chance to speak with Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners on how to measure various SaaS Metrics and why valuations are a geometric function of growth. An astute mind, I’m just surprised how calm...

Listen now | The importance of thinking in outcomes When Gaurav Munjal, the founder and CEO of Unacademy was pitching to Nexus, he was asked - how could a company offering video test prep solutions scale in a country with such poor internet bandwidth (this was the pre Jio era Get on the email list at turnaround.substack.com

Byrne Hobart called it “the Vegas Wedding Chapel of liquidity events” - quick and easy. One of the hottest trends of 2020 among late stage tech companies was to go public via a SPAC or Special Purpose Acquisition Company. SPACs are essentially blank cheque companies set up and listed with the sole purpose of merging and taking another company public in the next 2 years or so. This episode however is much more than just about SPACs. For anyone interested in Venture Capital, growth...

Why are Amazon, Reliance, Walmart backed Flipkart, and several others competing for a piece of the action in the online grocery retailing market? And how is BigBasket staying ahead of the competition? Look no further for answers. Get on the email list at turnaround.substack.com

Did you know that in 2020 on an incremental basis, more deposits went to private banks in India instead of Public Sector Banks for the first time in history? What is happening to the bad loan mess and NPAs that Indian banks have been forced to deal with by the RBI? Is the worst over? Forced by the rapid pace of technology, can India’s gigantic banking system rapidly evolve to meet the consumer demands? What’s stopping them? In this episode, we’re joined by Tamal Bandhopadhyay to get...

I hope you're thinking about new year resolutions because if you are then you've got to listen to today's show. It's going to change how you think about money. Our guest is Monika Halan, the author of the best-selling book Let's Talk Money.  Get on the email list at turnaround.substack.com

“When your profession has the word ‘capitalist’ in it, cold hard logic around economic incentives can’t be ignored. Otherwise the business would be called Venture and Sons” “The Housing.com saga would always be remembered as one that set a new benchmark for pissing of the greatest number of people in the least possible time.” “The core value in a VC firm is a competency I would call the ‘deal selection muscle’. Born out of the unique DNA of each firm, this muscle is a complex network...

There’s no template to success. That’s for sure. But, there are traits. In this episode Chris Saad, who was previously the Head of Product for Uber Developer Platform and is presently a strategic advisor to several startups joins us to share his learnings on what leadership characteristics set our favourite CXOs apart. Chris fundamentally believes that leaders look at the world in a special way. In the episode he shares concise, pragmatic insights into how leaders think and act - their...

The ability to launch a product or ship features on time can make or break your startup. Listen to Robin Dhanwani, the founder of design agency Parallel on how to minimize failures.  Get on the email list at turnaround.substack.com

Vikrama Dhiman is presently the Head of Mobility Products at Gojek and has been a builder for more than a decade across firms like Bharti Softbank, WizIQ, and Zeta- a Directi company. Vikrama says that having such becoming a Product Leader today has come at the expense of making several mistakes. He’s grown from making them, and gained an almost anticipatory sixth sense in prioritizing and responding to challenges - a critical skill for all founders, PMs and builders alike. Here’s what we...

On this podcast in the past, we’ve talked about product-market fit, minimum viable product, jobs to be done, lean startup model, blitz scaling and several other ways startup founders approach company building. In today’s episode, Dr Ajay Sethi, venture partner at Accel talks about a new way of looking at startup building. He calls it the engagement centric model. The model tells you when the lean startup or minimum viable product just doesn’t work. In fact, it offers an improved framework...

Let’s be honest. The title is every bit deceiving. Yet, there’s truth in it. It is true because this conversation with Vindhya captures so much of what building a product for India and being a Product Manager is about. It is deceptive because hidden within it are so many elements that are relevant even if you’re not a product manager. For example, the transcript below is from a part of the episode that touched upon user privacy. It’s got 1) an interesting book recommendation, 2) some...

It’s not often you meet old friends and take a trip down the memory lane and wind up with a podcast decent enough (I think) for other people to listen to. I caught up with Vineet Devaiah, the co-founder of Teleport.me (10 mn + downloads on Play Store) after long and had a fun talk about venture capital, startups and we even talked about GPT3, a la hype cycles. The last we met, was at the Indian Coffee House (not the one on Church Street) in Bengaluru. We were both at the crossroads. I was...

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather… …You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be...

Some weeks ago, I asked on Twitter who are the best product managers I should have on the show. And many people said we should have Taruna Manchanda, now at LinkedIn talk about her experience. We finally made that episode happen. If you enjoyed listening to our episodes with Mona Gandhi, founder of Upraised; Disha Chhabra, product manager at Google, and several other product managers we’ve had on the show, you’ll definitely enjoy this. Taruna has some practical advice gleaned from 4+...

The job of the Venture Capitalist, as has been mentioned on the show before, is in many ways to predict change and place bets that are likely to give returns. However, for an impact investor, it’s not just about predicting change but also about creating change. Bharath Vishweswariah, Director of Investments at Omidyar Network is one such investor who has, by way of placing strong bets like The Ken and Newslaundry, definitely lead the frontiers to sectoral change from the forefront. After...

We’ve been talking to some of the best product folks ever since we began this podcast. We had Deepak Abbot’s masterclass on products some time ago. Then we had Nir Eyal, Anshumani Ruddra, Sidu Ponnappa, and Mona Gandhi on the show. They all gave us a deeper understanding of what goes into building great products. Today on the Use Case podcast we have Disha Chhabra, currently a product manager at Google. In today’s episode, we talk about the importance of writing and managing stakeholder...

🔥🔥🔥BANGER EPISODE ALERT! 🔥🔥🔥 The story goes that Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming was super inspired by Steve Jobs. So much so that the name Bytedance was derived from Jobs’ philosophy for matching technology (byte) with art (dance). Rui Ma, who is one of THE MOST RESPECTED voices on tech in China, and the host of the popular Techbuzz China podcast, doesn’t buy that fully. But then again, no one today claims to believe everything that is said by startup PR teams- except maybe the founders...