Maharajas of Scale

Is one exit of $17 Billion (Flipkart) good or 300 exits of $50 Million good? In case you are wondering if this is a trick question, the answer is no. If you think it's the one $17 Billion exit, you're wrong! We think that it should be both. We need both . Now, let us ask a different question. What do you think about SaaS? If you thought SaaS is boring, think again! Prasanna runs Upekkha and he calls Upekkha a catalyst. He might have as well defined SaaS as Startup Success as a Service. Why? Because that is what he seems to be doing at Upekkha. Listen to Prasanna talk about how SaaS is the future of innovation, employment, wealth creation in India and about his unique approach at Upekkha. Prasanna is a speaker unlike any other who may have heard before. A person with strong views and insights, he is putting his money where his mouth and is enabling the next 1000 multi million $ SaaS startups come out of India. And he is playing a huge role around that. Listen to him talk about the Indian SaaS scene, the playbo

Dr. Sonal Verma, a Medical Doctor by profession found herself become an entrepreneur, courtesy of her marriage with Kunal. She channeled her medical background and her analytical ability into building and scaling their first successful venture - Healthcare Magic which was acquired by a US based Health Insurance company - Ebix. Back on the success of this exit, the same team parlayed into Social Commerce, driven by Sonal's desire to help women better their livelihood. What sounds like a scandalous work from home opportunity was turned into a dynamic social commerce platform. The team achieved 100 times growth in a span of a year and is helping lakhs of women earn an alternate source of income. An incredible story of humility, scale and success, Dr. Sonal has some amazing advice to women and entrepreneurs in general. This story is unlike anything you've heard before! Go ahead! Listen and SHARE!

Varun Sheth had a normal childhood. Growing up in Mumbai, he spent his younger years as any boy about town would. When he grew up, he worked in investment banking, the hallowed career option for many. Yet, he felt a hollowness. He saw the internet and e-commerce grow in India exponentially and decided that this would apply to crowd funding as well. Although the start was shaky and it took several years to find product market fit, the team that also had Kunal Kapoor of Bollywood fame as a co-founder eventually scaled in helping people who could not fund their medical treatments thru crowd funding. Now the team is poised for another phase of growth. Check out this episode!

There are dreamers, there are doers and then there are some who are dreamers who are also doers. Jimit Bagadiya of Social Pilot falls into the third category. Jimit had built a fairly successful IT services business which involved developing and maintaining programs, platforms, products and tools for Clients. Yet, he was hankering for more. Sooner or later, the treadmill nature of the IT services business gets to one running it. Many dream of building a product that would relieve them from the tyranny of the revolving door nature of revenues from IT services. Making the switch from being a services company to that of a product is fraught with failure and uncertainty. Yet, once the chasm is crossed, the going gets better. The IT services business on the other hand is the direct opposite of a product business. How did Jimit make switch from services to products successfully? What were the challenges he faced? How was the journey? Can Indian SaaS companies compete with the rest of the world? Is he out of the woo

Meghna Agarwal graduated as a Company Secretary and a CFA around the same time 9/11 happened. It was not a great time for jobs or starting up. Yet, coming from a business family, she dug into her entrepreneurial instincts and teamed up with her soon-to-be husband Rishi. Together, they started a company in recruitment that has eventually led them to starting up Indiqube, one of India's well known emerging scale stories in the Managed Workspaces or Coworking sector. It is a witty look at a lady who is driven by passion and has a rare clarity in what she wants do to and accomplish. Does clarity beget success or success beget clarity? If that sounds like a rhetorical question, it is intended to be. Clarity of thought & strategy and a vision to scale and build something together with her partner in life and business - Rishi has taken Indiqube and Meghna to business success. Listen to this!

Mahesh Murthy is a name that most entrepreneurs who started up in India between 2000 and 2012 know. Mahesh went from being a copy writer in Silicon Valley who helped Jeff Bezos with the "Everything store" campaign to leading Channel V and founding Seed Fund, one of India's best known seed funds that funded storied names such as Red Bus, Chumbak, Carwale, Voonik etc. Both his Seed Funds won the best fund award, a rare feat. Having funded some of India's storied startups and seen good exits, Mahesh is now trying his hand at Space, a new and exciting frontier. In this episode, he shares his wisdom on what makes ventures work, the strategies that entrepreneurs need to employ and what the space race is all about. He knows a thing or two about scaling startups and should we add that the episode is full of rare insights and pointers on how to make your venture tick, succeed and scale.  A must listen!

A creative techie, a fount of ideas goes from IT services to Social Tech Product success. Abhishek Desai filled the gap for cricketers and came up with CricHeroes to keep tabs on their neighbourhood and local league matches. It also became a platform to showcase the talent of young aspirants. He started with "Gully" cricket and Digital Scoring. Cricheroes now has a user base of more than 4 million cricketers in over 50 countries. It is an unlikely success story coming out of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. His journey is one of passion and perseverance. This is his story.

A farmer by genes became a programmer by accident. K N M Rao observed his colleagues facing problems with their commute and believed carpooling was a way to solve that problem. It is a thought that has perhaps crossed our minds but he went a step ahead and took action. Since several startups had already attempted and failed, Rao not only had a chance to do one better but also fix what was wrong in earlier attempts. It is a master class in entrepreneurship. As an entrepreneur, he believes that one should connect to the problem, be persistent and never give up. This is his story.

An educated MBA working in corporate world US, accidentally jumped into his family business. Pratik Shah’s determined thinking to get into his family's retail business caused conflict between father and son. He started enjoying retail along with his equity research. Together with his wife, they planned to give SpecsMakers a shot and raised funding from angel investors. With his chakra style of management, they scaled from one store to 300 plus stores and implemented the idea of franchising. As an entrepreneur, he believes that success should not get into your mind, it should be in your heart. This is his story.

Passion for traveling turned Aditi, a professional, into an entrepreneur. ‘V’ stands for lush green ‘view’ in V resorts. Aditi gave life to small properties. They hired local talent, trained them hospitality and got women to work to make gift packs like squashes and licensed it. Initially they started with 5 resorts and scaled through contacts by words of mouth and now are proud managers of 125 resorts. UN has recognized V Resorts as First model coming out of a developing country which looks at using the local resources and is perfect in creating a secular economy.

With experience from working on prepaid recharge products and a technical mindset, Abhinav and Abhishek started building solutions for financial inclusion. Each time they ran out of cash they pivoted to figure out where to grow and how to survive. Eko has built an intermediate layer between consumers who do not have access to digital money and are unfamiliar with English. They have catered over 50 million unique consumers and got little over 150,000 intermediates. Abhinav shares the key to his success story to our young Indian entrepreneurs and notes hard work, patience and perseverance and the leaves to success. His journey has been filled with convolutions making it both interesting and fascinating.

Ranjeet Singh could barely afford to pay for his education. Coming from a not so well to do family, reading was a luxury. He satisfied his passion to read by making deals with shopkeepers who sold books to watch their stores while they were away, borrowed books on Teacher's library cards so he could borrow more and hustled his way to read. Ranjeet who mostly read Hindi books at that time and counts Nirala as one of his favorites realized that Indian Language content suffered from an access problem both in publishing as well as in reading. Pratilipi is Story Telling at Scale He opined that it should be readers’ choice to read in whichever language they want but not simply because of lack of access. His friends suggested he create a digital platform with content in different languages. He quit his job and gave it a shot and Bravo! it worked. His journey has been interesting and fascinating. This is his story.

Amit Munjal was an investment banker and a management consultant. A chance brush with Tele Medicine while vacationing in Hawaii got him thinking about how he could bring access to medicine and quality healthcare to the masses in India. American Laws prevent Doctors from practicing across states but Indian laws have no such restrictions. This and a lot of others was what Amit discovered while he launched Doctor Insta in India. The journey for him has been fascinating and frustrating. This is his story.

Sampad, Aditya and Akash met on Twitter. They worked together before but their bonds were formed on Twitter. After building camaraderie and bonhomie on Twitter, they made two attempts at building a tech startup. Their second effort was about helping hyperlocal merchants attract users closeby. With no traction, Instamojo moved on and that is still a work in progress in the startup world. Their 3rd outing into Payments was where they hit scale. This is that story.

Coming from a family of 37 Doctors, Dr. Ritesh Malik was destined to be a Doctor. Or so his family thought. From studying Medicine in Tamil Nadu near the forests which once housed the brigand Veerappan to his latest exit with Oyo, you Dr. Ritesh Malik's story is a fascinating one. Even more fascinating is Project Guerilla. Give it a listen!

Santosh Panda failed twice before starting up with Explara. He started up Explara remotely from London in moonlight mode and bootstrapped it with his earnings till it was sustainable. Explara is a DIY event management platform for professional events that has inverted the SaaS revenue curve by being India First and World Next. With a down to earth attitude and unconventional hiring style, Santosh has built Explara quietly into successful at scale business.

Having trouble motivating your kids or getting your kids to grasp concepts? Tired of the rote learning system that dominates India's education sector, Flinto Box and Flinto Class might be the answer. Co-Founder and CEO Arun Prasad discusses their journey of building perhaps one of India's most creative startups. At 1800+ experiences for kids across ages 2-10 thru Flinto Box and hundreds and thousands of experiences at Pre-Schools with Flinto Class, Flinto Learning Solutions is bringing a refreshing change to India's education methods. Flinto looks like a typical IT company by looks but that is where the similarity stops. Flinto's one of its kind Kids Learning R&D Lab is where all their concepts and product ideas are tested by the finest - the young kids themselves. What Flinto is doing is fascinating.

Vaitheeswaran - widely known as father of India's e-commerce business has done it all in his life. He worked for a large corporate house before taking a plunge with fellow colleagues to start India Plaza, India's first and foremost e-commerce startup that wracked up innovation after innovation in its decade plus existence between 1999 and 2013. The India Plaza story reads like the George Lucas innovation factory having spawned India Plaza, Fabmart and Fabmall, India's first online and offline grocery businesses. The Offline Grocery business eventually became More which came a full circle after being acquired by Amazon. Vaitheeswaran has started up again, with "Again"Drinks with his previous co-founder - Sundeep. He describes "Again" as a WTF Drink - A Wholesome, Tasty and Filling Drink that's the world's first drink to have no added sugar and no preservatives as well as a fantastic shelf life.

GrabOnRent CEO and Co-Founder Manish Sugandhi talks about his startup journey. From conducting a Tech Fair to founding a UI/UX startup Perdix to eventually starting GrabOnRent with some of his founders from Perdix, Manish discusses it all. Minted from the Flipkart mafia, Manish also discusses how we was able to leverage that network to make GrabOnRent work.

Bootstrapping, Scaling Zerodha, Working with Family and Being Honest with Capital - turning down capital - Nithin Kamath of Zerodha Shares it all on this very first episode of Maharajas of Scale. P.S: There is stuff you've never heard before