Matrix Moments by Matrix Partners India: Recent Episodes

Matrix Partners India

Matrix Moments, by Matrix Partners India, is a podcast series dedicated to the founders, startups and all those within the ecosystem, through candid conversations on what we think it really takes to survive in this wild, wild startup world. In a world where we are endlessly engulfed with information in all its forms and sizes, this is our attempt to create, curate and bring to you the insights and reflections that we have had the luxury of having learned the hard way, through all the years spent in truly understanding what it takes to build and nurture a startup from ground zero.

What happens if you fail with everyone's money?

Abhishek Bansal never let himself ask and he thinks that's the only reason Shadowfax exists.
He's the first public-company CEO on Unstarted: a middle-class kid from Meerut who quit his job without telling his parents, asked a VC for $5 million with zero orders, and was the only one still standing after the year every competitor died.
In this conversation with Avnish Bajaj, they attempt to answer:

Should you have a co-founder and how do you actually pick one?
What should founders look for in a VC when there are multiple offers? 3. How do you tell your team you're failing?
Sustainable growth, or aggressive scaling?

By the end, you understand his test: accept the failure, name the core problem, tell your team. Because teams don't break on failure — they break on how you behave in it.

Chapters

0:00 Intro: our first public company CEO
1:19 Meerut, a middle-class home, and IIT Delhi
4:04 Parents didn't know he had quit his job
7:50 Q: How do you choose between VC offers?
8:47 Why he wanted a co-founder, not a skills match
11:03 Why not bootstrap?
11:28 Asking for $5 million with no product
12:23 The ₹8 lakh phone call
13:28 The angels who never sold: 1000x and counting
14:31 Three offers: $2M, $5M, $9M
17:19 Q: How do founders bounce back from failure?
17:46 The 2015 crash: five funded, one survivor
23:07 Knowing the core problem is the hardest problem
28:07 The offsite: profitable in three months
28:32 The retention numbers behind the culture
29:20 Q: Aggressive scaling or sustainable growth?
29:56 "In India, no idea is unique"
32:14 The guardrails: unit economics and 50-30-20
37:26 The CAPEX model that ran 100 iterations
39:07 When the HR team built its own hiring tool
40:20 Closing: teams compound, individuals don't

Most people assume serious AI silicon can only be built by a giant, in the cloud, burning hundreds of millions of dollars. Ravi Annavajhala did the opposite. Kinara built two AI chips for under $50M, 90% of it out of Hyderabad, and sold to NXP, one of the world's largest semiconductor companies for $307M, all cash. It's one of the largest deep tech exits India has seen, and one of the least talked about.

In this episode, Vikram Vaidyanathan sits down with Ravi to take apart how it actually happened, and what it says about where AI is heading next.

You'll hear:
1. Why the disruption playbook that minted the NAND-flash exits is the same one that explains Kinara's sale to NXP
2. The clearest plain-language explanation of training vs. inference you'll find, and why inference is moving off the cloud and onto the edge
3. The four reasons edge beats cloud: cost, latency, privacy, reliability
4. How you actually shrink a frontier model to run on a chip: distillation, compression, purpose-built retraining
5. Why India's real AI edge isn't talent or capital, but the industrial data sitting in its factories — and why it can't afford to become a "data colony"
6. Ravi's distinction between frugal and cheap, and why low cost has stopped meaning low capability

▶ If you're building, investing in, or just tracking India's deep tech story, this is the episode to watch.

About Intelligent Indians Intelligent Indians is Z47's thesis podcast on the people building India's technology future, for builders, operators, and investors who want the operator's view, not the press-release version.
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Chapters

0:00 A $307M deep-tech exit you didn't hear about
0:45 Meet Ravi Annavajhala & the Kinara story
3:10 The NAND flash lesson: how startups cash in on disruption
5:45 2015: betting on edge AI while everyone chased the data center
7:00 CoreViz → Deep Vision → Kinara: the naming journey
9:15 Why 90% was built in Hyderabad — a talent bet, not a cost cut
11:30 Two chips under $50M: engineering for capital efficiency
15:20 What "the edge" actually is: training vs inference
18:00 Why edge beats cloud: latency, cost, privacy & reliability
22:45 Physical AI: robots, self-driving & the real bottlenecks
28:30 Advice to VCs: conviction, local demand & the infra gap
31:20 Frugal vs cheap: why low cost ≠ low capability
33:30 Closing: India on the cusp of the edge-AI wave

How much money is enough to make starting up safe? Vivek Sinha thought he knew: ₹50 lakh in the bank. The day he hit it, he quit.
Vivek is the founder of Emversity, which trains people for the jobs India actually has in healthcare, hospitality, EPC and manufacturing.

Homeschooled till eight in a Bihar village surrounded by three rivers, he built Buildzar, lost ₹50 lakh, and spent nine years compounding skills at Mobikwik, OYO and Unacademy before starting again in a sector everyone had written off.

In this episode, Avnish and Vivek take on,

Where did you get the confidence to do this?
Why didn't it work? What did you think going in that didn't play out?
Should I drop out and work full time on my startup?"
How do I find the right co-founder?
How can we secure investment in a stigmatized sector despite proven traction?"
What stays with you: build it for the right reasons

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
02:00 Flood village to NIT: growing up in Bihar
06:00 First startup & why it failed: market timing
11:00 MobiKwik: 0 to 20 lakh merchants in 6 months
16:00 OYO & Unacademy: the lessons that compounded
22:00 The 9-year gap: how he killed bad ideas early
28:00 Should you drop out of college?
34:00 How many co-founders — and going solo
40:00 Building in a stigmatised, out-of-favour sector
48:00 What Mversity does + closing advice

What do you do when you've built the technology first and the first customer who tries it tells you it's not working at all?

Prashant Warrier is the first PhD and the first scientist on Unstarted. A steel-town kid from Bhilai who went from IIT Delhi to a PhD in AI, he came back to India because of a stolen passport — and built Qure.ai, whose AI reads chest X-rays for TB and lung cancer across the world.

In this episode, Avnish and Prashant attempt to answer:

How do you identify a unique problem is it about passion or market cap?
How do you know the technology is actually working?
How can founders assess whether they're early, late, or correctly timed for a market?
Will frontier AI kill vertical businesses or is there domain-specific stuff left to build?
Why build a cutting-edge AI company from Mumbai?

This episode is in partnership with TEAM — Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
1:41 Steel town to IIT to a PhD in AI
3:20 SAP, and the stolen passport that sent him home
6:32 Freedom over the US visa rat race
8:17 The 2012 breakthrough that started the company
11:43 A research lab with no business plan
13:33 "A solution looking for a problem"
16:52 The reality check & the real bottleneck
19:20 TB screening: 4 weeks to 30 seconds
21:43 Detecting lung cancer early with AI
24:23 Moats, ChatGPT & the future of AI in healthcare
32:04 Why Mumbai, and advice to founders

He built a ₹100 crore brand from scratch in two years. His company rated him 2 on 5. So the question stopped being am I good at this? and became am I even the right kind of person for it?

Shashank Mehta is the founder of The Whole Truth, one of the best consumer brands built in India in the last decade. We backed him early, off the strength of a blog whose readers became the company's first customers.

In this conversation:

What do you do when you build something from zero and still get rated below the person who grew an existing brand by 5%?
How do you tell the difference between being bad at a job and being the wrong category of human for it?
Is it risk that stops you from leaving — or is it fear wearing risk's clothes?
Why does writing your worst fear down on paper shrink it?
Can a single founder build a company that outlasts the founders who have co-founders?

A conversation about self-knowledge as the real moat — and why the fear that freezes you is almost always smaller on paper than the life on the other side of it.

Chapters

0:00 Welcome & introducing Shashank Mehta
3:00 Middle class Delhi, mom's tears and the pressure to study
8:00 HUL, the startup bug & discovering he's a creator
14:00 First leap — joining Fasos, failing and coming back
20:00 The blog, the rage and the protein bar made at home
27:00 Risk vs fear — writing down what actually scared him
33:00 The 2/5 rating that built a ₹100 crore brand
38:00 Co-founders — why chemistry beats skill every time
43:00 Brand first vs revenue first — the 20 year argument
47:00 Building culture on trust and inspiration not fear and greed

Nirja Bhatt looks intimidating on paper: Columbia, Harvard Business School, strategy consulting. But she calls herself "a duck in water” i.e you never see what’s moving beneath the surface. It took her two years of analysis paralysis, ten abandoned ideas, and learning to normalize embarrassment before she could finally start.

Nirja is the founder of Laani, a pre-launch personal care brand for women, built around the categories nobody talks about. In this episode, she and Avnish go back to the very beginning.

They get into:

How do you start when you have ideas but no capital?
Why validate a problem, not an idea?
How do you make peace with betting your own savings on yourself?
Should you raise money before you have a product?
And what actually separates the founders who make it?
An honest conversation about the part of the founder journey nobody photographs.

Chapters

00:00 Intro: Meet Neerja Bhatt, founder of Laani
01:30 Growing up in Baroda, raised by grandparents
03:00 Rejected by every dream school: the USC detour
04:30 How a professor's letter got her into Columbia
07:30 Q1: How do I start with no capital and too many ideas?
08:30 Analysis paralysis: 10 ideas and the HBS trap
11:00 Moving back to India: the waste management chapter
16:30 Q2: Passion vs. market gap — how to pick your problem
19:00 Talking to 200 women: customer validation done right
21:00 Q3 (Gubbachi founders): Hero products vs. commodity staples
26:30 To raise or not to raise: funding pre-launch
29:00 Final advice: persistence and eating a lot of shit
30:00 Outro

Chakradhar Gade had the résumé everyone's supposed to want: engineering, CFA, a hedge fund, and felt like he'd lost himself inside it. So he walked away to sell milk.

This is the story of how a finance guy who once mapped "the IRR of a cow" learned that the spreadsheet was a lie, lost all his money proving it, and rebuilt Country Delight from first principles, one customer relationship at a time.
Avnish Bajaj and Chakradhar get into the questions most founders sit with alone:

What do you do when a successful career leaves you with "a huge loss of identity"?
Should you bootstrap and survive, or raise aggressively and run?
How long does it really take to learn a business you've never been in?
How do you tell real customer love apart from people just being nice to you?
When the model that "looked very beautiful in Excel" collapses, what replaces it?

A conversation about chasing meaning over status, why bootstrapping bought six years of depth, and why, in Chakri's words, "there's no downside" to starting.

Chapters

0:00 Welcome & introducing Chakradhar Gade
1:35 Growing up in Guntur, Infosys & chasing meaning
4:43 From MBA to Wall Street — why he chose finance
7:33 The decision to quit New York and become a doodhwala
12:05 The IRR of a cow (and why Excel lied)
14:51 Bootstrap or raise? The real answer
17:00 Raising from friends & family without ruining relationships
21:02 From ₹80 lakhs to ₹200 crores a month
23:01 The milkman model & month 60 retention
32:34 Final advice: take more risks, there is no downside

Are entrepreneurs born or made? Asish Mohapatra is certain it's the second and he'll tell you plainly he's good at maybe 3 of the 10 things a founder needs.

Asish is the co-founder of OfBusiness and Oxyzo, which he built into one of India's largest B2B commerce and lending businesses. But this conversation with Avnish isn't about the scale, it's about the intellectual honesty underneath it.

In this episode, they get into:

How did you get comfortable in your own skin? Was there a trigger?
Are entrepreneurs born or made, and how do you decide which skills to build vs. buy?
How do you pick a co-founder (and run a company with your spouse)?
Why would you never hire someone at their last salary?
Do you have to go public and when?
A conversation about failing early, being honest about it, and finding the

🎧 New episodes of Unstarted every Thursday. For founders. By founders.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open
01:30 The boss he fired, the mentor he kept
03:30 The 10% you keep for life
07:30 Are founders born or made?
08:30 Why I got comfortable failing
08:45 Build it or buy it?
15:30 Picking a co-founder (and a wife)
19:00 Why I work 20-hour days
19:35 Baby is six days older than the company
22:45 The vulnerabilities he leads with
28:00 Never hire at their last salary
30:30 Always the next IPO?
35:00 Be yourself. Keep building your superpower.

Can you be a founder without ever founding anything?

Amarjeet Batra has spent 25 years building other people's companies, first Baazee, eBay, OLX, and now Spotify India, and never once thought of himself as an employee. He's what Avnish calls "professionally unstarted": a founder from within.

Avnish and Amarjeet get into the questions most operators never say out loud:

If you have the skills, the confidence, and the network, but not the one big idea, what do you actually do with that?
Is raising a fund a solution, or a responsibility you take on before you've found the problem?
Why would you choose 1% of a billion-dollar company over 100% of a ten-million-dollar one?
How do you build a category when ten players already exist and you've arrived last?
When is a difficult problem worth solving, and when does the market simply not care enough to pay?
This is a conversation about range over specialisation, ownership without a cap table, and why some of the most entrepreneurial people you'll meet never start a company of their own.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open
01:30 The professionally unstarted founder
02:55 Baazi, the born-again moment
05:10 Why I broke every rule of specialization
08:30 The eBay epiphany: time to do something bigger
09:43 China, and the scale that humbled me
18:26 The power of moving last
20:05 Building the category nobody built
21:15 Is there still a marketplace to win?
22:56 Disruption, distribution, and the AI shift
23:58 Q: How do you actually scale an events business?
26:15 Q: (cont.) Why your event might be the wrong product
28:14 Q: Should we build a place to apprentice under founders?
31:32 How to actually reach a busy operator
34:20 Q: Difficult problem, or one nobody will pay for?
35:09 Problem-first, and the willingness-to-pay test
36:37 Vitamin or painkiller
39:01 Play-front music: a business model flips
41:09 Why success looks overnight

What does it actually take to build AI for 70 crore users?

Vikram sits down with Rahul Chowdhury - co-founder and CTO of PhonePeto talk about how India's most scaled fintech is approaching AI. Not with hype or a top-down mandate, but with a quiet, deliberate, engineering-first philosophy that started four years ago with a small team focused on making developers happier.

Rahul shares the inside story of PhonePe's AI journey from building their own LLM gateway and Agent Hub, to launching AI search with Microsoft, to betting on on-device models for privacy and cost. And it ends with the biggest idea of all: India's DPI stack has spent a decade making data AI-ready.

The opportunity now is to use it to build the bank branch of one — truly personalized financial products for every Indian.

If you're a founder, engineer, or product leader trying to understand where India's AI story is really headed, don't miss this.

What you'll learn

🔹 Why PhonePe avoided output metrics in year one of AI and why it worked

🔹 How to build an AI culture without a top-down mandate

🔹 What an LLM gateway is and why every scaled company needs one

🔹 Why on-device models are the right bet for consumer AI in India

🔹 How DPDP will reshape how companies think about AI and data

🔹 Why India's role in global AI is in applied AI — not foundational models

🔹 How DPI × AI creates the opportunity for hyper-personalized financial products

Chapters

0:00 Intro & who is Rahul Chowdhury
02:30 PhonePe's AI journey: tinkerers to transformers
06:00 The DevX team: why developer happiness came first
10:00 Don't rush into AI — the engineering first mindset
14:30 Building the LLM gateway & data stack
18:00 Agent Hub: PhonePe's internal marketplace of agents
22:00 AI Search with Microsoft & on-device models
26:00 Why India needs edge models, not foundational ones
30:00 DPI × AI: the bank branch of one
34:00 Conclusion

Harshil Mathur started Razorpay after quitting the highest-paying job on his campus, a role his whole family had just celebrated, because he walked in on day one and realised he was a guy who wanted to sit and code, not step onto an oil field.

Then he spent a decade away from that: walking into bank after bank getting laughed out of the room, surviving the grind no funding can fast-track, and the night Yes Bank froze with customer money stuck inside it. This is the founder story, lived experience as an edge, why the rejections compounded in his favour, why the grind always comes, and the values that made the hard calls simple.

And then the thing that pulled him back: agentic AI. "It went from being an assistant to an execution engine." Six years after he last wrote real code, Harshil locked himself in a room, asked "if I were to start Razorpay today, how would I build it?" — and rebuilt everything.

The second half is an operator's view of what that shift actually changes:

Why AI magnifies an org's weaknesses instead of fixing them
Why an agent with no plan drifts exactly like a company with no plan
How Razorpay flipped its leadership hackathon and the bet behind Agent Studio
Hosted by Avnish Bajaj with Vikram Vaidyanathan this is a conversation about building, walking away from it, and being pulled back, and what that says about where AI is headed.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
02:15 Growing up in Jaipur & coding since 6th grade
05:30 IIT Roorkee, SDS Labs & building without permission
10:45 Quitting a $100,000 Schlumberger job in 6 months
14:20 The Facebook comment that sparked Razorpay
18:00 100 banker rejections & how rejections compound
24:10 Getting into YC with zero expectations
35:30 Yes Bank freezes — one decision defines the culture
40:00 Going back to coding after 6 years — AI changes everything
52:00 Rebuilding Razorpay from scratch with AI agents

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Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Anjali Sardana grew up in northern Virginia, studied biology at Georgetown, worked at Bain Capital — and then, without telling her parents, flew to India and founded Pronto: a platform building the world's largest labor organization network, starting with home services.

In this episode of Unstarted, Anjali breaks down how she picked an operations business over a product business (and why), why she sees India's informal labor market as a trillion-dollar opportunity, and the founder mindset that got her through the messy, chaotic, sleep-deprived early days.

She also gets brutally honest about faking confidence, hiring missionaries not mercenaries, and why she thinks most human limitations are completely made up.

Chapters

0:00 Intro — Meet Anjali Sardana
1:20 Growing up in Virginia, studying biology at Georgetown
3:10 The evolution framework that shaped her business thinking
5:00 Product vs. operations vs. distribution — how she chose
8:30 Why India? The labor-market thesis
12:00 Moving to India with zero experience — and hiding it from her parents
15:40 Fake it till you make it: raising a seed round at Bain Capital
19:15 Running pilots, vibe-coding the app, and getting the first bookings
24:00 The Kapil story — recruiting 30 workers in one afternoon
28:00 Operating 24/7 with 5 people, sleeping in shifts
31:30 Building culture: missionaries vs. mercenaries
36:00 Urgency as a core value — actions beget information
39:30 Conviction vs. market signals — how to balance both

India's GPU footprint is on track to grow 40x by 2030, from ~50,000 today to a couple of million.

That number is bigger than any public forecast. Sharad Sanghi has the unusual standing to make it: he built Netmagic into India's most significant datacenter business, and he's now running Neysa, the only neo cloud in India that Semi Analysis has rated, backed by Blackstone.
In this episode of Intelligent Indians, Rajinder Balaraman and Sharad cover:

Why neo clouds exist as a category, and what hyperscalers structurally can't do for one market
The ITQ case study: how to define ROI before infrastructure
The three infra mistakes that quietly cost AI teams 10x their compute spend
Why power, not GPUs, is the real bottleneck, and why 50% of India's data centre capacity sits in one city
What India's AI Mission could actually unlock in the next phase

If you're building AI infrastructure in India, tracking the space as an investor, or working on policy in the area, this is the operator view.

From someone whose entire balance sheet depends on getting the call right.

Chapters

00:00 India's AI Moment The Big Picture
02:00 Welcome Introducing Sharath of Neysa
03:30 How He Built India's First Data Centre with NetMagic
06:00 How ChatGPT Sparked the Idea for Neysa
18:00 India is 2nd Largest AI Consumer
21:00 50,000 GPUs Today. 2 Million by 2028
24:30 Neysa vs AWS, GCP, Azure
28:00 Why Indian Banks Are Early AI Adopters
31:30 Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing
35:00 PhonePe, Perfios, Hungama - Real AI Use Cases in India
38:30 Why Most AI Projects Stay in Pilot and Never Reach Production
52:30 GPU Obsolescence Risk — How Neysa Manages It
55:00 Healthcare, Education, Agriculture — Where Founders Should Build
58:30 IIT Bombay and the Bharat Gyan Project
1:01:00 Why India Needs to Keep Its AI Talent at Home
1:04:00 Why He Refused to Flip the Company Outside India
1:06:30 What It Takes to Make India the AI Research Capital of the World

Chirag Taneja built GoKwik into 1 in 5 D2C checkouts in India. But the path there was a series of bets that didn't work, jobs that didn't last, and one moment in 2020 where the suitcases for Canada were packed and waiting in his living room.
In Episode 12 of Unstarted, Chirag sits down with Avnish Bajaj to talk about what it actually means to keep tinkering, and when tinkering becomes the thing that holds you back.
They get into:

What's really important to start a business: idea, capital, or knowledge?
Why choosing the right problem matters more than solving any problem
The Canada PR that almost happened (and the suitcases that are still in his house)
Probabilistic thinking, and why "generate choices" beats "make decisions"
Should you have a co-founder you don't already know?
How he thinks about ESOPs, the size of the pie

Unstarted is a Z47 series. For founders, by founders. New episode every Thursday.

Chapters

00:18 From the shop floor to a 1-in-5 D2C company
01:35 A banker father, a single parent, and "play with intent"
03:15 Why he chose Delhi College over IIT Delhi Civil
05:30 The first Asian team to build a Formula race car
06:25 The Maruti bet that landed him on the shop floor
07:10 Q: Idea, capital, or knowledge — what matters most?
08:50 How Bombay Shaving Company became the foundation of GoKwik
09:35 The right problem matters more than the right solution
10:55 Payments were broken in 2005. They were still broken in 2017.
11:50 Pick your game: badminton or golf?
13:20 The Canada PR, the suitcases, and the trip that never happened
15:25 Generate choices before you make decisions
17:50 When the tinkerer turns on himself
19:15 Why "what worked then" stops working at 1-to-10
22:45 Q: When should you have a co-founder?
24:45 Why arranged co-founders are too risky
28:30 Closing

Most founders can't tell you the moment they decided to build. Vedang Patel can. He was 23, a finance analyst with IIM seats in hand, and he looked at the MBA-holder sitting next to him in office and asked himself one question: "Is that what I want to do?"

The resounding no from every section of his brain, and the ₹5.25 lakh he and his co-founders had between them is what became The Souled Store. ₹1000 crore in revenue,

₹150–200 crore in profit, an NSE bell on the way.

In this episode, Avnish and Vedang sit with three questions sent in by aspiring founders:

How do you actually validate an idea?
How do you separate polite encouragement from real market demand?
Brand or revenue first?
They also talk about the part most founders won't: the $10 million Vedang got "lost in frameworks" with, the 15-20 CR in personal-guarantee debt, and how exponential's cheque pulled him back.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open
01:30 From a cupboard of t-shirts to ₹1000 crore
03:30 The Sunday-Monday test
06:30 "She cried for days"
08:30 Risk vs Recklessness
11:00 Q: How do I validate my idea?
13:30 ₹5.25 lakh, no money for movies
15:30 Discounted PMF is false PMF
17:00 Q: Polite encouragement or real demand?
20:30 The empty chair of the customer
24:30 When the $10 million came in
27:30 "Maybe I should be inspired by Neera Modi"
30:30 Q: Brand or revenue first?
32:00 A brand is what the customer expects
35:30 Why he never left Bombay
38:30 The ESOP wall and the 5-10-85 rule
41:30 "Don't overthink. Start."

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India's AI moment is louder than its rank. 100M+ ChatGPT users. #2 globally in usage. Still 76th in the world on per capita penetration. So what's actually happening on the ground?

In this episode of Z47 Moments, Vikram Vaidyanathan and Ashwin Raguraman (Head of AI, walk through The India AI Edge: a three-month primary research effort by Z47, OpenAI, and Zinnov. The report draws on first-party ChatGPT data from OpenAI and interviews with 100+ CXOs across India's largest enterprises, traditional businesses, and emerging companies.

They unpack:

Why India's AI map looks nothing like its tech map: Delhi #1 in GDP penetration, Ahmedabad in the top 5 for coding, Assam 3x the national average on education usage
The flip nobody saw coming: in mid-2024, Gen Z (18–24) overtook 25–34 as India's dominant AI cohort, and now drives nearly half of all ChatGPT messages
Work-to-non-work: how India went from 60% work usage to 65% non-work usage in a year, and what that says about penetration
The four enterprise adoption archetypes: Tinkerer, Democratizer, Transformer, Enforcer, and why ~1 in 4 Indian enterprises is stuck in the wrong one
The trillion-dollar gap to Viksit Bharat, and the specific role AI would have to play to close it
The four pillars India needs to scale: compute (200–250 MW today → 7 GW needed by 2030), talent, data (and the "data colony" question), and the companies actually being built

To read the full report, go to:

The India AI Edge Website: https://z47.com/how-india-uses-ai
Link to report: https://www.ai-edge.z47.com/The-India-AI-Report.pdf Chapters00:00 — Cold Open: The Stats That Set the Frame
00:49 — Inside the Report: 100M Users, 100+ CXOs, OpenAI Data
02:14 — How AI Is Redrawing India's Map
04:59 — The Gen Z Takeover
11:24 — Work to Non-Work: India's Usage Flip
15:01 — Enterprise AI: The Four Archetypes
25:27 — The Enforcer Trap (And How to Escape It)
33:21 — Can AI Close India's Trillion-Dollar Gap?
37:22 — Compute, Talent, Data, Companies: The Four Pillars
47:15 — India's AI Ecosystem & Closing

What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet?
Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it.

By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a rubber-ducky shoe into the world before it ever touched a marketplace.

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Utkarsh sit with the questions most founders never say out loud:

Was the MBA real, or was I procrastinating?

How do you build your own legacy when one's already been handed to you?
How do you tell persistence apart from stubbornness when the first launch sells two pairs?
When everyone says list on Myntra, why wait two and a half years?

A masterclass in brand building, told as a confession.

Chapters

0:00 Introduction
0:50 Growing up in Kanpur's joint family
1:13 How Dainik Jagran started on a cycle in 1940
2:09 Why he left a media dynasty to build his own thing
4:47 Doon School changed everything at age 11
6:20 Grandfather's lesson: don't be afraid to scale
11:50 How Chicago's sneaker culture sparked Comet
13:31 Creating your own surface area of luck
14:55 Finding co-founder Dushyant
23:24 The 4-pillar brand strategy that built Comet
27:09 Why they waited 2.5 years before joining Myntra
28:55 The Mango shoe sold 2 units in 4 days — they persisted anyway
31:40 3 metrics every founder should track
41:46 Building the sole from scratch (4-5 moulds, 6 months)
43:02 Creasing problem: sourced a secret material from Korea
46:12 Instagram → Stores → Myntra: the distribution sequence
49:43 Exclusive reveal: the Rubber Ducky drop (May)

Do you need an original idea to start a company? Do you need to be a consumer of your category? Do you need the "right" co-founders?
Manish Taneja was none of those things. He grew up in Faridabad a self-described "frog of his own well." He went to IIT and "felt very small." He became a banker, then an investor, then started a beauty company with two other male engineers, with no female co-founder, and no personal stake in the category. He still built Purplle into one of India's largest beauty platforms.
In this episode of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj and Manish sit down to work through the questions that every founder without a clear edge asks themselves:

Do you need an original idea, or is it okay to be a "copycat entrepreneur"? When VCs tell you your team is missing something
Do you fix the weakness or back your strength? – How do you find a wedge in a category where everyone else has more money, more experience, and more insider knowledge?
What do you do when your ego won't let you leave — and is that the thing keeping you in the game?
How do you build responsibly without losing your edge?

Manish's answer to all of it, in the end, comes down to two lines: back your strengths, and build responsibly. This conversation is about how he got there.

Chapters

00:00 The $100 million mistake
01:55 Faridabad, the frog in the well
03:03 Feeling small at IIT, and the speech that changed everything
05:31 Lehman, Avendus, and the long apprenticeship
08:52 "I was the original copycat entrepreneur"
12:58 The feedback from Matrix: no woman co-founder
14:54 Why beauty, and why now
17:52 Dabau early: the rosemary water playbook
22:00 How Purplle won Kerala (and met the priests)
26:02 The internal compass, and saying no to Thrasios
28:53 Why your ego won't let you leave
30:36 Why he built in Bombay
33:17 The IPO question
35:49 Build responsibly

What do you do with the regret of being right too early?

Aakrit Vaish started Haptik in 2013: an AI chatbot company nine years before ChatGPT. By 2016 he knew the market wasn't ready. He kept going anyway. In 2019 he sold to Reliance Jio. In November 2022, he watched the world finally catch up to the thesis he'd carried for a decade and for a few weeks, sat with the sentence: "This should have been me."

Today he's co-founder of Activate, an AI-native VC firm running with two partners, one employee and seven agents, and an advisor on the India AI Mission. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj sits down with a founder who has rejected him more than once, and asks the questions most founders quietly carry:

How do you know whether you're early, late, or correctly timed?
Why do you keep going when the rational move is to stop?
When the world eventually proves you right, what do you do with the grief?
In AI today, what does it actually mean to be in the 99th percentile — globally, not locally?
How does a high-agency founder stay ahead when the tools keep rewriting the job?
What Aakrit lands on: market timing matters, but identity matters more.
Mission over everything else. And the only advice he gives, seven times a day, to anyone who'll listen: have agency. Build. Don't wait.

Chapters

00:00 Why Did You Let ChatGPT Happen?
02:30 Welcome to Unstarted — Introducing Aakrit Vaish
04:00 Growing Up in Juhu — Normal Mumbai Business Family
06:30 UIUC, PayPal Mafia & Moving to Silicon Valley
09:00 Why He Came Back to India at 27
11:00 What Was Haptic? India's First AI Chatbot Company
14:00 The Alexa Moment That Started It All (London 2012)
18:00 How Founders Can Know If They Are Too Early or Too Late
23:00 2016 — He Knew It Was Too Early. He Kept Going Anyway
27:30 Fear of Failure vs Fear of Not Trying Hard Enough
31:00 The Pull vs Push Test — The Clearest PMF Signal
35:00 Why He Sold Haptic to Reliance
38:30 ChatGPT Launched. His First Reaction Was Personal
43:00 "Should That Have Been Me?" — The Honest Answer
47:00 From Reliance to India AI Mission to Activate VC
51:00 How to Know Which Problem Is Worth Solving With AI
55:30 99th Percentile or Nothing — The New Bar for AI Founders
59:00 Why AI in India Is the Most Ignored Opportunity
1:03:00 Anthropic vs OpenAI — Two Different Strategies Explained
1:07:00 Voice AI, FinTech & How GDP Will Actually Grow
1:11:00 The K-Shift — GDP Growth at the Cost of Inequality

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

What happens when you spend 13 years building something, and for most of those years, the people around you think it's not going to work out?
Jaydeep Barman left a gilded career at McKinsey's London office to bet on a single roll shop in Pune. What followed was a decade-plus journey through India's costliest real estate market, the invention of an entirely new category (cloud kitchens — before anyone called it that), and the slow, painful work of staying in the game while companies that started years after him became unicorns overnight.

In this conversation, Avnish and Jaydeep wrestle with:

How do you find the one insight nobody else has, and trust it when the world disagrees?
What do you do when your investors mentally write you off?
Why does every real innovation at Rebel come from the moments they were closest to shutting down?
How do you build a team that stays for 13 years, through the pain, the doubt, and the long wait?
This is a conversation about what it actually costs to stay in the arena longer than everyone expects you to, and what that buys you that nothing else can.

Chapters:

00:00 The reality of startup comparison & investor pressure
01:30 Why we didn’t pivot to food delivery (despite the hype)
02:30 From McKinsey to starting a food business
04:10 The first roll shop: how Fasos began
09:00 Learning the business & why curiosity matters most
11:20 Insight v/s timing: finding your “right to win”
13:40 Building a cloud kitchen breakthrough
17:30 Founder mentality vs CV mentality
20:00 Hiring, ownership & building real culture
24:50 Performance vs culture: who stays, who leaves
27:20 Rock bottom moments: running out of money & pushing through

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

What does it take to fix the most broken system in America — from the outside?

Ajay and Aniket, co-founders of Coral AI, had zero healthcare experience when they started. What they had was a burning problem, a one-way plane ticket to the US, and a relentless drive to understand healthcare from the ground up — visiting 17 cities in 30 days, becoming interns, and reading thousands of faxes doctors still send in 2026.

In this episode of Zee47 Moments, Ashwin and Vikram sit down with the founders to unpack how Coral is using AI to eliminate the administrative chaos of patient referrals — cutting weeks of back-and-forth down to minutes — and how they're building one of the most AI-native companies in healthcare.

🔍 What we cover:

• Why 40% of primary care visits result in a referral — and how that process is broken
• How fax machines still run US healthcare in 2026
• The technology behind going from 80% to 99.1% accuracy on medical documents
• Why Epic and OpenAI can't solve this problem — but Coral can
• Winning head-to-head against a competitor that raised $100M+
• The "forward deployed engineer" model and why it's not services
• Building a lean, 10x team of future founders

Coral just raised $12.5M led by Zee47. This is their story.

─────────────────────────────
CHAPTERS

0:00 17 days to get a scan
2:22 Picking healthcare with zero healthcare background
4:48 17 cities in 30 days and the Mamba mentality
8:26 Inside the fax machine: how a US referral actually works
14:16 Getting to 99% accuracy (and why 95% isn't enough)
20:48 Beating a competitor with 10x the money
24:56 $100K to $500K without a sales team
28:07 The 10X-only team and the FTE model done right
33:40 Failure, rapid fire, and what's next

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Sanket Shah started thinking about business at 17. His first idea was putting ads on Mumbai's auto-rickshaws. The government said no. He went to Mantralaya three times, met the Chief Minister, got sent to the transport commissioner, and received government letters at home for four years.
He got 4 rickshaws approved.

Twenty-something years later, he's the founder of Invideo — a video creation platform operating at serious scale, with under 100 people.
And right now, he's stopped looking at his revenue numbers entirely. He has two people running the existing business. He is fully allocated to what comes next.

In this conversation with Avnish Bajaj, Sanket talks about why you can't optimise your way through a ceiling — and what it actually costs to do something drastic. He talks about the one conversation he had in San Francisco where he and his co-founder both knew they had to change course, chose not to, and paid for it all year.

Founder questions tackled in this episode:

What's the difference between an L1 insight and the insight that actually can't be copied?
When does persistence become stubbornness? How do you know which side you're on?
How do you talk to customers without asking leading questions — and what do you do with what you hear?
When everyone's going agentic, how do you actually stand out?

Recorded in association with Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM), ahead of Mumbai Tech Week 2026 May 29–30 at Jio World Convention Centre. Register at mumbaitechweek.com.

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Harsh Jain built Dream11 from a family business detour and a love of fantasy football into a company that sponsored every IPL team, sent athletes to the Olympics, and had 300 million users.
Then the government effectively ended the business he'd spent 15 years building.

This conversation isn't about the rise. It's about what happens after the nuclear bomb falls — how you grieve something you loved, how you decide whether to fight or pivot, and how you keep 1,000 people from walking out the door.

The questions Avnish and Harsh wrestle with:

Do you really need an original idea, or do you need to be obsessed with a problem?
What's the difference between being in love with your company and just being attracted to the outcome?
How do you keep going after 150 investor rejections — and is "keep going" always the right answer?
What do you do when the nuclear bomb falls on everything you built?
Can culture actually survive catastrophe, or does it only exist in the good times?

In the end culture is the only thing that scales. Not the product or funding. The team and whether you built something worth staying for.

YouTube Chapters
00:00 The neighbour who built Dream11
05:09 Love vs. lust: the only thing that keeps you going
06:39 Q1: Do you really need an original idea?
10:27 150 rejections: the napkin, the car ride
18:37 Q2:How to know if you actually have product-market fit
22:03 Culture is the founder's DNA
27:43 The nuclear bomb falls
32:54 What happens after you grieve together
39:45 Why Harsh never left Mumbai
41:21 — What Mumbai Tech Week is actually for
44:10 — B talent. A culture. One big problem.

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

OpenClaw went from zero to more GitHub stars than React, a library that took a decade to build that following, in 60 days. One graph, vertical, like nothing the developer community had ever seen.

When Z47’s founder, Avnish Bajaj saw that graph, something shifted.
Six months earlier, the at Z47 had sat down to look at the velocity of AI deal-making, the valuations, the volume of capital flooding in, and called it a bubble.

The consensus was clear: enterprise adoption would lag, the economics wouldn't close, and the correction would come.Then that graph happened. Then agentic AI happened. Then self-healing code happened. And the thing everyone assumed would lag — enterprise adoption — is now about to explode.

Avnish sits down with Rajinder on Intelligent Indians to work through what changed, what it means, and what every founder and operator needs to do right now before the window closes.

The conversation covers:

Why the bubble call was wrong, and the specific moment that broke the consensus thesis
The AI Agency vs. Mastery K-curve an what it means for your trajectory
Answering the question “Will AI take my job?”
How India is positioned to build AI services
What AI-native actually means (And no, it is not using ChatGPT)
A live demo of Avnish's WhatsApp-based agent Zen

Chapters

00:00 "I Called a Bubble. I Was Wrong
06:15 The Moment That Changed Everything: OpenClaw and the Enterprise Unlock
08:16 The K-Curve: Why AI Won't Take Your Job — But Someone Else Will
14:29 India's Real Opportunity (It's Not What You Think)
22:16 What Founders Should Actually Do Right Now
27:48 Live Demo: Avi's AI Agent "Zen"
33:24 I've Been Waiting 35 Years. It's Finally Here

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Most people know what they want. The problem is they keep waiting for certainty that never comes.

Oolka founder, Utkrishta Kumar built India's first just-in-time fulfilment network at 27, helped scale Meesho through one of India's biggest social commerce pivots and then left before the IPO. Not because he had to, but because the regret of not starting felt heavier than the risk of failing.

In this episode, Avnish and Utkrishta work through the questions early founders actually get stuck on:

How do I know I'm ready to start up?
How do you find PMF and is tracking PMF enough?
How do I build an AI product that ChatGPT can't just replace tomorrow?
If I've already made money, why does failure still terrify me?
The conversation lands somewhere honest: you won't see the whole road. 6. You just need to be okay with the fog

A new episode of Unstarted - every Thursday

00:00 Leaving before the IPO
00:56 Introduction: the one question every aspiring founder is asking
01:55 Growing up risk-averse
04:54 Q1: How do you know if starting up is the right move?
07:12 How to build a founder's operating system without an MBA
11:43 Q2: How do I know if I've reached PMF?
13:47 What Oolka does — and why every credit problem is individual
16:51 Why he left Meesho before the IPO — and the fear money doesn't fix 19:58 Q3: How do you build with AI without being replaced tomorrow?
26:49 Final advice: more than 70% never fire the bullet

What does it actually take to go from employee to founder — after 8 years inside one of India's greatest startups?

In Episode 5 of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj sits down with Anil Goteti, CEO of Scapia, to talk about the real founder journey — not the highlight reel. From leaving McKinsey after just one year, to carrying a US loan back to India, to building and shutting down his first startup before finding PMF with Scapia.
This episode covers:

Why entrepreneurs are made, not born
The Monday Morning Test — knowing when to quit
What 8 years at Flipkart actually teaches you
Why competition never killed a company — customers did
How to know when your product is (and isn't) working
The failure before Scapia and what it taught him

In the end, the destination was always clear and the route was never going to be linear. Finally, the Monday morning test doesn't lie.

Unstarted is a podcast by Z47 - by founders, for founders. Whether you've started or you're yet unstarted.

YT Chapters

0:00 - Introduction & What is Unstarted
1:45 - Meet Anil Goteti — IIT, McKinsey, Flipkart & Scapia
4:00 - Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?
7:30 - The Kid Who Wanted a Product in Every Indian's Hand
11:00 - IIT Electrical vs Computer Science — The First Detour
14:00 - Leaving McKinsey After 1 Year: "I Want to Be the King"
18:30 - Joining Flipkart - Taking One Notch of Risk
22:00 - 8 Years at Flipkart: The Best Projects & Lessons
31:00 - The Monday Morning Test
35:30 - Who Inspires Anil Goteti?
39:00 - How Do You Know When Your Product Is Working?
45:00 - Competition Never Killed Anyone - Customers Did
49:00 - The Failed Startup Before Scapia
54:00 - What's Next: Building Scapia

Most people have never heard of Captain Fresh.

In 2020, Utham Gowda walked into Z47's office with one belief: take a shrimp from Chennai to New York, and it's a very profitable business. Nobody believed him. He built it anyway.

Five years later: ₹10,000 Cr in revenue. ₹550 Cr EBITDA (annualised Q4 FY26). Distribution across 15 of the top 20 European retailers. One-third of the white-cloth restaurant market in the US. Three oceans, six countries, ten acquisitions — zero leverage, 100% management rollover on every deal.

And by Utham's own accounting, another ₹600-700 Cr of EBITDA still on the table.

In this episode, Z47's Sudipto Sannigrahi and Tarun Davda sit down with Utham in Bangalore for the most detailed conversation he's had on how Captain Fresh was designed, how it survived the most volatile macro environment in years, and what comes next, ahead of what is shaping up to be one of India's most significant IPOs.

The quiet empire is about to become impossible to ignore.

Chapters

00:00 The original bet: "Take a shrimp from Chennai to New York"
03:22 Six years on: what's changed, what hasn't
05:08 The problem that stayed the same: why seafood is broken everywhere
08:10 Why India wasn't enough: the pivot to US and Europe
09:00 What Captain Fresh actually is today: US restaurants, European retail
20:33 The supply side: three oceans, six countries, 250 factories
22:29 The numbers, the growth, and how acquisitions drive both
23:45 The acquisition playbook: zero leverage, 100% management rollover
29:24 Wallet share and the platform magic (the Coral story)
35:10 The FTA windfall they never modelled
36:58 Tariffs, the rupee, and why the macro actually helped
42:56 "Are you just playing multiple arbitrage?"
45:00 The four pillars: multi-species, multi-geo, vertical integration, tech
49:31 The next 10 years: from supply chain to innovation powerhouse

What happens when you spend your whole career chasing external validation and it still isn't enough?

Romita Mazumdar is the Founder and CEO of Foxtale, one of India's fastest-growing D2C beauty brands. But this conversation isn't about the business. It's about the years before it: the banking desk that made her feel seen for the wrong reasons, the VC firm where she was suddenly invisible, and the team dinner where someone asked a question she couldn't answer the expected way.

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Romita attempt to answer:

When do you actually know it's time to leave?
How do you find PMF when you don't trust your own lens?
What does it mean to build for yourself, not for validation?
How do you know you have what it takes?
What they land on: you either need self-belief, passion, or obsession. One 6. of the three. A hundred percent. That's the bar.

Chapters

00:00 The moment I decided to build a $100M consumer brand
02:10 Overachiever mindset, validation & a confusing career path
05:45 Losing confidence in VC & not feeling like I belonged
09:05 Where my ambition really came from
12:20 The turning point that made me choose entrepreneurship
15:05 Q1: When do you know it’s time to leave your job and start up?
20:40 Q2: How do you know you’ve found product–market fit?
26:50 Q3: How do you deal with conflict when working with family / co-founders?
30:10 Company first: the rule I use to make hard decisions
35:10 What ambition, duty & entrepreneurship really mean

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Most founders look at Aman Gupta and think: “he's different. I could never build that.

Avnish Bajaj has known Aman for over 20 years - since before boAt, before Shark Tank, before any of it. He knows that's not the truth. That's exactly why he invited him on Unstarted.

Aman Gupta co-founded BoAt in 2016 and built it into India's largest consumer audio brand, with ₹3000+ crore in revenue and a 45% co-founder stake. What most people don't know: before boAt, there were 5 other companies. Most didn't work.

Some ran simultaneously. He got fired from almost every job he held. And he only had a 2-year window to prove himself.

In this episode, Avnish and Aman try to answer the questions founders actually carry:

Follow your passion" but what if you don't know what yours is yet? Is it really the idea that separates winners from losers?
What does it take to build a cult brand when you're nobody? When do you know it's time to hand the keys to someone else?
How do you stay unapologetically yourself when the whole world is watching?

The answer they keep coming back to: it's less about being born right, and more about being willing to stay in the game.

Chapters

00:00 Aman Gupta & Baazi backstory
01:21 Podcast intro – What is Unstarted
02:44 Introducing Aman Gupta (boAt founder)
04:11 Shark Tank, media & public image
08:15 Jobs, getting fired & entrepreneurial DNA
11:12 “Hum bhi bana lenge” mindset
14:45 Q1Are entrepreneurs born or made?
17:52 Q2 3 outrageous qualities founders need
25:55 Q3 How founders should pitch to investors
27:44 Judging founders in minutes
28:30 Hiring philosophy – people like you vs complementary skills
29:44 Shark Tank regret question setup

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Ahana grew up in Bharatpur, a small town in India where many believed girls shouldn’t always have the same opportunities. But her mother believed otherwise and pushed her to dream bigger.

That belief eventually took her to Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and later to Harvard Business School. But this story isn’t about degrees or credentials. It’s about resilience, grit, and the relentless pursuit of building something meaningful.

From taking bold bets to navigating failures, Ahana’s journey eventually led to building Open Secret - one of India’s most well-known healthy snacking brands today.

This conversation dives into the real founder journey behind the brand: the risks, the setbacks, and the determination it took to keep going.

But this isn’t just a success story, in this episode, Ahana openly shares about failed experiments, her mother’s contribution to her life and why she’s passionate about unjunking India.

If you're building a startup, thinking about entrepreneurship, or navigating early-stage chaos - this conversation will give you clarity on what truly matters.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: Growing up in Bharatpur & breaking glass ceilings
06:40 IIT, Harvard and Open Secret
16:12 Q1 - Leaving behind a job in US to startup
18:00 Q2 - How does Ahana deal with failures
23:17 Q3 - How does one maintain funding until profitable
27:30 From -47% EBITDA to profitable growth
39:00 Women-led manufacturing and leadership
43:30 Losing her mother during COVID and finding strength

About Open Secret

Open Secret is a better-for-you snacking brand focused on removing maida, trans fat and artificial preservatives from everyday Indian packaged foods. With strong repeat rates and rapid quick commerce penetration, it is one of India’s fastest-scaling health-focused FMCG startups.

Unstarted is built for 1 to 1 founders — people thinking about starting, or just getting started.
Real questions. Real answers. Real founders.

Have a question you want answered by top founders? Submit it here:
https://z47.com/unstarted/ask

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - / z47.vc
LinkedIn - / z47-vc

Unstarted is a new Z47 series, by founders, for founders.

Most people think they need more experience before they start.

More operating. More pattern recognition. More certainty.

If you’re waiting to feel “ready,” this episode will force you to rethink that.

In Episode 1 of Unstarted, legendary investor Avnish Bajaj sits down with Revant Bhate (Founder & CEO, Mosaic Wellness — Man Matters, Be Bodywise, Little Joys) to unpack the real shift. What actually changes when you stop backing founders… and become one?

This is a founder mindset autopsy.

Inside this UnStarted episode:

The difference between scepticism (as an investor) and conviction (as a founder)
How much experience is actually “enough” before you start
Profitability vs scale: when the trade-off is real, and when it’s lazy thinking
Why founder–market fit may matter more than the idea
Building in an AI-first world when speed is default
The quiet mental tax of being the one responsible

Unstarted is built for 1 to 1 founders — people thinking about starting, or just getting started.

Real questions. Real answers. Real founders.

Have a question you want answered by top founders?

Submit it here: https://z47.com/unstarted/ask

⏱ Chapters

00:00 Introduction UnStarted
3.04 Revant's background & early career
9.23 The importance of discovering yourself
13:40 How do I pivot from VC to investor?
20:28 How do I stress-test my startup idea?
26:30 Should I choose profitability of scale?
31:13 Fundraising myths

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

Beautiful things shouldn’t cost the world.

India exports - $13B in home decor annually, expected to cross - $21B by 2030.
Factories everywhere. But almost no global consumer brands built from here.

In this episode of Z47 Moments, Sudipto Sannigrahi sits down with Abhik Ghosh, Co-founder & CEO of Trampoline (ex-Amazon, Wayfair), to unpack how they’re building an India-to-world home decor brand, starting factory-first.

Abhik breaks down:
Why they chose B2B before B2C and how it creates predictability

How trust with factories and sofa changed payment terms from advances to credit

How they reduced working capital in a 90–120 day category to under 30 days

Why “value” in Western markets means quality first, not just price

How AI powers creative, catalog, and performance marketing

And what it takes to build a brand across borders, from India to the UK and beyond.

This is a conversation about systems, sequencing, and discipline. If you’re building in D2C, exports, supply chain, or global consumer categories, this episode offers a practical playbook.

Chapters

⁠00:00⁠ Why build a global brand from India

⁠01:05⁠ Founders’ background Amazon, Wayfair, Europe

⁠02:10⁠ India home decor opportunity $13B → $21B

⁠03:30⁠ Broken supply chain 8k–10k factories

⁠05:00⁠ Factory-first model explained

⁠07:10⁠ Starting with 4–5 factories → 30 today

⁠09:20⁠ Why cross-border must start B2B

⁠11:40⁠ Wayfair & Williams-Sonoma playbook

⁠13:40⁠ Selling to UK from India

⁠15:10⁠ Customer value 30–80% savings promise

⁠17:10⁠ Western home refresh behavior 4-year cycle

⁠18:40⁠ GTM B2B acquisition strategy

⁠20:00⁠ D2C strategy Why avoid marketplaces

⁠21:40⁠ Unit economics & working capital under 30 days

⁠24:10⁠ Pre-orders & dropshipping from India

⁠26:00⁠ ROAS, LTV/CAC & marketing efficiency

⁠27:30⁠ Selection & design prediction

⁠29:00⁠ Unexpected demand signals

⁠30:20⁠ AI-generated creatives & catalog
100% AI product imagery

⁠35:10⁠ 2030 Long-term global brand ambition

Follow Z47
Website - ⁠https://www.z47.com/⁠

Instagram - ⁠ / z47.vc ⁠

LinkedIn - ⁠ / z47-vc ⁠⁠#ikea⁠ ⁠#howtostartastartup⁠

Enterprise AI doesn’t fail because models are weak.

It fails because data pipelines break, permissions drift, costs explode, and governance is treated like an annual checkbox instead of everyday operational discipline.

In this episode of Intelligent Indians!, Vikram Vaidyanathan sits down with Rohit Choudhury, Founder & CEO of Acceldata, for a deep conversation on how enterprise data systems actually behave at scale and why AI makes every weak foundation visible.

Rohit’s founder journey mirrors the last 15 years of data infrastructure: from scaling InMobi in the pre-cloud era, to the Hadoop days at Hortonworks, to pioneering data observability, and now pushing into Agentic Data Management as enterprises move from AI pilots to production.

The conversation goes deep into:

Why AI POCs often work in one team but collapse at enterprise scale
The real cost of fixing data late, and why ingestion is the only place to fix it
How AI agents change the stakes: real-time failures, hallucinations explainability and ai updates
A practical playbook for CIOs and CDOs: SLAs, rapid experimentation, and leadership upskilling
Why cost control is becoming existential, from reruns to cloud bills to private/hybrid AI

The “India edge” in building global enterprise companies, and what DPI × AI could unlock next

Watch the full episode to understand what it really takes to make AI work at enterprise scale.

Chapters:

00:00 Why AI POCs Fail at Scale in Enterprises
02:30 Introducing Rohit Choudhury (Acceldata Founder)
05:30 Early Days at InMobi & Rewriting the Stack 3 Times
08:30 First Startup Failure & Learning Customer Obsession
11:30 Birth of the Data Observability Category
14:30 How Enterprise Data Pipelines Really Work (1000+ Apps)
18:00 Why Enterprises Need End-to-End Data Visibility
21:00 COVID Story & Missed Investment Moment
24:00 Why hallucinations are dangerous for enterprises
27:00 Governance in AI
30:00 How Banks Should Prepare for AI at Scale (4 Steps)
33:30 Why Leaders Must Learn AI Themselves (Cursor Story)
36:30 From Tool Sprawl to One Agentic Platform
39:30 Cost Explosion: Cloud vs Private AI
42:30 Self-Healing Data & Preventing AI Hallucinations
45:00 – Future of Enterprise AI & Closing Thoughts

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

podcast #podcasts #future #ai #aiindia #aicourses #aiupdates

India’s AI moment will be defined by architecture.

In our new series Intelligent Indians! we sit down with the builders, policymakers, scientists, and founders shaping India’s AI decade as it unfolds. In the first episode, Avnish Bajaj and Vikram Vaidyanathan sit down with Abhishek Singh, CEO of the IndiaAI Mission, to unpack how India is designing AI as infrastructure, not experimentation.

The conversation goes deep into what Abhishek describes as “DPI to the power of AI” for an ai learner in India extending India’s proven Digital Public Infrastructure (Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, Account Aggregator and more) into the AI era and India AI Mission. The discussion covers how population-scale systems, once thought impossible, are now becoming India’s execution advantage.

This conversation is a must watch for anyone curious about:

How affordable compute, open datasets, and India-native foundation models remove first-order constraints
The seven pillars shaping of the IndiaAI mission:from compute and data to deployment, trust, and governance
Why AI in India must work across languages, income levels, devices, and real-world conditions
How the India AI Summit is a milestone in India's longer-term systems build

Chapters

00:00 Trailer
1:57 Introduction
2:36 What is India AI Mission
4:30 Nandan Nilekani's advice
5:03 What is DPI in AI
6:22 7 pillars of Indian AI
10:30 Rs. 65?
12:00 Developing applications that will benefit people
14:20 Knowledge and access to AI
15:25 AI helping Indian farmers
16:48 India's consent architecture
18:54 Where is AI helping?
21:00 DeVc AI founders
22:15 Is data labs a government initiative
23:50 Tools to code faster
25:24 Why is AI failing at production scale
26:16 What is free AI commission
27:41 Should data monetisation be banned
28:31 Is govt doing AI startup financing
31:20 Conclusion

Also watch:

India's secret advantage in AI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqvInPvPkhQ&t=1430s

AI Committee Report - https://kpmg.com/in/en/insights/2025/08/rbi-free-ai-committee-report-on-framework-for-responsible-and-ethical-enablement-of-artificial-intelligence.html

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
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LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/

podcast #podcasts #future #ai #aiindia

Future Signals is Z47's view on where the next category-defining companies are likely to emerge, and the spaces we’re actively tracking alongside the founders building them.

For Indian startups, 2026 promises to be an inflection year where experiments from previous years create a foundation on which the future is built.

Market-defining investing rarely arrive fully formed. They are assembled, piece by piece, by founders who are willing to do the unglamorous work: shaping behaviour, stitching infrastructure, earning trust before scale shows up in a spreadsheet.

Over the last two decades, we’ve observed India’s technology story unfold in phases. First, we built capability, then scale. And finally, the confidence to build world-class businesses and public-market-ready companies. We are now moving into the next phase, where founders start redefining how value is created: by owning outcomes instead of features, and by building systems that work at population scale and travel globally.

These are the Future Signals that will define 2026 and beyond.

Follow Z47

Website - https://www.z47.com/
Instagram - / z47.vc
LinkedIn - / z47-vc

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
01:49 Are founders creating markets?
05:23 Evolution of AI
7:59 How is AI changing consumer companies?
10:25 Disruption via Agentic AI
12:01 Fin Ops is largest SaaS opportunity
14:28 Speed takes over startups
16:46 AI in Intelligent hardware
18:42 AI in banking and finance
20:48 Consumer companies making AI personal
22:43 The next META/ Binance?
23:59 What does India need?
28:21 Commerce is being re-built
30:03 Indian companies going global
32:47 SaaS products scaling globally
36:11 Manufacturing goes global
38:03 Co-pilots in businesses
41:43 2026 is the year of deployment

podcast #podcasts #future #ai #aiindia

Between overprotective term sheets and oversimplified ones lies the real market.

On this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Avnish Bajaj and Tarun Davda, are joined by Archana Rajaram to weigh in on one of the most misunderstood parts of startup building: the term sheet. As the founder of River Law (formerly Rajaram Legal), Archana’s work has quietly shaped the “market standards” that nearly every Indian SHA now follows.

In this episode, they break down the real-world changes in Indian term sheets post-2021:
from liquidation preferences and reverse vesting to governance, exits, board control, and how AI is already reshaping negotiations. The way a founder negotiates a term sheet often foreshadows how they’ll build their company, handle conflict, and navigate hard decisions later.

Tune in for a rare inside look at venture’s most misunderstood document

01:23 Introduction to the Z47 podcast
02:52 Handshake deals to hyper-detailed clauses: how India’s term sheets have evolved
05:55 Why written guardrails matter, even in trust-based relationships?
08:48 Between one-pagers and legal novels lies the real market standard
10:38 Founders lose leverage the moment they sign without counsel
12:42 What founders miss at incorporation, they pay for at IPO
16:20 You can’t switch from founder-led to board-led overnight
28:02 In India, governance runs through SHAs, not boards
34:07 Every founder’s dilemma: what terms really matter in your term sheet?
37:39 Event of Default: India’s most controversial term and why it exists
49:49 How you negotiate your first term sheet predicts how you’ll scale
59:57 AI may change diligence, but judgment still writes the rules

For more insights, revisit the related Z47 episode:
• The Terms of Term Sheets
• Hard clauses in a term sheet
• From (Z)omato to (A)ther: India’s Tech IPO...
Article: / calculating-liquidation-preference

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Website: https://www.z47.com/
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X: https://x.com/z47_vc
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In this episode of Zero to Infinity, Rajat Agarwal and Chandrasekhar Venugopal sit down with Vivek Sinha, second-time founder and CEO of Emversity, to unpack one of India’s most urgent and least-discussed problems:

👉 Why are millions of young Indians still unemployable after 16 years of education?
👉 What will it take to build a truly job-ready workforce?
👉 And why might the biggest opportunity in education lie in the “grey-collar” economy, not tech or test prep?

Vivek takes us deep into the realities of India’s higher education system, the failure of legacy institutes to prepare students for real-world roles, and the massive talent gaps in healthcare, hospitality, construction, and manufacturing.

He also breaks down Emversity’s groundbreaking model:

On-the-job learning (not online, not offline)
Industry-backwards curriculum co-designed with employers
Earn-while-you-learn degrees that effectively cost students ₹0
VR simulation labs and real-world skill training
50%+ organic student acquisition driven purely by outcomes

If you care about India’s future workforce, social mobility, or building meaningful businesses at scale, this conversation is a must-watch.

01:47 - Introduction to the Z47 Podcast
02:52 - What really happened to India’s EdTech boom?
03:25 - The three faces of EdTech: daycare, test prep & higher education
06:24 - Intent and Outcomes: the two pillars of real education
10:51 - From disruption to discipline: building an education business that lasts
15:47 - Emversity’s goal: make every student employable, not just enrolled
18:59 - Bridging academia and industry through tech + training
22:43 - Why Emversity bets on India’s grey-collar workforce
27:55 - Earn while you learn: the zero-cost degree model
31:24 - Tech-enabled, execution-driven: how Emversity scales smart
37:27 - The long road ahead: can Emversity educate a million students
40:30 - Changing lives, one job at a time
42:00 - Building India’s next-gen education infrastructure

Follow us on:
Website www.z47.com/
LinkedIn www.linkdin.com/company/z47-vc/
Twitter: https://x.com/z47_cv
Instagram: www.instagram.com/z47.vc/

70% of enterprise AI projects never reach production. The solution: Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs).

In this episode, Vikram Vaidyanathan and Rocketlane CEO, Srikrishnan Ganesan unpack the rise of the FDE model, from Palantir’s origins to how AI companies use it today to bridge the gap between prototypes and production.

They discuss why traditional SaaS orgs break in AI, the governance needed to scale FDE teams, and why India is emerging as the global engine room for AI deployment.
A crisp breakdown of the role shaping the future of enterprise AI.

Chapters

00:01:29 - Introduction to the Z47 podcast
00:04:16 - The 70% problem: Why enterprise AI fails to scale
00:05:25 - The origin story: Inside Palantir, where it all began
00:12:43 - Evolving from deployment to GTM engine
00:14:23 - The Vision Selling era: from POCs to production ROI
00:17:09 - What does a great FDE motion look like?
00:18:59 - Building with FDE DNA: How Rocketlane practices what it preaches
00:24:06 - Product, success, or stand-alone: Where should FDEs sit?
00:26:22 - Scaling the FDE model: from speed to structured governance
00:33:38 - Pairing on-site FDEs with India’s 24×7 talent engine
00:34:21 - AI adoption as India’s next big export
00:37:49 - FDEs: The human bridge between AI promise and delivery

From a small apartment in Bengaluru to powering over 2 billion users across 60+ countries, MoEngage is one of India’s most quietly global success stories. This is more than a startup story — it’s a story about India’s rise as a product nation, and the founders who are reimagining how the world engages with technology.

Raviteja Dodda, Narasimha Reddy and Yashwanth Kumar built a world-class customer engagement platform out of India — long before “SaaS for the world” became a buzzword.

We trace MoEngage’s journey through its toughest pivots, its cultural DNA, and the product decisions that made it indispensable to brands like Airtel, Ola, Nestlé, and Samsung.

In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, MoEngage co-founders Raviteja Dodda & Narasimha Reddy join Tarun Davda & Pranay Desai of Z47. In a wide-ranging chat, they discuss the MoEngage journey - from initial failures to serving over 2Bn users.

756 of 1,009 rows displayedSubmarine parts. Metro casings. Agricultural harvesters. Even bombshell casings for the defence sector.In this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Ximkart founder explore how solving the “thinking loop” first makes it possible to deliver parts for any industry, anywhere.Once the right inputs hit the execution loop, size, sector, and material become irrelevant, it’s all just precision manufacturing at scale.

The US innovates. China industrializes. Can India deploy at scale and claim its right to win in AI?

India’s edge has always been its people: engineers, data, and scale. But as LLMs automate language and logic, can that advantage still hold?

In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Chandrashekhar Venugopal speaks with Avnish Bajaj and Vikram Vaidyanathan about India’s crossroads in the AI race and what will define the country’s next decade.

The trio unpacks:
The rise of Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs): India’s secret weapon in AI deployment
How data, assurance, and governance could become India’s strongest moat
Why AI might finally flip India from back office to frontline
How voice and vernacular interfaces could erase the digital divide
And what government, investors, and founders must do to spark India’s inference leap

With Aadhaar, UPI, and consent layers powering population-scale systems, India has the infrastructure and now the opportunity to lead the world by deploying intelligence at scale.

In the near future, less than 10% of access will come from humans, the rest will be agents?

What happens when your next user isn’t human?

In this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Pranay Desai sits down with Satya Devarakonda and Ravi Madabhushi, founders of ScaleKit, to decode a fundamental shift in software: the rise of agents as first-class users.

Humans log in and out with predictable patterns. Agents are transient, transactional, and unpredictable, hitting systems hundreds of times a minute. ScaleKit’s modular approach is built for this new reality, where AI agents, not humans, dominate usage.

Satya and Ravi bring rare scar tissue and foresight. From PipeMog in 2013, to FreshID at Freshworks, to now ScaleKit, they’ve spent a decade solving identity and access at scale, and are rethinking it for an agent-first world.

The duo also shares what it means to build again as second-time founders: why distribution matters more than product, what they’ve unlearned from Freshworks, and how agents are evolving from assistants into colleagues who accelerate productivity.

Dive deep into the transformative power of AI in India’s consumer app landscape. In this episode of Zero to Infinity, Avnish Bajaj, Chandrasekhar Venugopal aka CV, and Kishan Kashyap break down:

✅ Why ChatGPT is AI’s MS‑DOS moment and what comes after
✅ How token costs dropped 1000x in a year (and why Sam Altman calls it the “new Moore’s Law”)
✅ The Disruptor–Digitizer–Enabler framework for founders building in consumer tech
✅ Why QuickCommerce for “X” (fashion, pharma, events & more) is the next frontier
✅ And why India’s rails: UPI, Aadhaar, WhatsApp—mean everything is aligned for founders

After tracing India’s growing consumer instinct in Part 1, this segment explores what happens when that intuition meets AI and what gets reimagined when UX, infra, and distribution evolve together, not sequentially.

Whether you’re an early‑stage founder, an operator, or just AI‑curious, this conversation will spark ideas on what to build next.

Most startup journeys are told in hindsight, GreyLabs AI’s told in the middle of figuring things out.

In this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, the founding team of GreyLabs AI reflect on what building actually looked like in year one: navigating a cofounder exit, cash running out, COVID hitting collections, and a work culture being built reactively.

This conversation with co-founder Aman Goel is about what startup life feels like before structure, where ESOPs are misunderstood, leave policies don’t exist, and the only way to build trust with enterprise clients is to keep showing up.

What started as a speech analytics platform for BFSI quickly turned into something more: a layer that could coach agents, surface cross-sell opportunities, and turn raw call data into revenue. But the real build wasn’t technical, it was emotional.

GreyLabs was built without funding, a co-founder or a roadmap. Just presence, product sense, and a willingness to stay in the room longer than expected.

Inside the team, hiring moved fast and policy came later. Hiring was led by instinct, and culture was shaped by how the team responded to mistakes, not how they talked about values. Who gets ESOPs? When do you make a leave policy? How do you scale trust without layers of management?

When COVID hit: collections slowed down and revenue dried up, but even without clarity on survival, the team promised zero layoffs, and that appraisals happen.

Because sometimes, the strongest signal a startup can send isn’t product, it’s how it shows up for its people.

Why sustainable startups start with sustainable founders, only on the #ZeroToInfinity podcast.

We’re not seeing enough entrepreneurship in India, not for lack of talent, but because most founders haven’t yet internalized how quickly India’s consumption story is shifting.As GDP curves bend upward and new behavior patterns emerge across services, spending, and aspirations, in this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Kishan Kashyap, joined by Avnish Bajaj & Chandrasekhar Venugopal, maps out the biggest trendlines shaping consumer India through the next decade.From rising discretionary income to evolving expectations around access, quality, and convenience, the Z47 team makes a case for how premiumization is no longer about luxury but about discernment, service, and experience. How full-stack brands are winning not by controlling supply, but by owning end-to-end experience and why India’s microtransaction economy is quietly creating massive consumer surplus in places few are watching.Tune-in

India’s largest creditworthy segment remains invisible to the lending ecosystem, not because of a credit problem, but because of a design problem.

When every lender chased the top tier or flooded the informal market, Finnable saw an opportunity to build for the 60–70% in between: salaried, PF-backed Indians earning ₹15–40K a month.

Join co-founders Amit Arora and Nitin Gupta on the Z47 podcast as they trace their vision behind building a full-stack, risk-first, and collections-led lending engine—designed to scale, but built customer-backward.

The duo, in conversation with the Z47 team, reflect on the decisions that shaped the company: from making collections the third hire, to designing 200+ fraud algorithms rooted in field intelligence.

Understand why their model went against the industry wave, offering longer-tenure, higher-ticket loans designed for credit discipline and repeatability.

When COVID hit, their customers didn’t default. They returned. That resilience validated the model across cycles, powering a ₹3,000 crore book & pointing to a lending business quietly built for public markets.

Listen to the latest #ZeroToInfinity podcast on building lending systems that stay with the customer.

India will see 100 tech IPOs by 2030. While Silicon Valley still waits for $5B+ exits, Indian founders are going public earlier - at $600 million.

Why? Because market receptivity has fundamentally shifted. The buyers want this asset class.

On the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Avnish Bajaj and Rajinder Balaraman define what it actually takes to go public in India today. Through the lens of four distinct IPO waves, the duo traces how market expectations have evolved — from the early public-market pioneers, to the pricing missteps of 2021, and into a new phase where predictability and return on capital lead the way.

The team argues that IPOs are no longer about valuation peaks but about narrative control, access to permanent capital, and owning the category early. For founders, that means shifting how companies are built, instead of chasing scale at any cost to designing for profitability, pricing discipline, and long-term market trust from the outset.

This conversation unpacks the why, when, where, how of IPOs and the thresholds that separate companies that list from those that last. The team reframes the “To IPO or not to IPO” debate into a first-principles question for founders: Are you building with the intent to go public?

India may be heading toward its own Nasdaq moment - the first 100 tech companies that go public will reshape how founders raise, grow, and exit.

See why India's IPO math has permanently changed and what it means to be IPO-ready in India only on the latest episode of the Z47 podcast.

The next 30 global SpaceTech giants will be built and 10 could come from India.

But DeepTech is clunky, Series A is brutal & government still writes 70% of the cheques. So what makes a SpaceTech startup VC-backable and what makes one global? That's where the duo of Anurag Srivastava & Sudipto Sannigrahi from the Z47 team map out the government to private inflection point, opportunity, the reality, and the path forward for India’s SpaceTech ecosystem.

This episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast isn’t about rockets but what comes after launch. ISRO gives us the talent & India gives us the cost advantage but enduring companies will be built by founders who design customer-backward, know how to navigate Series A, and solve with insight — not just technology.

The conversation reframes spacetech as a build-now opportunity, backed by sovereign demand, frugal innovation DNA from ISRO, and a rare cost advantage in the global supply chain.

Their top-down analysis covers application-specific payloads, downstream applications like earth observation as a go-to-market wedge to building full-stack solutions for vertical use cases, asking what it really means to build full-stack, export-ready, insight-led space businesses.

Learn how India’s frugal edge is powering global SpaceTech, only on the #ZeroToInfinity podcast.

How do India’s top founders actually think through a P&L?

This special episode of #ZeroToInfinity podcast takes you inside Z47’s experimental panel event with India’s leading consumer founders, including voices from Mamaearth, Urban Company, and Mosaic Wellness.

From CAC to contribution margin, & retention to revenue models, Kishan Kashyap, Avnish Bajaj & Chandrasekhar Venugopal, share insights on what it really takes to build a durable consumer business in India today.

Listen for a break down of the P&L as a series of strategic choices: It starts with revenue, where TAM is reframed as a lens on market creation vs. market share, and demand signals emerge from how India vs. Bharat actually spends.

Gross margin becomes a moat, shaped by what you build vs. buy. Contribution margin reveals the true cost of platforms, and why owning your channel matters. And finally at the bottomline, it’s about cash, control, and building a business that lasts beyond funding cycles.

Explore the full P&L rethink from an operator founder lens only on the #ZeroToInfinity podcast.

00:25 Introduction
02:32 Breaking Down the P&L of Building Consumer Brands
04:37 Reframing the P&L as Strategic Choices for Founders
04:58 The Revenue Rethink - What & Who are We Really Biulding for?
08:58 Market Creation or Market Share?
12:27 Revenue = Clear Articulation of the Opportunity You're Going After
12:39 Gross Margin Isn't Fixed - It's a Function of the Choices you make
18:43 Don't Just Hope COGS Will Fail - Design Margin from Day Zero
21:39 Contribution Margin: The True Cost of your Channels
25:13 Q-comm's Biggest Mistake: Chasing Scale, Not Sustainibility
28:44 Find the GTM Unlock: PLG, Word of Mouth & Retention
32:52 Bottom Line: Where your P&L becomes your Reality
34:14 RoCE Matters more than EBITDA
35:27 The ZIRP Era Skewed Founder Behaviour
41:20 Limit your Highs. Ground your Lows. Build with Zen Mode on

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What if the next great Indian startup isn’t another consumer app — but a B2B company quietly owning a supply chain, exporting to 40 countries, and compounding capital without ever chasing a billion-dollar valuation?

This #ZeroToInfinity podcast episode walks us through a decade-long arc of insight — from Z47’s first B2B bets to the inflection points that changed everything: GST, UPI, COVID, and the rise of trust-based distribution models.

Avnish Bajaj and Sudipto Sannigrahi lay out the real arc of India’s B2B evolution - from ignored category to unstoppable force. From how horizontal and vertical marketplaces came to dominate post-2015, to why cheap capital created artificial winners in the ZERP era, the conversation is all about rewiring how you think about margins, moats, and manufacturing.

This #ZeroToInfinity conversation isn’t about B2B vs B2C — it’s about what it really takes to build for India’s core economy.

Z47 invested in WizCommerce in 2022. Since then, Divyaanshu Makkar and team have scaled to $1mn in revenue from the B2B Commerce SaaS mid-market.

In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Divyaanshu Makkar, Co-founder & CEO of B2B Commerce SaaS startup WizCommerce -, joins Sudipto Sannigrahi and Ashwin Pandian to unpack:

🚀 WizCommerce's pivot from SourceWiz
📈 Scaling to $1M ARR in 5 Quarters
💥 India-made SaaS is eating the world

From selling to enterprises to winning trust in slow-moving industries — this episode is a crash course in building category-defining SaaS.

Tune-in

The real revolution is not just AI building products - it’s AI rewriting how we build them.

In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Avnish Bajaj and Aakash Kumar cut through the noise to reveal why AI is far more than just another tech wave - it’s a paradigm shift.

This conversation offers a comprehensive, unfiltered exploration of AI’s evolution, its current impact on industries and knowledge workers, and how it’s reshaping the future of work.

From drawing parallels with past tech bubbles like dot-com and crypto to decoding AI’s leap from correlation to causation and the emergence of “Servitization of Software,” they break down why founders who wait will be left behind.

Discover why the future isn’t about AI replacing humans - but enhancing human capability. Only on the #ZeroToInfinity podcast.

What if India transformed from outsourcing hub to global engineering powerhouse?
In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Sudipto Sannigrahi, Z47's investor in B2B Commerce and Manufacturing, sits down with the visionaries making it happen—Karan Anand and Himanshu Uniyal, founders of Wootz.work.

Their conversation unlocks the ambitious blueprint behind India's largest advanced engineering export company.
Witness how they're breaking the "build to print" ceiling, catapulting Indian manufacturing into the elite "build to spec" territory—where cutting-edge solutions aren't just manufactured but conceptualized, engineered, and perfected on Indian soil.

The founders reveal how they're harnessing India's untapped engineering brilliance to create precision systems that global industry giants now depend on.
With candid insights and surprising revelations, Sudipto explores their unconventional journey and the high-stakes gamble that's quietly positioning India as the next engineering superpower.

Can the ancient legacy of Wootz steel—once the most sought-after metal in the world—inspire a modern manufacturing renaissance? Find out for yourself in this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast.

Consumer brands are being built differently and the next wave of unicorns won’t just be about speed or scale - they’ll be built on AI, hyper-personalization, and a global-first mindset.

In this episode of #ZeroToInfinity, Rajinder Balaraman, Tarun Davda, and Rajat Agarwal demystify the rise of real-time commerce and how AI is no longer an add-on - it’s the foundation for intelligent shopping.

Indian founders? The winners will be those who break past borders & build for the world.

The next consumer unicorns won’t play by old rules - will you?

FinTech is transforming the economy at every level.

India’s financial ecosystem is at an inflection point, where technology isn’t just enabling transactions but engineering entirely new economic structures.

In this episode of the #ZeroToInfinity podcast, Avnish Bajaj, Pranay Desai, and Vikram Vaidyanathan bring the sharpest insights to the table, revealing the forces shaping FinTech’s next decade.

The businesses that will define the next decade are not where everyone is looking right now. This conversation reveals the contrarian bets, the high-stakes risks, and the market forces shaping the biggest opportunities ahead.

If FinTech is the future, who’s building it right?

00:00: Coming up
01:50: The Compounding of Value in Financial Services
02:42: The Opportunity Sets in FinTech
04:55: Vital Viewing: How to go Phygital for Growth
05:45: Is FinTech Phygital or Digital
08:30: What are the New Opportunities in FinTech for the 1%?
09:38: The Tight Credit at the right time can have a Multiplier Effect on the Economy
11:27: Opportunities for the Next 10% in FinTech
12:00: Will How India Saves Money Change with Tech?
13:20: The Future of FinTech is Infinite ROE Businesses
13:47: Untapped potential across Credit, Insurance, and Wealth Products

Follow us on:
Website: www.z47.com/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/
Twitter: https://x.com/z47_vc
Instagram: z47.vc

In this episode of Zero to Infinity, Avnish, Vikram and Pranay dive into the latest trends shaping the future of AI and enterprise software. From the evolution of enterprise solutions to India’s growing influence in the global AI landscape, this discussion unpacks the future of technology and its impact on businesses.

🔹 How is AI revolutionizing enterprise workflows?
🔹 What role does India play in the global AI boom?
🔹 Where are the biggest opportunities in the Indian startup ecosystem?

Whether you're a tech enthusiast, an entrepreneur, or just AI curious, this discussion offers crucial insights into where technology is heading and how it's reshaping the global business landscape.

Welcome to 'Zero to Infinity,' the new face of the Z47 Podcast.

In this series premiere, tech veterans Avnish, Rajinder, Vikram, Tarun and Rajat chart the remarkable evolution of India's 25 year internet revolution. From the early dot-com pioneers to today’s AI-innovators today, travel back in time to the moments that shaped India’s digital transformation.

Learn about Z47's mission: Developed Nation Building, as we work towards India’s emergence as a global digital superpower by 2047. This is one of those rare, unfiltered chats about the future of Indian startups that you wouldn't want to miss.

Subscribe startup insights, founder stories and sector deep dives.

What does it take to lead a 17-year-old legacy brand like redBus into international markets? In this episode of the #Z47podcast, CEO Prakash Sangam shares an unmissable journey—from his transition to the world of startups to selling 87 million tickets globally.

Discover how a passion for innovation, cultural alignment, and a relentless focus on customer-centricity propelled redBus to break records, such as selling 400,000 bus seats in a single day!

What's in for you? Actionable insights, leadership hacks that built high-performing teams, the power of cultural alignment, and why embracing ambiguity is key to success in today’s startup ecosystem.

Going deeper into their discussion on first-time and experienced founders, Avnish Bajaj and Chandrasekhar Venugopal dissect everything from failure zones founders should watch out for, to increasing one’s chances of success and finding purpose.

But the question remains: How first-time founders truly leverage this evolved ecosystem to outpace seasoned counterparts? Can there be just one winner?

Watch the second and final part of the #Z47Podcast on Founder Archetypes and find out! And, if you haven't already, catch episode 1 here: • Founder Archetypes: The First Time Fo...

▶️Some more of our podcasts that came up in the conversation:
Burn Rates: https://www.z47.com/podcast/whats-the...
PMF: https://www.z47.com/podcast/finding-s...
Org 3.0: https://www.z47.com/podcast/finding-s...
Single VC Multiple VCs: https://www.z47.com/podcast/single-ve...

60% of Indian unicorns are helmed by first-time founders, 29% by second-time founders, and 6% by those on their third attempt. Why is that?

First-time founders bring audacity, fearlessness, and unencumbered first-principles thinking. Experienced founders solve deep problems with domain expertise and strong customer networks.

But here’s the big question: Are founders born or made?

Join Avnish Bajaj and Chandrasekhar Venugopal as they dive into this age-old debate on the #z47podcast. Gain valuable insights into entrepreneurship, startup journeys, and what it takes to build a unicorn.

💡 Discover the secrets to success in the #FounderPlaybook!

The aerospace, space, and defence sector is pivotal to India's journey toward self-reliance and global leadership. Over the years, this industry has seen a growing startup ecosystem addressing challenges in supply chains, autonomous systems, indigenous manufacturing, and space technology.

In this exclusive panel discussion, featuring industry stalwarts like Air Chief Marshal (Retd.) Rakesh Kumar Singh Bhadauria, Lt Gen PJS Pannu, and Ashish Saraf, CEO, Thales India, we delve into:

1️⃣ Strategic Entry Points for Startups
2️⃣ Why Customer-Focused Innovation Matters
3️⃣ Leveraging Policies and Support Systems

From understanding market dynamics to leveraging opportunities like iDEX, Aditi, and the Space Tech Fund, learn how startups can create a lasting impact in this high-stakes sector.

The DMII: Seed to Silicon edition in Bangalore brought together builders in India’s semiconductor story. Z47’s Sudipto Sannigrahi hosted d-Matrix CEO Sid Sheth on the panel about India’s rising semiconductor potential and d-Matrix’s growth. d-Matrix’s commitment to lowering adoption barriers and hyper-interactive video solutions promises to reshape the industry.

The riveting chat was a goldmine: Sid’s insights about a vital space for India’s tech-ade are a blueprint for how Indian founders can chart a path to success in semiconductors.

5 Key Takeaways:
Breakthroughs Take Time: d-Matrix Took a Year
Even though Sid’s background at Intel and Aeluros gave him deep domain expertise, he took a year to explore ideas before launching d-Matrix. This reflects the importance of taking time for reflection and eliminating weak opportunities before venturing forward.

Focusing on What’s Overlooked in Chip Design to Disrupt Incumbents
By developing a unique chip architecture that integrates compute and memory, d-Matrix carved out a niche in the semiconductor market where larger players couldn’t compete.

Energy & Cost Efficiency Drive d-Matrix’s Semiconductor Success
d-Matrix’s focus on building energy-efficient, cost-effective chips addresses key pain points for customers, positioning them as a more practical solution for data centers.

Betting on India as the Tech Hub is a Competitive Advantage
Recognizing the immense talent pool and market potential, d-Matrix set up its largest tech hub in India, positioning the country as a critical player in the future of semiconductors.

Building Trust with Proof-of-Concept Chips is the Way to Grow
d-Matrix invested heavily in developing proof-of-concept chips in the first few years. This demonstrated real progress and minimized risk for investors and customers, enabling efficient innovation in their chip design.

"If you are an AI founder, buy a .com domain and not .ai domain" says Pranay Desai (MD, Z47) as CIOs often restrict access to most .ai domains within their organisational networks.

In conversation with Ashwin Pandian, Pranay addresses the facets of AI in SaaS, talking about various dimensions of the trade and shares insightful nuggets on the subject:

He engages with key topics, including:
▶️ The shift in role of CIOs - from enabling businesses and creativity to protecting them.
▶️ The future being consolidated stacks instead of point solutions, as clients are sceptical about giving away their data.
▶️ The founder’s conundrum: to ship fast, or take time and build a full stack.
▶️ Focus on distribution innovation to win in a mature product market.
▶️ A good AI business could be measured on the basis of product usage, repeat usage, revenue, and talkability.
▶️ Founders building in large markets need not build their own models, unlike players in smaller markets

Globally, we are on the verge of a complete overhaul of the software stack, and India is positioned to capture a significant share of this emerging landscape due to its strong capabilities in data curation and labelling.

Tune into the full podcast if you are a founder interested in AI in SaaS and want to know about the markets to consider.

How do you monetise your app business from 600 million connected smartphone users in India? This is the only question founders in India’s App Economy 3.0 need to ask themselves.

Vivek Ramachandran, Chandrasekhar Venugopal and Aakash Kumar from Z47’s consumer team talk about the shifts in India’s app economy over the years and how engagement, retention and monetisation became the key pillars for app-based businesses.

They answer questions useful to any and every founder trying to succeed in India’s app economy 3.0:

▶️ What is the core nature of the value exchange in the app economy?
▶️ What effect will AI have on production?
▶️ What are the exciting trendlines?
▶️ Where do founders make mistakes when measuring success?
▶️ What key vectors do founders need to focus on building in 2024?

If you’re someone looking to build in or understand India’s app economy, this episode will give you years of insights in less than an hour.

Romita Mazumdar is channelling her love for skincare into a Rs. 1000 Cr Brand.
She started with almost 1000 interviews over a course of six months to find a market gap. And now, inspired by the likes of P&G, she has her eyes set on the Rs. 1000 Cr mark for Foxtale.
As a former VC, she closely observed consumer brands before shifting her focus to building in skincare, a category where she is a power user.

In conversation with Z47’s Rajat Agarwal, Romita recounts her journey from investment banking to founding Foxtale and answers gripping questions that all D2C founders can learn from :
▶ How consumer needs have changed in skincare
▶ How she thinks about channels for her business
▶ Where the 1000 Cr goal comes from
▶ Her thoughts on new ventures and diversification

If you’re passionate about entrepreneurship, building in skincare or branding, this episode will provide insights to help you get started on your journey.

If you’re a founder working to solve for an underserved market in unsecured lending, this episode is required listening! Vikram Vaidyanathan and Anish Patil trade trendlines in unsecured credit landscape, and highlight four key insights that underpin the Z47 thesis for this sector.

👥Solving for Under-served Market Potential
Borrowers with low, but stable incomes and good credit culture have been under-served by traditional lenders, presenting an opportunity for new lenders.

🗂️Forecasting with Robust Payments Data
The evolution of UPI, account aggregators, and GST has streamlined underwriting, enabling precise borrower profiling, and accurate cash flow estimation, all of which allows lenders to tailor financial products.

🤳🏽Why A Phy-gital Approach Is Optimal
Digital tools enable fraud prevention, enhanced risk assessment and monitoring, while physical presence helps build trust and strengthen operations.

🌏Financial Inclusion & Strong Credit Demand
Improved infrastructure, steady GDP growth, and better law & order, especially in northern states, have opened new credit markets. Strong credit demand and smoother operations have made previously underserved areas more appealing to lenders.

HOW IS THE INDIAN E-COMMERCE TRANSFORMING?

With the adoption of quick commerce, the launch of the latest GenAI technology, and the increasing purchasing power of GenZ, the Indian e-commerce industry is poised for transformation.

In this episode of Matrix Moments, we analyse it further with Chirag Taneja, founder of GoKwik, a rapidly expanding e-commerce enablement startup, our founder Avnish Bajaj, who also launched one of India’s pioneering e-commerce ventures, Bazee, and Rajat Agarwal, MD at Matrix Partners India (aka Z47).

📲Digital penetration of Indian e-commerce stands at just 6% today.
It is set to increase drastically as GenZ consumers are on the rise while the digital public infrastructure is thriving.

🛵 Is Quick Commerce a feature, or a standalone company?
Every e-commerce player will have to embrace it or they’ll lose market share. This creates opportunities for infrastructure providers to facilitate this transformation.

🦾 The AI native apps are yet to come.
The enablement of consumer AI is expected to be similar to the era when mobile apps were first introduced, leading to the launch of various apps offering innovative solutions, many of which made a notable impact.

🕺🏾 Consumers no longer trust paid influencers. Co-creation is key.
The success of Freakins hints towards the opportunity that lies in co-creating with influencers instead of just paying them to promote products.

💥E-commerce disruption is boosting competition for companies that still have a firm foothold due to strong distribution.The original mode key to building consumer brands was distribution and that is getting disrupted.

If you are a founder exploring the e-commerce sector, this episode of Matrix Moments will provide you with insights into the diverse opportunities that are set to thrive in this space.

The Indian Internet Pioneer Starting Up AGAIN in AI

Sharad Sanghi is a pioneer of internet in India: from the early days of VSNL to rapid cloud adoption, when it comes to internet infrastructure, he’s seen it all. He founded among India’s earliest IT infra startups, NetMagic in 1998. In 2012, the IT Services company was acquired by NTT, where Sharad also served as CEO. Sharad Sanghi was an early partner to many Indian startups, and the NetMagic story is required reading in the evolution of the internet in India.

In 2022, Sharad & longtime NTT tech leader Anindya Das started Neysa Networks - spotting the opportunity in AI Cloud infrastructure early. Co-founded by experienced founders with deep domain expertise, Neysa is solving to democratise AI for enterprises, offering a suite of Generative AI platforms and services. Neysa’s AI Cloud products help clients discover, plan, deploy, and manage their Generative AI projects cost-effectively, and secure their AI landscapes in the cloud and at the edge in a consumption-based model. Earlier this year, Matrix Partners AKA G47 led the investment in Neysa Network’s $20mn seed round.

On this special episode of Matrix Moments, AI SaaS investor Pranay Desai is joined by Avnish Bajaj, to talk to the Neysa leadership, Sharad Sanghi, Founder & CEO, and Anindya Das, Co-founder & CTO. From evaluating the hype around artificial intelligence to discussing the future of Indian AI startups, they break down the AI landscape in India.

This one is unmissable, and covers:
🚀Why AI is Different vs. other hyped up tech
✋Why AI Adoption Needs AI Infrastructure
🤝Why Democratizing AI is the Way Forward
📈Why India Will Lead in AI

“Not just wealth… I think experience is all about compounding”
Says Manisha Raisinghani, founder of SiftHub.

After her stint as the CTPO at LogiNext, Manisha Raisinghani spent some time looking for the right problem to solve before starting up again. In her search, she found a sales enablement problem that could be solved through AI: enterprise sales teams have over 100 touch-points to tap into when collecting the data needed to make an effective sale. This sapped sales team effectiveness, since sales teams spent time doing non-sales tasks. This is the problem Manisha & the team at SiftHub are setting out to solve, with AI.

In this episode of Matrix Moments, she explains how SiftHub stands apart in a crowded space. Ultimately, just because a sector is ‘crowded’, doesn’t mean it has run out of problems to be solved.

📍Identifying the problem: Manisha’s experience and research showed that sales resources spend 70% of their time doing non-selling activities.

👥 Approaching a crowded market: With so many SaaS applications designed for salespeople, it gets confusing to find what information lies where, complicating an already complex sales process.

👩🏻‍💻Building High-Performing Teams:
Manisha’s 3-O framework for SiftHub is unmissable if you want to build high-functioning, high-agency teams.

This episode of Matrix Moments is flush with insights on building in AI. Tune in.

HOW DID PARK+ ACE 🛞HIRING FOR AN EARLY-STAGE STARTUP

Founded in 2019, Park+ drove through various challenges and introduced a plethora of services to find its footing today. However, it always had one clearly defined goal - to make car ownership easy and hassle-free. Park+ Founder and CEO Amit Lakhotia takes us through his interesting ways of building the team at Park+ in this episode of Matrix Moments.

-Amit mentions how hiring when the startup is going from 0-to-1 is different as compared to when it's at 1-to-10 and why getting a good Talent Acquisition Head is essential for any startup.

-0-to-1: At this stage, a startup needs people who can deal with ambiguity and are naturally inclined toward solving problems.

-1-to-10: This is the stage where a more disciplined team is required since the answers are already figured out.

-Amit has an interesting way of training leaders. He hires people with 4-8 years of experience to work in the founder's office for six months and understand how each department works. Later, they’re allocated to a specific department.

Amit says, “We are not going to randomly hire, we are not going to randomly fire.”

His conscious hiring method has helped find the right folks to bring on board. This has helped with solving new consumer problems, leading Park+ to offer services like issuing FASTag, car washing, parking, challan, and more.

If you’re a founder stepping into an untapped territory, this episode of Matrix Moments will provide you with meaningful insights.

IS GreyLabsAI PLAYING THE AI GAME BEFORE TIME?
The founders of a leading speech analytics platform for financial institutions, GreyLabsAI, Aman Goel and Harshita Srivastava, take us through the journey of identifying their market, building the product, and distributing it over the past few years. Setting up an AI business in India might seem a bit earlier than recommended, but is it?

This episode of Matrix Moments unpacks the nitty-gritty of a young AI startup.

📍 Identifying a meaningful problem
Customer service chats are recorded to be analysed later. GreyLabsAI helps large enterprises with analysing this data. The problem proves to be quite meaningful for enterprises.

🤝 Collaboration among co-founders
They stress on how compatible traits and mutual trust are necessary among co-founders. It allows them to create clear boundaries. While Harshita builds the product, Aman handles the business aspect of GreyLabsAI.

🌏 India or USA?
Working for American clients while living in India brings a larger risk from companies functioning completely in the States. Aman and Harshita chose India as the base for their company as well as their market.

🦾 Is it too early for an AI start-up?
While Harshita sees the opportunity NOW as the technology is reasonably mature to solve real-world problems but hasn’t been explored yet, Aman believes that it’s the right time to gain the trust of the customers.

✨ Distribution in a new market.
Although Financial enterprises have a lot of tech spending, it’s necessary to establish trust. Furthermore, one can analyse more customer problems and solve them with new products.

Harshita says, “It is said that sometimes little things happen in decades and sometimes decades happen in little time.”

If you’re a founder exploring the potential of AI products in India, this episode of Matrix Moments will give you pointed insights on various aspects of building and distributing young technology in India.

WHAT’S THE FUTURE OF FINTECH IN INDIA?

The Indian Fintech ecosystem is entering its middle journey. With $100bn+ in market cap already created by these businesses, the twin engines of Compounding and market penetration project potential for large-scale growth. Anand Khetan and Vikram Vaidyanathan dissect the past, present, and future of the finance industry in this episode of Matrix Moments.

On this Matrix Moments episode:
•⁠ ⁠What can FinTech learn from the success of Financial Services behemoths like HDFC & VISA?
•⁠ ⁠What is the importance of TRUST while building a FinTech brand?
•⁠ ⁠How can FinTech businesses compound without growing user base?
•⁠ ⁠How should founders view regulation & the costs of compliance? Is it a feature or a bug?

How should founders think about using offline channels for growth? Is phygital a real option or just a mirage? Rajinder Balaraman and Vikram Vaidyanathan double-click on the myths around phygital, bust them and share learnings for founders thinking of going phygital.

👉MYTH #1 Phygital has a higher CAC - It depends basis category, users and ticket size - Dezerv who employs a phygital model has a lower CAC than its competitors, whereas OneCard, operating purely online has a CAC that is 4-5x lower than SBI cards.

👉MYTH #2 Going offline slows you and makes it harder to scale - When you employ the right tech, scalability at speed becomes possible. Mamaearth’s online presence has spiked from 15% to at least 50% in 3 years.

👉MYTH #3 Customer experience journey is too complex in phygital - The journey is actually complex, but is an opportunity for founders to create an edge, and potentially a long-term moat.

👉 MYTH #4 Phygital is not relevant for all sectors - While there are sectors in the extreme who don’t need a phygital model, a significantly larger number benefit from creating a phygital experience. SaaS is an excellent example, where prima facie it looks like a purely digital model, but the sector spends much more on offline branding and events.

If you are a founder who is evaluating going phygital, this episode of Matrix Moments would help you make an informed choice.

PICKING THE PERFECT SaaS LAUNCHPAD - US or INDIA?

For SaaS founders, the incorporation decision hinges on factors like business outlook, end goals, and access to capital markets. The US has often been the default choice for incorporation, but this is changing in recent years - India is increasingly considered a viable choice to start a SaaS company.

So what should founders do? Watch this episode of Matrix Moments. Dig deep into the incorporation dilemma - Harish Sekar, Partner at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, talks to Pranay Desai and Ashwin Pandian and they've got tips on:

Shattering Location Myths: India's burgeoning startup ecosystem is challenging US dominance with lower costs, faster setup, and abundant domestic capital.
Choosing Your Target Market: The optimal incorporation location depends on the target market, IPO aspirations, and founder location.
IPO vs. Acquisition: Strategise for both scenarios, including the United States' stringent IPO standards and India's more accessible path to local listings.
Transitioning from the US to India: Navigating the complexities of restructuring and the potential opportunities in Indian capital markets.

THE FOUNDER’S PLAYBOOK: INTERNAL FUNDING ROUNDS

Internal or pre-emptive funding rounds are a major topic on founders' minds. Internal rounds refer to financing events where a company's existing investors, rather than external new investors, provide additional capital. They can signify confidence from current investors in the company's potential and can help maintain momentum without the complexities of bringing in new stakeholders.

If you’re a founder, Internal rounds can be a complex decision to make with several variables to consider. To help, Vikram Vaidyanathan & Rajinder Balaraman weigh up the pros & cons of internal or pre-emptive funding rounds on Matrix Moments.

👉Valuation-Dilution trade-offs are inevitable - Both the founders and investors make trade-offs during pre-emptive rounds, requiring nuanced decision making.

👉The stability of internal interest - An existing investor is likely to have the highest intent in terms of new investment commitment.

👉Efficiency of internal funding - It is the fastest process with the least capital dilution.

👉Price advantage of external funding - The wider discovery process can lead to higher price if there’s very high interest in the market.

👉Criticality of external validation - An external round is a crucial as a validation of TAM, quality of the team and the business model.

If you are a founder thinking through fund-raising choices, this episode of Matrix Moments is for you.

Domain Alphas are founders whose edge lies in their domain knowledge, and their market-tested experience of solving problems for customers. Watch Rajinder Balaram & Vikram Vaidyanathan share their views on Domain Alpha founders, and trade great examples of how Domain Alpha founders build great businesses.

Getting to PMF Faster: How the experience of building the ICICI cards business helped the founders of OneCard launch slow, but get it right faster
Choose the Right Problems: How the founders of Country Delight didn’t rush, and spent a significant amount of time understanding the market problems before scaling
Know the Consumer Deeply: Why Ola Electric chose to build in two-wheeler EVs when everyone was betting on cars

Domain Alphas are able to turn their unfair advantage into real success. As a founder, you have it, or you have to acquire it. What do you do if you don’t have domain expertise?

Sumit Chhazed is a serial entrepreneur, who figured out his first startup as soon as he graduated from IIT Bombay. OTO is the fourth company that he has founded, employing a business model that combined commerce and finance to disrupt the two-wheeler purchase landscape in India. OTO has already sold over 1lakh two-wheelers through their online marketplace and apps.

On this episode of Matrix Moments, Sumit delves into the levers behind the success of OTO, sharing his approach with Rajinder Balaraman and Anish Patil. Here are the key takeaways about building a disruptive business model:

1.⁠ ⁠OTO is betting big on India’s 2-wheelers: with over 60% of new purchases coming from 18-25 year olds, living outside the metros.

2.⁠ ⁠Two-wheeler financing is a big opportunity: OTO has built a full-stack financing business that allows consumers to lower their 2-wheeler loan EMIs by 30%.

3.⁠ ⁠A phygital experience brings the buyers to the yard: This space is ripe for disruption as new-age audiences are not keen on going to multiple dealerships and scouring the market for financing. OTO’s partnerships with payment apps and OEM partners is driving their reach with young consumers.

4.⁠ ⁠EVs are the future of 2-wheelers: the younger buyer is more keen on EV 2-wheelers than 4-wheelers. OTO is helping brands like Ola Electric penetrate deeper into India.

If you’re a founder who is seeking to build a disruptive strategy and business model, watch the episode and gain insights into how OTO charted their road to 100000+ 2-wheelers sold, while changing the two-wheeler play in India.

The Whole Truth Foods founder Shashank Mehta is a rare breed of a CEO who is also a creator. 🌟 A lifelong student of the content & community game, Shashank’s content journey started as a stand-up coming on YouTube, long before he became the face of The Whole Truth.

On this episode of Matrix Moments, Shashank goes deep on content & community, sharing with candour in a deep chat with Vikram Vaidyanathan. Here are 4 big takeaways around building brands through content & community for founders:

1.⁠ ⁠Founders must be clear on the WHAT of their content marketing, the HOW is easier with modern tools & AI. 💡

2.⁠ ⁠Transparency is the biggest tool in the content marketer’s arsenal. Consumers are the best bullshit detectors in today’s hyper-connected world. 👀

3.⁠ ⁠Brand communities are more about GIVING than TAKING. 🤝

4.⁠ ⁠ROI from Content Marketing shouldn’t have a hard linkage to Sales: Founders must leverage content as an editorial lever, and not tactically link it to sales. 💼

If you’re a founder who wants to level up your brand’s content & community marketing game, watch this episode as Shashank & Vikram’s easy camaraderie uncovers the Whole Truth.

If you're a founder seeking advice on how to build great teams, this episode of Matrix Moments is for you. Vikram Vaidyanathan hosts The Whole Truth Foods Founder & CEO, Shashank Mehta and they share their wisdom around building great company cultures.

🌟 Shashank sent The Whole Truth Foods' culture document, titled Why We Exist, before he met Vikram Vaidyanathan for the first time. The document outlines the company's mission about the Whole Truth.

💼💡Shashank's conviction in his company’s mission is unparalleled, with a clear vision of positive societal impact and the ability to inspire others to make it a reality, so much so that the team at The Whole Truth Foods has imbibed the founder's mission, made it their own, and keep him accountable.

👷‍♀️ The Whole Truth's manufacturing is run by women - Shashank shares the challenges they faced in doing this, and shares a story about how the company's culture & mission have been received on the factory floors.

Ashish Kashyap needs no introduction. The first country head for Google in India, before he turned entrepreneur, Ashish is a serial founder. He's founded and scaled marquee Indian internet startups RedBus, PayU, GoIbibo, before starting his most recent FinTech venture, the super app, INDMoney.

Ashish was a guest on Matrix Moments People First with Rupali, where shared startup and team-building learnings from his journey across the companies he's built.

Revant Bhate on #PeopleFirst by Matrix Moments!
Passionate about building a people-centric culture, Revant takes on dual roles at Mosaic Wellness as both CEO and CHRO. In a conversation with Rupali Sharma on our latest episode, Revant delves into the intricacies of building his startup from scratch, emphasising the pivotal role of human capital.

Key takeaways from the episode:

1️⃣ Fundamental Team Building Principles: Revant shares insights on leveraging his network of seasoned operators who trust his vision, a crucial asset in the volatile startup landscape. His core team comprises individuals who have previously collaborated with him, highlighting the importance of building trust from the onset.

🔎 Strategic Recruiting: Transparent communication about challenges and expectations is paramount during the hiring process. Revant's clarity from day one ensured that team members joined with the right mindset and expectations.

🧲 Aligning Incentives: Revant stresses the significance of employees understanding the startup's growth trajec

On the latest episode of Matrix Moments, catch Aakash Kumar, Sudipto Sannigrahi, Pranay Desai, and Anish Patil of Matrix Partners India as they discuss the India consumption and growth story, insights on investing in Digital India and their predictions for 2024.

This episode covers:

🚀 India's $10 Trillion Vision: Anticipating India's trajectory, there's a strong belief that India will grow into a $10 trillion economy by 2035. Growth is fuelled by deepening markets, robust internal demand coupled with strong public and private capital investments

🌐 Secular Trends & Growth: Long-term growth seen in sectors like manufacturing & exports, energy, defence, financial services and consumer retail

📊 Market Dynamics & Investment Strategies: The sectors that Matrix Partners India is bullish about in 2024, exploring India's growth dynamics and entrepreneurial landscape.

🔮 Predictions & Optimism: The advent of experienced founders and digital industrialists, the rise of “phy-gital” business models and a dispersion in value-creation beyond traditional hubs will help India retain its lure as an attractive market for venture capital

Join Asish Mohapatra, Co-founder and CEO of OfBusiness, and Rupali Sharma on the latest episode of "People First" by Matrix Moments. Explore OfBusiness's remarkable journey and unravel the intricacies of building a resilient organization.

This episode covers:

🌐 Innovation Hub: OfBusiness leads the way in innovation, with the team embodying a fusion of values and innovation, working collectively towards profitability and shared achievements.

🔐 Org-Building Secrets: Asish delves into the organizational alchemy that catapulted OfBusiness to market leadership in just seven years.

🌱 Investing in Tomorrow: The conscious decision to build in-house talent, as Asish shares the challenges and benefits of this unique approach. He highlights why nurturing young talent for sustained success yields substantial returns long-term.

📈 Non-negotiables in Hiring: The hiring philosophy, focusing on qualities like a commitment to doing the right thing, a strong work ethic, and a commercial mindset.

👥 Maintaining Organizational DNA: OfBusiness ensures the preservation of its core values and culture as it scales, with Asish sharing both successes and mistakes in this journey.

The driving forces propelling the Indian startup ecosystem forward all share a common thread—they are all People. Founders, investors, employees—all united working towards growth and success.

At Matrix, we believe in putting our founders first, and now, we want to shine a spotlight on the talent and teams that move these visionaries forward. In the very first episode of "People First" by Matrix Moments, Avnish Bajaj and Rupali Sharma from Matrix Partners India, highlight the pivotal role of human capital teams in shaping successful ventures.

The episode covers:

💼 People First Philosophy: The significance of prioritizing founders and recognizing that, at their core, founders are people. This underscores the essence of the podcast's title, "People First."

🚀 Evolution of VC Ecosystem: The Indian venture capital landscape focusing not only on investments but also on aiding companies in building robust teams.

💰 Investment in Human Capital Teams: As the venture ecosystem expanded, why Matrix invested in a human capital team, viewing it as a strategic function crucial for supporting startup growth.

🏆 Value Creation: The core objective is to expedite startups' value creation, with human capital teams playing a vital role in ensuring that the right talent propels this growth.

🌐 Reinvention: Founder roles and team dynamics evolving to stay relevant. Managing human capital strategically is a vital competitive advantage in the digital age.

🤝 Communication and Transparency: Fostering trust and collaboration within the organization for clarity in expectations and skillsets, ensures optimal returns.

On the latest episode of Matrix Moments, Ashish Aggarwal, Co-Founder, AppBroda and Vivek Ramachandran, Matrix Partners India discuss the world of mobile apps and the growing segments in the gaming landscape in India.

This episode covers -

📈 Growth Potential: Discover why India's gaming industry is on the brink of an inflection point in the next 18 months.

🌐 Developer Talents: Learn about India's vast developer talent pool and their evolving role in the global gaming industry.

🌍 Global Perspective: Gain insights into the importance of expanding beyond local markets to maximize revenue and user acquisition.

💡 Monetization Strategies: Advice on incorporating ads, premium formats, and effective user acquisition to boost your game's success.

📈 Scaling Success: How developers who started small and grew into million-dollar studios and why now is the perfect time to embrace the entrepreneurial plunge in the gaming industry.

Atomicwork leverages the power of AI to seamlessly bring together employees, IT systems, and HR operations. On the latest episode of Founder Moments, Vijay Rayapati, CEO and Co-Founder of Atomicwork, along with Vikram Vaidyanathan and Pranay Desai, discuss his phenomenal founder journey.

This episode covers -

🚀 The Minjar Journey: Vijay shares insights from his entrepreneurial experience with Minjar, highlighting the challenges faced in fundraising, seeking suitable partners, and entering foreign markets. He also discusses the significance of cultural alignment, which ultimately led to the sale of the startup.

💼 Building a SaaS company: Vijay emphasizes the creation of value through service and encourages a deep focus on redefining AI rather than simply adding it on top of existing solutions. He introduces the concept of Act 1 in a company's evolution, describing it as an iterative phase where various approaches are explored to solve problems.

👥 Co-founders' Chemistry: He also elaborates on the qualities that drew him to his co-founders. Patience, perseverance, curiosity, and a shared cultural context played crucial roles in their partnership.

📈 Team Building and Hiring: Vijay highlights the founder's role in not only selecting but also fine-tuning the team's DNA to align with the company's vision and values.

Amidst the lack of innovation & transparency in traditional fixed return assets, which constitute approximately 70% of Indian household savings (with around 45% in FDs), a significant opportunity arises to bridge the gap.

On our latest episode of Matrix Moments, Saurabh Jain and Harish Reddy, join Anand Khetan to discuss their foray into wealth fintech with Stable Money, India's first of its kind fixed-return investment platform.

This episode covers:

🚀 Transitioning to Entrepreneurship: Saurabh and Harish share their incredible personal journeys. Harish's transition from a lifelong trader to Saurabh's wealth of experience from organizations like Navi and Swiggy, adds depth to their story.

💹 Drive Behind Wealth Fintech: Discover the driving forces that led them to launch the Stable Money product, its standout features, and their relentless pursuit of building trust among investors.

👥 Forging the Team: Explore the early stages of team building and the qualities that the founders were seeking in their initial hires.

📊 Customer Insights: Saurabh's conversations with customers and the insights gained, emphasizing the importance of trust and feedback.

💼 Navigating Regulatory Challenges: Drawing from their past experiences at companies like Navi and Estee Advisors, the founders share insights into navigating the regulatory hurdles in the fintech landscape.

📈 Future Vision: The episode also showcases a glimpse into Stable Money's long-term vision and how they plan to shape the future of India's wealth fintech industry.

FoundersFirst #MatrixMoments #MatrixFintech

In the latest episode of Matrix Moments, Sudipto Sannigrahi, and Anurag Srivastava, delve deeper into the existing B2B landscape and cover why Matrix Partners continues to be bullish on the segment and the fundamentals that make a good B2B business

This episode covers:

Is B2B still an attractive segment to build in
Fundamentals of a good B2B business
Sustainable, defensible moats in a good B2B business
Pitfalls for B2B founders to be aware of in their 10 – infinity journey
Importance of good corporate governance

Traditionally centered on distribution, B2B investments are now shifting toward core IP-led manufacturing. We consider ourselves fortunate to witness the inner workings of a diverse range of B2B businesses, spanning from well-established companies like OfBusiness, FarMart, Captain Fresh, and VEGROW to upcoming innovative product companies like ZippMat, XIMKART, and bijnis among others.

On the latest episode of Matrix Moments, we feature seasoned entrepreneurs including Arvind Parthiban, CEO & Co-Founder at SuperOps.ai; Rishi Kulkarni, Managing Director at LegalZoom; Vijay Rayapati, Co-founder and CEO of AtomicWork; along with Pranay Desai. These founders share valuable insights from their second innings building SaaS companies.

This episode covers -

Strategically aligning go-to-market approach with market demand.

Embracing market immersion and adapting to international markets.

Fostering agility for success in the dynamic SaaS landscape.

The Indian SaaS ecosystem has demonstrated greater resilience than its global counterparts. Revenues crossed $7 billion, formation of new SaaS companies expanded three-fold, and India now corners 2% of the global SaaS market, as per a report by SaasBoomi and McKinsey.

On this episode of Matrix Moments, Arvind Parthiban, CEO & Co-Founder at SuperOps.ai; Rishi Kulkarni, Managing Director at LegalZoom; Vijay Rayapati, Co-founder and CEO of AtomicWork, and Pranay Desai, delve into the journeys of second-time SaaS founders.

Explore the driving forces that led to embarking on a fresh journey, coupled with their approach across pivotal domains including market strategies, co-founder synergies, product innovation, customer exploration and much more.

On our latest episode of Founder Moments with Salone Sehgal, Founding Partner at Lumikai Fund, and Aakash Kumar, we shine a spotlight on why India stands at the cusp of revolutionizing gaming.

This episode covers:

👥 Shifting Demographics

📈 India's Gaming Potential

🖥 Emergence of Indian Talent

🎮 Convergence of Gaming and Social Media & much more!

After building a large profitable digital company, what do such infinity founders do next?! Become “Digital Industrialists!”

Up next on Matrix Moments, we discuss a counter narrative concept – that its okay for infinity founders to start multiple businesses as long as it is about value creation for all stakeholders and not value capture. As big a violation of first principles of company building as it sounds, we invite you to tune in to know more in our latest episode.

GenWise, founded by Geentanshu, Nehul, and Rajat, is driven by a collective vision to develop a lifestyle app that empowers the elderly and bridges the digital gap between generations.

GenWise leverages innovative features such as a personal digital assistant, streamlined digital passbook, medication reminders, scam education, and engaging social tools. They employ cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence, for a seamless user experience, creating an elder-friendly digital environment.

Within two months of their launch, GenWise has hit ~100k installs

Hear the founders next on Matrix Moments, as they share their vision to empower and enrich the digital experiences of the elderly through India's first lifestyle app.

The tailwinds in the Media Social and Gaming space are building up to a perfect storm. At a high level Media, Social and Gaming seems to be converging especially for GenZ. Marry this with the fact that AI is going to disrupt Media Social and Gaming by significantly altering the Quality/Quantity isoquant as well as allowing for personalization at scale. High velocity of content will also lead to innovations in content management in general.

At the core of this lies content, catering to ever-changing attention spans. With its multi-modal capabilities encompassing text, image, video, audio and more, AI acts as a catalyst, igniting revolutionary experiences, sparking creativity and fostering meaningful connections between content creators and their audiences. It’s why we’re calling this piece ‘Feel good inc.’ internally. If you thought you are binging today, wait for AI to be properly integrated into your content.

Up next on Matrix Moments, Tarun, Aakash and Chandrasekhar Venugopal, delve deep into the AI Revolution in Media and Social, where they uncover the potential, challenges and countless opportunities that lie ahead in this evolving landscape.

Scapia has made a remarkable entry into the market with the launch of its co-branded credit card in collaboration with Federal Bank. The response has been overwhelming, with massive growth in customer sign-ups. Tailor-made for travel lovers, the card turns a customer's everyday expenses into exciting travel rewards. And the perks are unparalleled! From zero-forex markup to unlimited domestic lounge access, zero joining and annual fees, it is the ultimate travel companion. Founder Anil Goteti’s passion for travel and understanding of the younger generation's needs, has been the driving force behind Scapia.

Brace yourselves for our latest episode of Founder Moments, as Vikram uncovers Anil’s approach to building Scapia and his vision for the future. With less than 5% of the population currently possessing credit cards and India projected to have 200 million credit cards in circulation by 2030, the opportunities are vast.

To unlock India's immense potential in the semiconductor industry, Sudipto and Nivedith deep dive into the possibilities that lie ahead on our latest episode of Reflections.

The Complex Semiconductor Supply Chain: Dive deep into the intricacies of the semiconductor supply chain and its pivotal role in shaping the industry.
India's Role in the Global Semiconductor Value Chain: Explore India's limited participation and the golden opportunities arising from recent changes.
The Semiconductor Opportunity in India and its Subsets: Uncover the vast potential of the semiconductor market in India, along with the most promising subsets.
The "Right to Win" for Indian Companies: Discover winning factors that can drive Indian companies to make a mark in the global semiconductor value chain.
Commercial Implications of Moore's Law: Explore how Moore's Law evolution impacts the semiconductor landscape and the commercial implications of advanced technologies like 3D architecture.
Notable Players in RISC-V Adoption: Learn about leading global and Indian companies driving the adoption of RISC-V.
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and India's Role: Discover how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing semiconductors and the potential role of India in this transformative trend.
Where will the Next Set of Indian Founders Emerge: Uncover potential sources of the next wave of Indian founders and valuable insights for those building in India.

On our latest episode of Reflections, join us as we unravel opportunities in Fintech infrastructure and Banktech. We will explore the changing landscape of BaaS and delve into how it has revolutionized the delivery and accessibility of financial services. The episode covers:

🚀 BaaS 2.0: BaaS 2.0 represents the evolution and maturation of the concept since its initial inception. BaaS 2.0 offers a more robust and scalable platform, enabling a wider range of services and features.

🔀 Fintech vs. SaaS: What aspects are different? While both Fintech and BaaS focus on leveraging technology in the financial sector, they differ in their primary offerings.

💡 Exciting spaces and our investment framework: Within the BaaS ecosystem, we are excited about certain spaces like payment gateways, lending platforms, wealth management solutions and more. We will discuss our investment framework used to evaluate and select opportunities.

🌐 Identifying adjacencies and tapping into them: Adjacencies play a crucial role in the growth and expansion of BaaS platforms. Tapping into adjacencies is essential for expanding the customer base, increasing revenue streams and creating synergies.

🔧 Skillsets required for building a Banktech play: Building a successful Banktech platform requires a specific set of skillsets. These include expertise in banking operations and regulations, technology infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and customer experience.

📲 Indian rails as public goods vs. private in the US: Boon or bane? The Indian rail infrastructure, including Aadhaar Authentication (AA), Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN), is considered public goods. In contrast, the rail systems in the United States are predominantly private. Comparing these two models raises important questions about the benefits and challenges of each approach.

🌍 Global expansion: Is it imminent? As the BaaS industry grows, evaluating the Total Addressable Market (TAM) in India is crucial to assess its potential for building a large-scale business. Additionally, exploring the feasibility and necessity of expanding to geographies similar to India provides valuable insights into global expansion opportunities and challenges.

In our latest episode of Reflections, we explore the use cases of generative AI in fintech with Aakash Kumar, Anish Patil, and Anand Khetan. Hear them as they discuss AI's disruptive impact, emerging patterns in technology development, future trends, as well as risks and opportunities in financial services. Tune in!

In this latest episode, Ankur Edkie and Sneha Roy pull back the curtain on how they have built a rapidly growing business. Tune in.

In this exciting new episode of Matrix Moments, Tarun Davda, MD, Matrix Partners India, is in conversation with Dilsher Malhi, the founder of the booming gaming platform, Zupee. Dilsher delves into the trends in the gaming industry, human psychology, and the advent of AI in the gaming space. Join the conversation as they talk about Dilsher’s journey and what he learned along the way.

In our latest episode of Matrix Moments, we uncover what's next for Matrix Partners India in the next Techade, with the closing of our fourth fund.

"The best product wins, right, and the best product means the founder who has the closest insight to the consumer, who spent time on the backend researching it, truly passionate about it I think can really create large opportunities." shares our VP, Chandrasekhar Venugopal, on our latest episode of Matrix Moments titled " Indian ConsumerTech - Coming back to Life." Joining him are our Founder and MD, Avnish Bajaj, our MD, Rajinder Balaraman, and our Principal, Siddharth Agarwal.

What's next for ConsumerTech? Will ConsumerTech witness an evolution? What would this mean for entrepreneurial innovation? Tune in to know this and much more

To go IPO or not to go IPO is a dilemma that companies face as they consider raising capital and providing liquidity. Despite the potential benefits, some choose to remain private to avoid the challenges and limitations of being publicly traded. The objective of this podcast is to spark a discussion to share our perspectives. We have framed both the positives and some of the issues to think through before a company decides to go public.

In our latest episode of Founder Moments, listen in from Vijay Rayapati, Co-founder and CEO at Atomicwork, on why every founder should be thinking of GenAI, how AI can be leveraged within organisations and his predictions for the future.

Watch our Founder and MD, Avnish Bajaj, in conversation with our MD, Rajinder Balaraman, on what it takes to be an infinity entrepreneur.

"A lot of raw materials today are untouched across all the value chains and functionality that we spoke about. Choose out a new raw material, choose out a new value chain, or choose out financing to learn the market structure a lot better," said Asish Mohapatra, Co-founder and CEO, OfBusiness, as one of the four B2B verticals founders should invest in. Watch him in conversation with Sudipto Sannigrahi, Principal, Matrix Partners India.

“The West or the US specifically has always been built on a 222 kind of model, it’s 2 percent growth, 2 percent inflation, 2 percent interest rates, and India has always been more 777, 7 percent growth, 7 percent interest rate, 7 percent inflation, give or take in India maybe a little bit more but it’s not a shock to the Indian economy and you can see it around you because people are spending, businesses are investing.” said Rajinder Balaraman, MD, Matrix Partners India in our latest episode of Matrix Moments on “Environment, Valuation and Starting up in 2023” with Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India.

2022 was a year of unprecedented change and disruption, with the world having to adjust to a new normal. As we look back at the past year, it is important to take stock of what happened and reflect on what we have learned. At the same time, it is also important to look ahead and anticipate what the coming year may bring, Tune – in.

In this episode, Aakash, Principal at Matrix Partners India, talks to Shanav, VP of investments at Jump Crypto, about what builders in the crypto space can look forward to and other interesting trend lines for 2023.

Tune in to know more

In today's episode, Avnish Bajaj and Rajinder Balaraman, discuss Founder Market Fit and how it differs from the concept of building within a domain. Tune in to know more.

In today's episode, Aakash, Principle at Matrix Partners India, along with Andrew Vranjes, GM, APAC at Blockdaemon, and they are going to talk about the future of staking, selling and building a business in enterprise in the domain of Web3

In today's episode, Ayush Chamaria, Associate VP, along with Vipul Allawadhi, Co-Founder, Kutumb and Prashant Sachan, Founder and CEO, AppsForBharat, deep dive into vertical social communities

Anurag Sinha, co-founder & CEO of OneCard shares advice on the key choices he made while building OneCard - important decisions related to choice of domain, market risk, profit pools, GTM, followership and much more.

Blockchain, Web3, crypto what is so fundamentally transforming about these technologies and where do we see value creation emerging over the next few years in this space? Tune in to hear Matrix's POV on this and more.

In this episode, we dive deep into Aakash Kumar's (Principal at Matrix) journey of crypto investments - he talks to Rajinder Balaraman (MD at Matrix) about why he's been an early believer of the space, his thoughts on the rise (& fall) of the market & more. Tune in.

In today's episode, we have Anurag Sinha, Co - founder and CEO, OneCard, in conversation with Avnish Bajaj, Founder and Managing Director, Matrix Partners India, tells us what it takes to build for scale, learnings from his company building journey & much more. Tune in.

Revant Bhate, Co-founder & CEO at Mosaic Wellness, shares advice on building for growth at the seed stage, in conversation with Aakash from the Matrix team. Tune in.

Talent has increasingly become a competitive advantage amongst fast-growing companies and on today's episode, we have Maya john& Anuradha Bharat, HR leaders respectively at Dailyhunt (VerSe Innovation) & Razorpay, in conversation with Rupali Sharma, to share learnings from their journey & give us their perspective on building the org of the future. Tune in.

Hear from Srikrishnan of Rocketlane on his journey of creating the customer onboarding category, in conversation with Pranay from Matrix Partners India, learn about the importance of driving the narrative, tactical advice to build a thriving community of advocates, and how to measure your brand efforts. Tune in

In today’s episode we have Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur, co-founders of Razorpay, along with Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD at Matrix Partners India. In this episode they talk about the evolution of Razorpay and learnings from its hypergrowth journey - tune in the find out.

In today's episode, we have Vamsi Krishna, CEO & Co-founder, Vedantu as well as Mayank Kumar, Co-founder & MD at upGrad, who walk us through their respective company building journeys as well as the their thoughts on how they expect the future of edtech to unravel. Tune in the find out

In part 4 of our gaming series, we talk to Manish Agarwal, CEO, Nazara Technologies, Thomas Purtell, Co-founder & CEO, Omlet, and Anirudh Pandita, Founder, Loco, about the untapped opportunities within the gaming industry. Tune in.

In part 3 of our gaming series, we talk to Manish Agarwal, CEO, Nazara Technologies, Thomas Purtell, Co-founder & CEO, Omlet, and Anirudh Pandita, Founder, Loco, about the rise of Web3 and how we expect it to impact and transform the gaming industry. Tune in to find out.

In part 2 of our Gaming series, we cover the rise of Estreaming and the key trends stemming from it, with insights from Manish Agarwal, CEO, Nazara Technologies, Thomas Purtell, Co-founder & CEO, Omlet, and Anirudh Pandita, Founder, Loco. Tune in.

Avnish Bajaj of Matrix Partners India on how he picks winners and what it takes to be one

Founder and managing director of one of India's most well known venture capital firms, Matrix Partners India, Avnish Bajaj, has a knack for picking winners. It’s not luck; it’s an ability he hones through intense research and also by studying human nature and decision making.

So, how does he pick a winner? What are the traits he looks for in entrepreneurs? Avnish talks about all that on this episode of The Uppercase Podcast. Tune in

In part 1 of our Gaming series, we talk about the future of e-sports with Manish Agarwal, CEO, Nazara Technologies, Thomas Purtell, Co-founder & CEO, Omlet, and Anirudh Pandita, Founder, Loco. Tune in for an insightful discussion.

Today on Matrix Moments, we address the recent manufacturing explosion - how much of it is real? what are the tailwinds contributing to this boom and why now? tune in to find out.

On today’s episode, Shashank Mehta, founder of The Whole Truth gives us a play by play rundown on what it takes to build a consumer brand from scratch, while in conversation with Rajat Agarwal, MD, Matrix India. Tune in.

On today's episode, we talk about perishable supply chains - the challenges that come with it, & the learnings we've gained from partnering with our founders who are building in the space. Tune in for more.

In today's episode Chirag Taneja, Co- founder & CEO, GoKwik, walks us through the business building frameworks that have helped him scale and build a fast-growth company.

Ankush Jain (Sales Head @ OfBusiness) & Vasant Sridhar (Co-founder & CSO @ OfBusiness) talk to Rajinder about the construct of their management trainee programme and the leadership factory they've built out at OfBusiness. Tune in to know more.

On today’s episode we dive deep into the makings of an ideal B2B marketplace. Tune in to know more.

In this episode, we discuss the what, why, how of b2b marketplaces. Tune in to know more.

Today we talk about corporate governance & digital companies, why this topic has gained increasing importance in board rooms and the global practices we’ve seen companies follow. Tune in.

In this Episode, Jivraj Singh Sachar speakS with Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix Partners India on his journey as a venture investor.

In today’s episode we hear from the founders of FarMart on the ground reality of building a large SaaS led Agri company. Tune in to know more.

In this episode we discuss Captain Fresh’ org building journey with Utham, Venu & Abhishek along with Rupali Sharma, Director, Human Capital, Matrix Partners India

On today's episode, we discuss the ins & outs of the role of a junior VC - a crucial role that helps drive the core function of a VC firm. Tune in for a candid conversation between Nitisha & Avnish.

In today’s episode, we take stock of the current market volatility and its impact on the early stage startup ecosystem - tune in to hear our perspective.

As a first time founder - how do you decide the dynamics of your board?When should the board discussion happen? when does it become relevant? How many people should be on a board, who should be on the board? We try to unpack learnings & reflections from our experience of being on boards, tune in to find out.

The Matrix team takes stock of the year gone by and discuss trend predictions for 2022. Tune in to hear our thoughts.

Inside out vs outside in: what is the better business strategy to adopt for an early-stage startup? Tune in to hear our thoughts.

On today's episode we have Ilya Sukhar (Partner at Matrix Partners) in conversation with Vikram Vaidyanathan (MD at Matrix Partners India). Through this conversation, we uncover Ilya's journey from founder to VC, learnings & insights gained from his journey at Parse.com, YC, Facebook and Matrix. They then dive deep into Ilya's investment in Fivetran - leading provider of automated data integration. He takes us through the thought process behind the investment and much more. Tune-in

At the early stages, building your company's recruitment muscle is paramount to its growth, but is an in-house head of talent a necessity to accelerate this process?

Tune in for key insights on team building & recruitment from Avnish Bajaj & Rajinder Balaraman.

Here's #AMatrixMoment with our take on the role of an executive coach, tune in to find out.

On today’s episode Avnish Bajaj, Founder & Managing Director at Matrix Partners India, & Sudipto Sannigrahi, VP at Matrix Partners India, dissect the Hard clauses in a term Sheet.

What does a 'chief of staff' role entail, and when is the right time to hire one?

Startup India's C-suite has increasingly been hiring for this role - but what is the definition of a 'chief of staff' and when should you hire one?

A few thoughts from Avnish Bajaj & Rajinder Balaraman on the 'chief of staff' role, and what the benchmark of this role is across the various stages of a company. Tune in. SHOW LESS

On today’s episode we have the co-founders of DaMensch, Gaurav Pushkar & Anurag Saboo, along with Sudipto Sannigrahi, VP at Matrix Partners India. They talk about the origin of the brand DaMensch, how the company attained strong customer love over a short span of time and what it takes to build a profitable D2C brand and much more.

"What if I want to startup but don't have a groundbreaking idea?"

Aspiring entrepreneurs who are looking to build a company often do so to solve a personal pain point - but is solving for a personal problem the only way to build a company? Tune in to hear what Avnish Bajaj & Rajinder Balaraman have to say. SHOW LESS

On today’s episode we have Rajinder Balaraman, Director at Matrix Partners India, as well as Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. They cover they key markers that help determine a company’s IPO readiness, the right size for an IPO, the role played by the board of directors and the board can be leveraged for an IPO and much more. Tune – in.

"When industries are changing in structure, either you shape that structure, or you can get shaped by that structure" - Avnish Bajaj

Here's #AMatrixMoment where we talk about M&As & downturns and the real value creation that can come out of mergers. Tune in to know more.

On today’s episode we have Dana Stalder, Partner at Matrix Partners. Dana is in conversation with Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. They cover Dana’s journey into the venture capital world, his learnings from his investments in Afterpay and much more. Tune – in.

While each co-founder has a unique set of strengths, a company ultimately needs one decision maker - but how should a founding team decide who amongst them becomes CEO?

Tune in to hear our take on it.

In today's episode, we speak with Sumit Chhazed, the founder of OTO Capital, a company focused on reimagining the two wheeler ownership experience. Sumit opens up about why he chose this market & his vision to transform the future of bike ownership in India. Tune in to know more.

Should startup founders hire an external CEO? and if so, is there a right time/stage to bring in an external CEO? Tune in to find out how we think about it.

In today’s episode we are in conversation with Sandeep Jethani, Co-founder of dezerv. and Sarthak Malhotra, senior associate at Matrix Partners India and Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. In this episode we cover dezerv. Differentiated integrated portfolio approach and much more. Tune-in.

Joining us today is Utham Gowda, founder of Captain Fresh, along with him are Sudipto Sannigrahi, Vice President at Matrix and Tarun Davda, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. In this episode, we cover Utham’s journey from a banker to a founder of a B2B Sea Food Marketplace.

One of the toughest questions employers struggle with & there are various schools of thought around it, here's #AMatrixMoment where Avnish Bajaj & Rajinder Balaraman discuss a framework to help think through it. Tune in to know more.

Hi and welcome back to part 2 of our Delhi edition Founder Moments episode. In todays episode we take stock of startup environment and the growing and burgeoning founder eco-system in Delhi NCR. we have with us today, Chirag Taneja, the Co-founder of GoKwik, Anindya Dutta, the Co-founder of Stanza Living, Amit Lakhotia, Founder of Park+, and Asish Mohapatra, Co-founder of Ofbusiness, along with Avnish Bajaj, Founder and Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. Tune - in.

Todays discussion is heavily centered around the prevailing start-up environment and we’re here to essentially take stock of the current scenario, from the overheated funding situation, to exits, MNA’s, remote hybrid working models, the COVID impact, all of these and more. We have with us today, Chirag Taneja, the Co-founder of GoKwik, Amit Lakhotia, Founder of Park+, Anindya Dutta, the Co-founder of Stanza Living and Asish Mohapatra, Co-founder of ofBusiness, along with Avnish Bajaj, Founder and Managing Director at Matrix Partners India.

Today on FounderMoments, we dive deep into Bijnis's journey of empowering the manufacturer community & their vision of taking factories to the world!

What should founders be raising and what's the market standard? Avnish Bajaj & Rajinder Balaraman discuss the thought process behind this decision for both the founder and investor. Tune in to find out.

Co-founder conflicts: one of the trickiest situations that a founding team goes through.

How should founders engage with one another amidst a conflict & maneuver such a situation? Tune in to find out.

Amidst the current overheated funding environment - what is the right speed, size & frequency a founder should fundraise at?

Here's #AMatrixMoment where Avnish Bajaj & Rajinder Balaraman discuss the nitty gritties of fundraising, tune in.

In today’s episode, we have Chirag Taneja, co-founder of GoKwik in conversation with Rajat Agarwal, MD at Matrix Partners India, and Sarthak Malhotra, Senior Associate at Matrix Partners India. Through the course of this episode, we discuss the growing need for the one-click check-out product such as GoKwik, what led Chirag to start this company, the early traction received, and much more.

"The best businesses raise money inbound, not outbound" - Avnish Bajaj

As a founder, if you don't need the funding but capital is chasing you, should you still raise a round? Here's #AMatrixMoment with our perspective on fundraising when you don't need it. Tune in.

In today’s episode, we have Deepanshu Arora, co-founder of Toddle, In conversation with Rajat Agarwal, Managing director at Matrix Partners India. As part of this episode, we cover the learnings from Deepanshu’s journey of building a global EdTech platform, from what triggered the inception of the company and what it's like to sell to schools, to managing a team remotely and much more

Deepanshu Arora, co-founder of Toddle - Your Teaching Partner, talks to Rajat Agarwal on his journey of building a "teachers-first" global edtech platform.

Here's a snippet where Deepanshu shares his POV on what it's like working with international schools as his clients. Stay tuned for the full episode!

In today’s episode we have Anindya Datta and Sandeep Dalmia the co-founders of Stanza Living. In conversation with Tarun Davda, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. In this episode we cover what it takes to hyperscale a phygital business amongst pandemic and biggest learnings that have emerged from this experience

There's a lot that has been said about this - if you're a founder who is fundraising & thinking about this, here's #AMatrixMoment capturing our take on it.

India, US, Singapore are some of the more common options that founders consider but what are the driving factors for this decision?

Here's #AMatrixMoment on our perspective, tune in to find out.

In today's episode, we have Sourjyendu Medda and Vineet Rao, the co-founders of DealShare in conversation with Tarun Davda, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. We talk about what makes them unique and also cover highlights from their growth journey.

What's the right burn rate for your company? and how does this vary across stages?

One of the most discussed topics by founders & VCs both, tune in to hear Avnish Bajaj share a framework to help think through it.

In today’s episode, we have Shri and Vignesh the Co-founders of Rocketlane. They’re in conversation with Pranay Desai Vice – President, at Matrix Partners India. They talk about the team's deep SaaS history, learning from their prior venture, Konotor, their vision for Rocketlane and much more.

This episode is an audio recording to the recent Clubhouse session, that Tarun Davda, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India, Did with Priya Rajan, MD at Silicon Valley Bank, as well as Anand Chandrasekaran, Who is Executive VP at Five-Nine, Anand was formerly Director, messenger platform at Facebook and prior to that CPO at Snapdeal. In this episode, they cover the latest trend emerging in India tech. Matrix’s investment strategy through and post-Covid. IPO and MNA trend amongst other topics.

Announcing your company's fundraise is a big deal - but when is the right time to announce it? and more importantly, why should you be announcing it?

Tune in to find out how we think about it.

Network effects: one of the most spoken about & most important concepts for tech businesses - it helps a co. scale, build moats and contributes to virality. But what really is a network effect? Tune in to hear Avnish Bajaj summarize network effects in a nutshell.

Product versus distribution capability - what's more crucial for a founder to focus on at the early stages & why?

Tune in to know how we think about it.

Sameer Nigam, Co-founder, and CEO at PhonePe takes us through his journey of building India’s leading payments platform. In conversation with Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD at Matrix Partners India, they cover Sameer’s early days at Flipkart to starting up & scaling PhonePe & then selling to Flipkart, and much more. Tune in

This episode is part 2 of the episode we did earlier on Marketpalces. Joining us for this podcast is Rajinder Balaraman (Director, Matrix Partners India) and Avnish Bajaj (Founder & Managing Director, Matrix Partners India).

About Tarun Davda: He is the Managing Director of Matrix, India. Prior to joining Matrix, Tarun was the Co-founder, India CEO and Board Member at StepOut.com, a venture-backed startup. StepOut became India’s #1 online dating site with over 5 Million users. Before that, Tarun established BigRock.com (incubated by the Directi group) - India’s #1 provider of domain name registration and other web services. Tarun started his career at Infosys as an IT consultant. He has an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and an Engineer from VJTI, Bombay.

Tarun Davda (Managing Director at Matrix Partners India) speaks to Utsav Somani of AngelList India to take stock of the current startup scenario and Indian entrepreneurial drive

In today's episode, we have Nithin Kamath the founder and CEO of Zerodha, India’s largest tech-broking discount firm as well as Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. This is Nithin's second podcast with us and in an unplugged and candid conversation with Vikram.

Here's a snippet, from our #FounderMoments episode, where Kunal Bahl (Founder & MD, Snapdeal) talk to Tarun Davda (MD, Matrix India) about the people that were most instrumental in his childhood & the qualities he imbibed from them very early on. Tune in to find out.

To catch the full episode, go here: https://lnkd.in/ec4GxSn

As a founder how do you determine what your own compensation should be? & what is the right salary to be drawn across stages?

Here's how we Matrix Partners India think about it, tune in:

A conflict within the founding team is a situation that unfortunately arises more often than not, but when conflict does occur amongst two or more founders, how should one tackle it?

Tune in to hear how Avnish Bajaj thinks about it.

LTV-CAC – what’s the right number early-stage founders should track?

Is marketing a scalable function for companies to leverage? Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India, decodes how marketing is used to “fuel the fire” and why it’s far more impactful for digital businesses. Tune in for more.

s founder reverse vesting standard practice? Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India & Rajinder Balaraman, Director, Matrix Partners India, decode how we think about this at Matrix Partners India. Tune in for more SHOW LESS

How should founders think about it at across the different stages of a startup? Avnish Bajaj, (Founder and MD, Matrix Partners India) shares his perspective, while in conversation with Salonie Ganju, ( Marketing Manager, Matrix Partners India ) Tune in to find out

Valuation versus dilution is something all founders spend a lot of time thinking about. Avnish Bajaj (Founder & MD, MPI) shares his point of view on how founders should approach this.

What matters more – growth or profitability? In this episode, Rajinder Balaraman, Director, Matrix Partners India, and Avnish Bajaj, Founder and MD at Matrix Partners India talk about hacking the way to profitable growth vectors and loops.

In today’s episode, we have Tarun Davda Managing Director at Matrix Partners India, with Kunal Bahl, co-founder of Snapdeal and Titan Capital. Through the course of this conversation, we cover Kunal’s early childhood and background that helped him shaped him into who he is today. The biggest learnings from his journey at Snapdeal, transitioning from an entrepreneur to an investor.

Here's a snippet from an upcoming episode where Debleena Das & Rajinder Balaraman share learnings and insights on team building at the early stages.

How much should a founder worry about competition & the threat of being disrupted by a new startup? tune in to find out how Avnish Bajaj, (Founder and MD, Matrix Partners India), and Rajinder Balaraman, (Director, Matrix Partners India) think about it.

In today’s episode, we have Revant Bhate, the co-founder of Mosaic wellness in conversation with Sanjot Malhi, Director and the lead for the consumer sector at Matrix Partners India. Mosaic Wellness is a house of brands, focused on redefining the Indian wellness market and on today's episode we cover Revant’s transition from investor to founder and what that was like, what it takes to build a consumer brand in India and the problem they aim to solve through their recently launched brands ManMatters and Bodywise. Tune in to know more.

The pandemic & recent global trends have brought about a shift in the way companies are thinking about profit pools at the early stages, but what’s really changed? and how does one go deeper into the value chain of an industry in quest of the right profit pool - tune in to find out.

In this episode, Sanjot Malhi (Director & consumer sector lead at Matrix Partners India) sits down with Aarti Gill & Mihir Gadani, the co-founders of OZiva, to dissect & decipher their journey of building India’s leading clean, plant-based nutrition brand.

In this episode, we explore the concept of “gamification” and the impact it has on user growth & retention at the early stages, tune in to know more.

In today’s episode we take stock of the biggest learnings from the last 12 months and trends we think will explode in 2021. Tune in to find out!

In today’s episode, Rajinder & Avnish are crystal ball gazing into the future of commerce – tune in to know more about trends and sectors we expect to explode in 2021.

While choosing to ‘work from office’ is a personal & company specific decision, we at Matrix Partners India have slowly inched back towards operating from the office, with all measures & protocols in place.

Tune in to hear what our experience has been like over the last few months.

Harsh Jain, CEO and Co-founder, Dream11, sits down with Tarun Davda, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India to retrace the journey of building Dream11 – they discuss the key inflection points, fundraising struggles, winning the IPL title sponsorship, Harsh’s personal growth journey as a leader & much more. Tune in.

Welcome back to episode 5, the last episode of this series. In today’s episode we talk about the unsolved opportunities in the agri-tech space. We have with us Thirukumaran Nagarajan, co-founder of Ninjacart, Shashank Kumar, Founder & CEO, DeHaat, Karthik Jayaraman, Co-founder of WayCool and Shobhit, Co-founder of VeGrow. The conversation was moderated by Ankush Goyal, Sanjot Malhi & Tarun Davda who look over the investments in the agri-tech sector for Matrix Partners India.

Welcome back to part 4 of this series. In today’s episode we discuss the importance of technology adoption in the Agri tech sector and how behavioural change plays a large role in the farmer community when it comes to leveraging tech. This episode is part 4 of a 5 part series on the Indian Agritech ecosystem, with insights from Thirukumaran Nagarajan, co-founder of Ninjacart, Shashank Kumar, Founder & CEO, DeHaat, Karthik Jayaraman, Co-founder of WayCool and Shobhit, Co-founder of VeGrow. The conversation was moderated by Ankush Goyal, Sanjot Malhi & Tarun Davda who look over the investments in the agri-tech sector for Matrix Partners India.

Welcome back to part 3 of this series. In today’s episode, we discuss about the journey of Ninjacart and learnings on building unit economics positive business in Agri. We have with us Thirukumaran Nagarajan, co-founder of Ninjacart, Shashank Kumar, Founder & CEO, DeHaat, Karthik Jayaraman, Co-founder of WayCool and Shobhit, Co-founder of VeGrow. The conversation was moderated by Ankush Goyal, Sanjot Malhi & Tarun Davda who look over the investments in the agri-tech sector for Matrix Partners India.

Welcome back to part 2 of this series. This episode is focused on the inception of WayCool and insights from Karthik's journey on building and scaling the company. Also part of this episode are prominent founders from the agri-tech startup industry, Thirukumaran Nagarajan, co-founder of Ninjacart, Shashank Kumar, Founder & CEO, DeHaat and Shobhit, Co-founder of VeGrow. The conversation was moderated by Ankush Goyal, Sanjot Malhi & Taun Davda who look over the investments in the agri-tech sector for Matrix Partners India. Tune in.

In this episode we deep dive into one of India’s largest industries, which is agriculture, and the associated agri-tech disruption that is underway in India, we discuss the opportunities and the pitfalls in agri-tech, with Thirukumaran Nagarajan, co-founder of Ninjacart, Shashank Kumar, Founder & CEO, DeHaat, Karthik Jayaraman, Co-founder of WayCool and Shobhit, Co-founder of VeGrow. The conversation was moderated by Ankush Goyal, Sanjot Malhi & Taun Davda who look over the investments in the agri-tech sector for Matrix Partners India.

This episode is part 2 to the India venture opportunity, a podcast we hosted last year. We cover the state of affairs in the Indian startup and Venture community, the recent China ban, and its ramifications. Jio’s impact on start-ups and the fund-raising environment and the COVID effect on India’s digital economy among other topics. Tune - in

In today’s episode we have Shashank Mehta the founder of The Whole Truth, (formerly known as and nothing else) with Sanjot Malhi, Director, Matrix Partners India. Sanjot and Shashank dive deep into the brand story, starting with Shashank’s real motive and personal journey behind founding The Whole Truth and the reason behind the recent brand transformation exercise.

In an episode focused on the mobility sector, Tarun Davda, MD, Matrix India & Prakash Sangam, CEO, redBus decode the bus ticketing ecosystem, they talk about COVID recovery patterns, changing consumer behavior, and learnings from redBus’ journey in the international markets.

In today’s episode, we do deep dive on the importance of economic moats for early-stage startups, and why they matter.

In today’s episode, we have Rupali Sharma, ( VP, Human Capital, Matrix Partners India ) and Rajinder Balaraman, ( Director, Matrix Partners India ), they cover performance management systems & HR best practices for early-stage startups. We work closely with founders in this area and have tried to summarize some of the key learnings from our experience. Tune - in

In today's episode, we talk to Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, the Co-founders of Razorpay, as well as Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. This episode is primarily focusing on the early part of the founder’s journey, we cover their fundraising process. Living together as founders and building an amazing product culture and much more.

Welcome back to part 2 of the Dailyhunt episode, with Virendra Gupta (Founder, Dailyhunt) and Umang Bedi (Co-Founder, Dailyhunt), as well as, Vikram Vaidyanathan (Director, Matrix Partners India). We talk about the dynamics of their partnership and also the cover the changing face of content consumption in India, and how Dailyhunt has been at the forefront in each of these changes. Tune in.

In today’s Matrix Moment episode, we have Virendra Gupta ( Founder, Dailyhunt ) and Umang Bedi ( Co- Founder, Dailyhunt ), with Vikram Vaidyanathan ( Director, Matrix Partners India ). We talk about the dynamics of their partnership and also the cover the changing face of content consumption in India, and how Dailyhunt has been at the forefront in each of these changes. Tune in.

With Marketplaces on the rise, today’s episode covers how Marketplaces have evolved as a sector and an analysis of the differentiated business models that work for different markets. Joining us to discuss this is Rajinder Balaraman ( Director, Matrix Partners India ) and Avnish Bajaj ( Founder & Managing Director, Matrix Partners India ). Tune in to know more.

Welcome to part 2 of Matrix Moment episode with Asish Mohapatra, Co-Founder & CEO – Ofbusiness opens up to Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix Partners India, about transitioning from an investor to entrepreneur, building Ofbusiness from ground zero, co-founder relationships & dynamics, his thoughts on profitability vs growth and much more

In today’s Matrix Moment episode Asish Mohapatra, Co-Founder & CEO – Ofbusiness opens up to Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix Partners India, about transitioning from an investor to entrepreneur, building OfBusiness from ground zero, co-founder relationships & dynamics, his thoughts on profitability vs growth and much more.

In today’s Matrix Moment episode, we will cover the opportunities in the grocery and E-Commerce space post-COVID-19, joining us for this discussion are Vineet Rao and Sourjyendu Medda, the co-founders of DealShare as well as Tarun Davda, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India, and Gourav Bhattacharya, Director at Matrix Partners India.

Today’s Matrix Moments episode is a masterclass on the journey of building Country Delight, India’s leading direct to home, mass premium, dairy, and fresh grocery brand. Country Delight currently serves 200,000 families across Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Bangalore. With a $50 million run rate along with the 3x year on year growth rate. The episode outlines the highlights and milestones of the journey with insights and inputs from both sides of the table – founders and investors. Tune in to know more.

In this episode Avnish and Rajinder talk about why not all margin is equal and how margins relate to valuation.

What is the change required to survive this crisis and how will each sector navigate their way through it? In this episode of Matrix Moments, the Matrix team shares their thoughts from a macro + sectoral view point. Tune in to know more.

In this episode of #MatrixMoments, Vikram Vaidyanathan, ( Managing Director, Matrix Partners India ) and Rajat Agarwal, ( Director, Matrix Partners India ) share guidelines for Fintech firms on how to navigate their way through the perfect storm that is Covid-19 and why overreaction is the only reaction at this point. Watch the full episode to know more.

With rapid evolution taking place in the business environment world over, we’re dedicating today’s #MatrixMoments episode to discuss and decode the implications of the Covid-19 on the startup ecosystem. Here’s how we at Matrix are thinking about it. Tune in to know more

In this episode, Vikram sits down with Nithin to uncover what it takes to build and scale India’s largest tech broking discount firm, Zerodha. Nithin talks about the early years of his career, co-founding a company with his best friend and brother, what he looks for in a person when hiring, why he hasn’t raised any form of external capital till date and his future plans for Zerodha

Joining us in this episode of Matrix Moments is Asish Mohapatra, Co-Founder of OfBusiness – India’s leading tech driven B2B lending platform, and is also a Matrix portfolio company, along with Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix India. Prior to founding OfBusiness, Asish actually worked at Matrix as part of the investment team and worked very closely with Avnish during that time. This episode follows a role reversal of sorts, where Asish in the capacity of a founder interviews Avnish on all things fundraising, early stage and VC investing, he asks the hard questions that first time founders have always wanted to know but haven’t got the answers to. Tune in.

In today’s episode, we talk about DINVIBs i.e. Digitally Native Vertically Integrated Consumer Brands and our thesis behind investing deep into this sector. Joining us to discuss this is, Sanjot Malhi (VP & Consumer Sector Lead at Matrix Partners India), Avnish Bajaj (Founder and Managing Director at Matrix Partners India ) and Rajinder Balaraman (Director, Matrix Partners India). Tune in to know more.

In today’s episode we cover the importance of inculcating a strong and health culture in your company right from the early stages. Joining us to dicuss this is Ahana Gautam, ( Co Founder & CEO, Open Secret ), along with Avnish Bajaj, (Founder & MD, Matrix Partners ) and Rajinder Balaraman, (Director, Matrix Partners India)

With 2019 coming to an end, we decided to do a quick look back and summarize some of the macro themes that emerged from the year. In some ways it’s been a record year for the Indian VC industry and a very busy year for Matrix, Avnish Bajaj (Founder and Managing Director Matrix Partners India), Vikram Vaidyanathan (Managing Director Matrix Partners India ) Tarun Davda (Managing Director Matrix Partners India), and Rajinder Balaraman (Director, Matrix Partners India) take us through the highlights of the year gone by and what to expect from 2020. Tune in to know more.

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj, Founder & Managing Director, Matrix India, talks about decision-making and applying the 'POS framework' as a guiding tool to navigate through hard decisions, both personally & professionally. Tune in to know more.

Today’s episode, Founding Team, is about a topic that we as a firm are very passionate about, it’s also a topic that forms the basis of Matrix’s investment philosophy, foundersfirst!. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj talks about the importance of a strong founding team, how this can shape a company’s journey, frameworks that can help reach the ideal founding team, learnings from Avnish’s experience with his 2 prior co-founders at Baazee and then Matrix Partners India.

With the recent spate of investments made by Matrix Partners India in the NeoBank space, we decided to host an episode with serial entrepreneurs, Jiten Gupta (Co-Founder of a Neobank venture, Jupiter and previously founder of Citrus Pay) and Anurag Sinha (Founder of neocard, OneCard and previously founder of Walnut, a personal finance management startup) to discuss the current landscape and what makes Neobanking so exciting at a time like this. The episode was hosted by Rajat Agarwal, Director and fintech sector lead for Matrix India as well as Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix India who has led the investment in market leading fintech companies like, Razorpay, Mswipe, Five Star Business Finance, and OfBusiness to name a few.

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj, Founder & Managing Director, Matrix India talks about the varied GTM strategies used by startups to drive a wedge into the market.

In this episode of Matrix Moments, Tarun Davda, (Managing Director, Matrix Partner India) guides founders on how to think about fundraising & valuations at the early stages. He covers how much capital is required to be raises at each stage, what the typical dilutions are at each stage, the downside that comes with raising too much capital and that at the end valuation is vanity, what matters is a founders percentage of ownership. Tune in to know more.

Stanza Living is one of India’s largest student housing networks, co-founders Sandeep and Anindya share their journey of building the company from ground zero, with guest moderator, Gourav Bhattacharya (Director, Matrix India) and also the investment lead for Stanza Living.

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj (Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India) and Rajinder Balaraman, (Director, Matrix Partners India) discuss the current environment in the startup and investments ecosystem. Funding in early stage companies versus later stage, repeat entrepreneurs, investment cycle bubbles and the trends expected to play out in 2020, tune in to know more.

In part 2 of a 2 part episode, serial entrepreneur, Bhavin Turakhia, founder and CEO of Flock and Zeta, joins us to share learnings from his journey on what it takes, personally and professionally, to build and sell a series of successful companies. Tune in to know more.

In part 1 of a 2 part episode, serial entrepreneur, Bhavin Turakhia, founder and CEO of Flock and Zeta, joins us to share learnings from his journey on what it takes, personally and professionally, to build and sell a series of successful companies. Tune in to know more.

In this episode of Matrix Moments, Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, at Matrix Partners India shares his views on Exits: learnings from his journey with Baazee.com which was acquired by Ebay, key factors to evaluate when making this decision, and how to deal with multiple investors at a time like this.

As a company scales, how you scale & grow with it as a founder is crucial to business success. A fundamental part of this transition includes knowing how to shift your strategy pre and post attaining PMF, in this episode Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix India sums up the key indicators and metrics to keep in mind at each stage.

Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix India, catches up with Amrish Rau and Jiten Gupta, Founders of Citrus Pay, which was later acquired by PayU, where both founders took on the role of CEO and MD, respectively. In this episode they go over the journey of building Citrus from ground up, the decision making process that went behind exiting Citrus, their investment strategy as angel investors and lastly their advice to founders looking to startup in the fintech space.

In this episode of Matrix Moments, we deep dive into the relationship dynamics between a founder and his/her board. Specifically for first time founders, board room etiquette is an unknown area and thus we decided to put together an episode that covers all queries founders may have on this subject. From setting the right rules of engagement to knowing how to deal with a difference in opinion in the board room, Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India shares his views on the best practices to keep in mind when dealing with a board of investors.

Tracking and measuring your company’s performance is crucial not just at the early stages but through the course of your companies lifecycle. In this episode of Matrix Moments, Tarun Davda & Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Directors at Matrix Partners India, share learnings from their experiences with founders on why tracking the right metrics can help you measure what is working for your company and what isn’t. In addition to measuring performance, picking a North Star metric as the one metric to align the entire company on what is important helps keep all teams focused on working towards the same goal. Listen in to know more.

Structuring and designing an effective incentive plan is key at the early stages to help promote retention as well as high levels of motivation among the team. From cash versus equity, how much equity is apt at each stage, bonus plans to measuring employee performance through a balance scorecard, in this episode of Matrix Moments, Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India, outlines simple thumb rules to keep in mind when structuring your employees incentive plan.

In this episode of Matrix Moments Tarun Davda, (MD, Matrix Partners India) and guest speakers, Miten Sampat, (VP Corporate Development, Times Internet) and Samidha Sharma (Emerging Business Editor at Economic Times) discuss the current state of affairs within the Indian startup and VC ecosystem and the way forward from here

In this episode of Matrix Moments, Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India, and Rajinder Balaraman, Director, Matrix Partners India, do a deep dive on the significance of terms within a Term Sheet, what founders should focus on, and essentially provide a guide for founders who are working on a Term Sheet for the very first time.

In this episode of Matrix Moments, we spoke with Raghuram Talluri, Co-Founder, LoadShare Networks, on the learnings of being a first time founder and scaling an asset light logistics platform. Rajinder Balaraman, Director, Matrix Partners India, also joined this episode to share insights from an investor perspective.

At the early stages a critical factor that determines your startups success or failure, is the level of spending or burn rates. Practicing extreme financial discipline is a crucial part of controlling your companies burn rate. Tune in to this episode of #MatrixMoments, where Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India, talks about the importance of business performances, plans, burn rates and budgets.

Every successful company goes through 3 distinct phases, the startup phase (0 – 1), the scaling / growth phase (1 – 10) and finally profitability (10 – 100). The archetypes of people required to help the company transcend all phases, is different at each stage. Avnish Bajaj, Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India, shares his experience on building the perfect Org in this episode of Matrix Moments.

Episode description: Founded by Mayank Kukreja and Anish Khadiya, Itilite is a corporate travel management solution that balances company’s savings and the traveler (employee’s) experience. Itilite is also a Matrix portfolio company and this episode features a conversation between Gourav Bhattacharya (Director, Matrix India) and Mayank (Co-Founder, Itilite) on what it’s like to make the shift from a stable job at Myntra.com to founding your company.

Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix Partners India, catches up with Naveen Tewari, Co-founder, InMobi, who unravels the journey behind building India’s first unicorn startup. Naveen gets candid about strategies implemented for expansion to international markets, creating a family-like work culture and rising above the challenges that come with building a weatherproof company.

As part of our guest series, Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix India catches up with Rajeev Ahuja, Executive Director, RBL, Bank on “Discovering Fintech Religion”. The conversation is spread across a 2 part episode, and covers the transformational journey of Ratnakar to RBL Bank, a debate on Fin versus Tech, and phygital as a means for fintech companies and banks to scale.

As part of our guest series, Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix India catches up with Rajeev Ahuja, Executive Director, RBL, Bank on “Discovering Fintech Religion”. The conversation is spread across a 2 part episode, and covers the transformational journey of Ratnakar to RBL Bank, a debate on Fin versus Tech, and phygital as a means for fintech companies and banks to scale.

Hiring at the early stages helps define the momentum at which a company grows. In this episode, Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix Partners India, captures some of his learnings from having worked closely with founders on what works when hiring for a startup. Dna based hiring versus hiring for skill set is another challenge that founders deal with and in most cases founders have found the former to be more effective at least in the initial phase of their company. Listen in to know more.

Hiring a strong team is the one of the proven ways to ensure startup success. Yet, it’s the biggest issue that founders / CEOs face when building their organization. In this episode of Matrix Moments, Tarun Davda talks about ‘Extreme Referencing’, and how this helps him go beyond the surface level interview process when trying to hire for senior executive positions.

In an attempt to forecast for 2019, this episode of Matrix Moments talks about the trends we expect to play out, sectors expected to explode (or not), the changing face of the average Indian entrepreneur and how 2018 will impact the momentum of 2019. Tune in to hear Avnish Bajaj, Founder & Managing Director, Matrix Partners India, take us through this.

A snapshot of the year gone by for the Indian Venture ecosystem: the aftermath of the Flipkart – Walmart deal, government policies surrounding angel tax, the possible rise of trade unionism within startups and the question on everyone’s mind – will India ever see IPOs for consumer internet companies in the near term?

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj, (Founder & MD, Matrix India) talks about MoFu: what it takes to continue retaining & engaging your users post the initial burst of customers, how to evaluate CAC, and what metrics to keep a track of.

Why do some people seem to have more bandwidth than others, and how do they achieve extreme levels of productivity? This episode talks about the principles and practices followed by successful leaders when it comes to time management, prioritization and clarity of thought.

Going back to the fundamentals of investments and valuations, and to ascertain whether a company's valuation is more than just a quixotic pursuit. Avnish Bajaj (Founder & Managing Director, Matrix Partners India) gives us a piece by piece break down of the valuation techniques and strategies used to analyse and determine a company's real value versus price.

Addressing the much debated question of who makes a better venture partner - operators or investors? Tarun Davda, Managing Director, Matrix Partner India, talks about his journey of transitioning from an intrapreneur to a venture investor, what his experience has been like having been on the other side of the table as an operator, his views on both types of venture investors: operator VCs and investor VCs and the biases that come with each.

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj (Founder & MD, Matrix Partners India), talks about the investment cycles of fear and greed with reflections from his first exposure to the high's and low's of the cycle. From Peter Lynch to Warren Buffet, he touches upon the investment philosophies that helped shape his own strategy and approach to the cycles, how to avoid the most common mistakes made in investing and navigate your way through a bear market.

We chose to launch our series with an episode on a topic that we believe is extremely integral for both personal and professional development, a concept that is at the core of Matrix’s ideologies and forms a large part of the foundation, intrinsics. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj (Founder & Managing Director, Matrix India) takes us through what he thinks are the traits required by an individual to succeed against all odds, the ingredients of what goes into the makings of the best founders, and the essence behind our foundersfirst! philosophy.