Stride Stories: Recent Episodes

Stride Ventures

Stride Stories is a podcast by Stride Ventures, to relive the journeys of prominent founders, investors and industry leaders in the start-up ecosystem and look back at the serendipity moments to inspire the next generation of dreamers. Stream in to listen to the industry stalwarts talk about the big dream, fund-raising, business models and pivots, importance of debt and some behind-the-scenes rapid fire questions about their personal life. About the host: Apoorva Sharma is a Partner at Stride Ventures, a leading venture debt in India based out of Delhi pioneering innovative solutions for end-to-end debt needs of new-age business. Follow Stride on Twitter - https://twitter.com/venturesstride?s=11, LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/strideventures/ or visit - https://strideventures.in/

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In the latest episode of Stride Stories we host the Founder and CEO of the disruptive fintech startup – Nitin Gupta of UNI.

IIT Delhi, IIM Ahmedabad, Lehman Brothers, PayU India and Ola, may seem like a long list of accomplishments to most but not him. With disruption and innovation at the core of his being, his ever-lasting energy can be a source of inspiration to the entire ecosystem.

With UNI, he has undertaken another challenging yet disruptive journey and we cannot wait to see it unfold in the times to come.

Catch the episode to learn more about his plans for UNI – the first of its kind 1/3 credit card offering in India.

Tune into this podcast to listen to-:

  1. Childhood and inspiration growing up - 2:05
  2. Was entrepreneurship always the plan? – 4:12
  3. Evolution of the online payments landscape in India – 8:50
  4. The most exciting aspect about payment products backed with credit in the times to come – 12:00
  5. Balancing expansion of customer base and increase in ROI with increase in credit cost in UNI – 18:55
  6. How will the linking of credit cards with UPI impact the interchange fee revenue stream – 22:25
  7. Is there a need for more Fintech focussed VCs in India – 26:25
  8. Rapid Fire. – 29:15
  9. Indebted to debt. – 33:37

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The enterprise debt market in India has 3 million SMEs, contributing 40% of the GDP but constituting only 11% of the bond market. While a lot of attention has been given to the consumer lending space through a slew of FinTechs and new-age NBFCs, the enterprise debt requirements have mostly remained a white-space.

With over 65000Cr+ transactions, 500+ lenders, 1000+ borrowers and a 40% market share in MLDs, Vivriti Capital is one of the few players that is disrupting the enterprise debt ecosystem by building a full-stack SME debt platform and in this episode of Stride Stories, we go behind-the-scenes with the man behind this disruptive venture – Vineet Sukumar, Founder and Managing Director of Vivriti Capital.

Graduating from IIM Bangalore, Vineet accumulated experiences with Tata Administrative Services, Standard Chartered Bank and IFMR Capital. In 2017, he took the leap to the hardships of entrepreneurship to start Vivriti Capital, a venture that has been profitable since the first year of its operations and delinquency rates less than 0.3%. The Vivriti Group has under its umbrella 3 verticals – CredAvenue (tech-based debt platform), Vivriti Asset Management and Vivriti Capital.

Tune into this podcast to listen to-:

  1. The thought of starting up after experiencing the corporate world - 2:00
  2. How has Vivriti disrupted the enterprise debt market? - 5:57
  3. How did the vision to create an online enterprise debt platform come about? – 8:58
  4. Strategy to enable end-to-end digitisation of wholesale banking/enterprise debt – 10:54
  5. Future plans for CredAvenue – 14:30
  6. How do the 3 verticals of Vivriti complement each other – 16:25
  7. Dividing investment decisions between NBFC and AMC businesses – 20:30
  8. Difference in profile of investors on the CredAvenue plaform and the AMC business - 23:19
  9. Evolution of the debt securitisation market in India – 24:54
  10. Work culture at Vivriti- 29:17
  11. Rapid Fire. – 31:20
  12. Indebted to debt. – 37:50

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From Princeton to Goldman Sachs to Digital-First Entertainment. Doesn’t sound like a conventional journey right? Well, in the latest episode of Stride Stories we have one of the most resilient, innovative and unconventional founder of the ecosystem, Aditi Shrivastava – Co-Founder and CEO of PocketAces.

From Ayush and Barkha from Filtercopy, Dhruv and Kavya from Dice Media, to the lip-smacking dishes on Gobble, nothing better represents GenZ, Entertainment, Content and Tech - together other than PocketAces. We are excited to host the former Wall-Street banker who took the plunge to entrepreneurship and put India on the world map for digital first content and entertainment in the 3rd episode of Stride Stories. Tune into this podcast to listen to-:

  1. How was PocketAces born and what is its vision - 1:15
  2. When did you realise that you wanted to transform the content and digital entertainment industry? 5:40
  3. Convincing brands about the content-to-commerce play before it was popular in the industry – 10:00
  4. Defining the output metrics to track ROI and Engagement - 13:23
  5. Building an extensive digital distribution - 21:39
  6. How does PocketAces look at short-form video content and influencer marketing to their business strategy? - 25:49
  7. Content creation strategy of PocketAces for OTT platforms like Netflix going forward - 30:34
  8. Why was Loco spun-off into a separate entity? – 34:15
  9. Rapid Fire - 37:16
  10. Indebted to Debt - 46:30

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Who knew that a 23 year old who left his first job in 90 days would go on to start one of the largest startups in the home décor space and get on board the Cricketing Legend MS Dhoni as the brand ambassador.

Srikanth pursued his engineering from Bangalore and then went onto pursue Computer Science at Harvard and not surprisingly started a startup in the same domain as his first shot at entrepreneurship.

After dabbling with 2 other stints, Srikanth Iyer founded HomeLane in 2014 where he leveraged technology to bring in accountability and visualization in an industry infamous for the complete opposite. He also serves as a Venture Partner at Unitus Seed Fund and brings his VC side to his business as well as he has built one of the most capital efficient business in the home décor sector.

Catch Srikanth Iyer, Co-Founder and CEO of HomeLane on the second episode of Stride Stories, as we go behind-the-scenes with the experienced operator.

Tune into this podcast to listen to-:

  1. When did the entrepreneurial bug hit you?- 1:29
  2. How did you come up with the idea of HomeLane?- 3:27
  3. How important has technology been in an execution intensive business? - 6:20
  4. Concept of finite catalogue by HomeLane - 11:39
  5. What to outsource and what to not - 19:18
  6. What areas should a founder devote time to in a mature startup? - 24:32
  7. Importance of commercial advertising in a low-frequency high ticket size business - 30:45
  8. How has HomeLane been so capital efficient? – 32:40
  9. Difference in consumer behaviour over time and geography - 35:24
  10. Rapid Fire - 37:58
  11. Indebted to debt - 46:30

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Vineeta Singh and Kaushik Mukherjee are the founders of SUGAR – a leading colour cosmetics brand in India which defines itself as the brand of choice for the women of today. Before starting SUGAR, Vineeta and Kaushik met each other during their MBA at IIM Ahmedabad where they connected over their commonality of building their own venture. Post their MBA they got married to each other and dabbled with multiple ventures where they acquired the inputs needed to build a successful business before they set out to start SUGAR together.Vineeta is also famously known for being one of the Sharks on Shark Tank India and Kaushik is known for his enriching tweets on Twitter which he posts with a dash of his trademark humour.

Tune into this podcast to listen to Vineeta and Kaushik talk about-:

  1. Starting up in a nascent startup ecosystem. - 2:10
  2. How they both complement each other as co-founders and life partners. - 7:45
  3. Evolution of subscription e-commerce in India and the journey of FabBag. - 14:49
  4. Product-content-commerce playbook of SUGAR. - 22:20
  5. Work-life balance. - 29:05
  6. From a founder to being an investor on Shark Tank for Vineeta. - 37:08
  7. Hiring and team management. - 40:20
  8. The big dream for SUGAR and way forward. - 45:00
  9. How did SUGAR as the brand name came into being and will they stick with it as expand into sub-categories? - 49:45
  10. Behind the scenes of the investment by Stride into SUGAR. - 52:35
  11. Rapid Fire. - 54:55
  12. Indebted to debt. - 1:06:50