Maharajas of Scale

Jag Chima is a second-generation businessman of a different kind. He has built multiple businesses, from mobile retailing to real estate to celebrity fitness companies. The interesting thing about each of these companies is that he has timed them well and made a success out of them Jag has scaled them to meaningful heights within the confines of the market that he was working in. A chance discussion led him to launch and scale a celebrity fitness company that has literally trained all Bollywood A-Listers His latest venture is again timed well, focusing on the creator economy. Jag is bringing the same zeal to the world of creators and influencers as he did with his other ventures. This is an episode very different from what we have had in the past

Emotion is at the heart of everything that we do as humans. As the adage goes and what we are witnessing with modern day Twitter wars, the pen is mightier than the sword. However, using the right words to evoke the right emotions seems more like an art than science. Can technology help us write as well as Kalidasa or the Bard? This is the place where Sharmin Ali is focusing her energies. Sharmin traces her origins to Shantiniketan, the hallowed place of Rabindranath Tagore. Being a Bengali, Sharmin spent the first few years of her professional in high growth environments such as Mu Sigma and Fortune 500 companies in Biz Dev. However, her literary origins and Bengali roots did not go away. Sharmin eventually branched out to build India's Netflix writing as many as 70 scripts on her own. She saw the writing on the wall and sold her scripts to launch Instoried. With Instoried, Sharmin Ali is hoping to change the way people write. Infusing their writing with emotion and empathy is something Sharmin is envisioning. Interesting episode with lots of twists and turns. 

Mention the name Sabeer Bhatia and it evokes memories of startups, the excitement and frenzy of the dot-com era and more. Sabeer Bhatia is a well known name for pre-millenial Indians who all grew up on the dreams of having a startup and exit like Sabeer did with Hotmail. Sabeer and his co-founder arguably kicked off the dot-com boom. The $400+ Million acquisition of Hotmail by the then pre-eminent company Microsoft opened the eyes of entrepreneurs, investors and industry watchers to the possibility of what the internet could bring. Sabeer was the first in a long line of entrepreneurs that tasted success with the ventures they built. Having tasted this success, they went on to try their hand at various other ventures. Sabeer did the same. He tried to recreate eBay in India calling it Aarzoo and he tried at other ventures. Ever the dreamer, Sabeer is back with a bang with an idea that on paper is likely to give goosebumps. He is in a mission to unleash millions of entrepreneurs just like the millions of email accounts that he unleashed with Hotmail 25 years ago. The vision is audacious but seems practicaly and timely. Listen to the episode to understand his story and how he plans to achieve this daring vision.

Gaurav Mathur had a life similar to Hrithik Roshan's life in the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. He was on the trading floor of the London Stock Exchange and thought his life was set. He could not believe that someone like him who roamed around in chappals (Indian for flip flops) was doing that kind of work, rubbing shoulders with amazing people and getting paid such insane amount of money. However, something kept nagging at him. That he was a misfit in a large organization and that he had to do something different bigger and run his own organization. After trying his hand at running a PE fund, he founded SafeGold. India and Indians are perhaps the largest consumers of Gold on the planet. Gaurav hit upon the idea to provide Indians a way to channel their Gold obsession. Today, SafeGold helps millions of Indians invest in Gold safely. Check out this episode for some amazing insights into the Gold Industry and what SafeGold is doing  

What does it take to build a D2C brand? How can we become successful at it? We live in the age of individual and local brands. Not a day passes without us discovering a brand in cosmetics or food or another consumer product introduced to us. The advances made by industries make it possible for anyone to launch brands and products with a bit of work. In this in-depth episode, Co-Founder of the successful spa chain Four Fountains De-Stress Spa and Co-Founder of Pilgrim Cosmetics Anurag Kedia takes us thru his journey, how he spotted the opportunity for a D2C brand, how they succeeded in launching during Covid and other aspects. If you want to win with your D2C brand and in online commerce, listen to Anurag here.

Insurance is a very interesting business. Nobody thinks they need one until they face a certain situation. For a country with chronic illnesses and perennial under penetration of healthcare facilities, systemic solutions have not necessarily kept pace with the needs of the people. People in MSMEs or in the unorganized sector don't have access, let alone the right pricing. The result is a large number of uninsured and underinsured employees with no health insurance benefits. This problem begged for an intervention and that's a problem Abhishek Poddar of PlumHQ is solving. Abhishek Poddar is a serial entrepreneur. Having tried his hand at building a couple of startups in the past and having attended Stanford, he knew he had it in him to make it happen. How did Plum come to be and where is it headed? Its in this episode

LoanTap's Satyam Kumar enjoyed a cushy life as a senior banking executive. By the mid-2010s, he experienced a glass ceiling and felt that he had plateaued. In addition, the growing Indian vocal and connected millennials, the black swan event of demonetization, and the startup wave pushed the market in a new direction. Users who wanted better products and the Indian Government's Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile (JAM Trinity) greatly aided LoanTap's Satyam Kumar's push towards better digital products. Driven by the ability to authenticate users electronically and the millions of young users online, LoanTap made a mega push. Backing this mega push was Satyam's ability to raise funding on the back of his experience and the market opportunity. This episode is full of insights into how LoanTap has grown at such a fast pace.  

Anshoo Sharma joined Bain Consulting in Boston and cut his teeth in the world of management consulting. Anshoo moved to India when Bain opened an office and soon moved to the emerging world of Venture Capital. After watching startups rise and fall, he was itching to start one himself. He teamed up with one of his buddies and soon they launched Magic Pin in the world of Hyper-Local in the year 2015. Why is Magic Pin still standing where others have disappeared? Magic Pin's Anshoo Sharma and his team had a clear agenda and goal from the beginning. Their goal was to build a startup in the hyperlocal space. One that would help users and customers discover new and exciting places. Their scientific and growth-oriented approach is the key success ingredient. They launched a series of growth hacks that helped them gather accurate data that enabled them to drive traffic to offline stores. One of their first growth hacks - selfies in front of coffee day stores garnered 100K responses. Tasting first blood early, they went for the kill and methodically implemented their growth plan. Today, Magic Pin has emerged as an exciting player in the Hyper-Local space and one of the few in its categories to be standing. How did Magic Pin's Anshoo Sharma pull this off? What were their growth hacks and tactics? We go deep in this episode and bring it all to you on a platter

Jumbotail's Karthik Venkateswaran is an interesting man. He came from a middle class background and rose to the rank of a major in the Indian Army. After a decade of serving in the army, his heart bled for something else. That something else was a larger goal - a goal of makings people's lives better. Making people's lives better is a common thread we see across a variety of entrepreneurs who are working on goals and problems that are very large. Karthik wanted to work in India's large retail sector and on large problems but had no credibility. He chose to get some credibility since he had no entrepreneurial experience. He enrolled in Stanford where he met his future co-founder.  Organizing the $883 Billion Indian Retail sector made up of 12 Million Kirana stores was the target. Jumbotail today has outgrown its roots in Bangalore and is spreading its wings across the country. How big can it get? What were the initial challenges? This and more in this episode

Viraj Bahl of Veeba sauces is an interesting man. Upon graduation, his father told him that he would have to earn his way into a life of prosperity. His father told him that he would have to earn outside the family business. He would have to establish a basic lifestyle before participating in the family business. Once he established a basic lifestyle, his father was good for his word. Viraj joined the family business - Dr.Oetker's fun foods around the year 2003. Amidst the back of the IT Offshoring and India's decade of growth, Oetker took off. It became a massive success, and Viraj likes to quip that it succeeded despite him. His family business was sold and Viraj tried his hand at a restaurant chain which failed. Not one to stop at failure, Viraj set about starting up again. However, this time around, he was going to do something familiar with. Only, he was going to do it bigger and better. He founded Veeba. As he likes to say and we totally, the sauce is the unsung hero of the Indian palette, kitchen, dishes, and Indian cooking. Without the sauces, the dish is just a skeleton of things. The next time you try your favorite Bhel Puri or Chicken Tikka Masala - imagine the dish without the sauce, and you'll understand. Today, Veeba has grown into one of India's largest foods companies, especially in sauces. They have recreated every imaginable amazing flavor on the planet and brought it closer to us. How did Viraj Bahl of Veeba do it bigger and better? Where do new flavors come from? How do they bring out new sauces? What is their secret ingredient? It's all in this episode.    

Welcome to Season 2. After a rocking Season 1, we are back yet again with amazing speakers. In this Episode 1 of Season 2, we feature Amit Gupta of Yulu Bikes. Remember those cute small little bikes that we see in the central business districts of cities such as Bangalore, that's Yulu for you. Amit has seen a startup or two in his life. Amit was a founding team member of InMobi, one of India's lesser known Unicorns. At InMobi, not only was he instrumental in InMobi becoming a Unicorn, he eventually worked on Glance, which became a Unicorn created by another Unicorn. After an amazing ride, Amit decided to use his smarts and experience fixing India's urban transportation problem. He is making a dent or two in the problem. Another outstanding episode for you to listen. Listen, share and leave us a review wherever you get our podcasts.

Our Season Finale - Grand 50th Episode features Anupendra Sharma of the Startup Leadership Program. Today, Startup Leadership Program has grown to enable 4000 entrepreneurs who have raised $3.5 Billion in funding for 2000 ventures spread across 28 cities in 14 countries. Around the year 2006, two different types of people embarked on creating an organization that would enable entrepreneurship. One was Paul Graham of Y Combinator Fame and the other was Anupendra Sharma. While Y Combinator and Paul Graham have become famous and enabled the creation of billions of $ of wealth and transformed ventures, Anupendra Sharma built Startup Leadership Program from the shadows. This episode is all about how Anupendra built this with a frugal team of just 3 and yet created this massive impact.

Kinner is an unlikely entrepreneur from the likes of it. With a master’s in molecular biology, he jumped into management consulting. Along the way, he discovered that one of the challenges that enterprises and companies grappled with was making knowledge and learning available to their employees and team members. In the process of helping companies overcome this, Kinner saw an opportunity in making it easy for content creators to launch their academies online. Kinner's Knorish is right in the middle of perhaps the most massive remote working and learning wave we have seen to date. With the help of funnels and automation, Knorish has to date enabled more than 17000 academies to launch and go online. And this is just the beginning. How did Kinner and Knorish get here? It is all in this episode.

While on a vacation in Mexico, Sunil Patro, an IIT grad and a software engineer at Microsoft, got a call informing him about a job that he had been offered. All he needed to do was sign the acceptance letter and send it back. Simple right? Well not so much. It was like as if he was like stuck in a government office! The struggle in finding a printer, scanner and a fax machine made Sunil realize that this is a problem. This incident led Sunil to finally realize his life long dream of entrepreneurship.

Every year, Monica watches about 10,000 startups go thru the motions, highs and lows. She watches it from close quarters and gets to see varied practices from across the globe. She sees myths being broken and new models formed. She heads up the Wadhwani Foundation's NEN Program that focuses on teaching entrepreneurship to students. Monica is an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. Having started her own venture about 20 years ago and having spent time with the likes of Omdiyar Network, she has had a ring side view of everything related to starting up scaling and entrepreneurship. What does this vantage point offer her? How did her own experience of starting up shaped her perspective and much more in this episode

From dreaming of being an engineer to then being an entrepreneur, the story of Issac Wesley from Inkmonk is truly remarkable. Low scores in mathematics led this young tech enthusiast to take up a design course rather than engineering. Yet, it was Issac's father, an artist first and a printing guy second, who inspired him to start Inkmonk and the rest is history. Focused on small businesses who need printing of visiting cards, flyers, custom packaging, t-shirts, labels and stickers, Inkmonk has come a long way. Listen to Issac Wesley from Inkmonk talk about the art of scaling an E-Commerce platform, growth tactics, his entrepreneurial and personal journey, Printo acquisition and much more! This episode of the Maharajas of Scale Podcast is not one to be missed!

An engineer who had the desire to build something after attending the Stanford Insight Programme on entrepreneurship and leadership and here, she also met her Co-Founder Venkat, that is Neha Suyal for you. Her humble beginnings and what she has built, go hand in hand. Checking off entrepreneurship from her own bucketlist despite her simple background, Neha has built Woovly so as to bring together people of similar interests and goals. And thus share their experiences so as to help each other check off goals and ambitions from their bucketlists. How did they scale to more than a million bucket lists? It's here

Yogesh and Kulin can be called the Jai-Veeru of the Insurtech start-up space. The two met at ACKO, a private sector general insurance company. And since then, the two have a strong entrepreneurial bond which led them to start Onsurity in early 2020, with the primary goal being enable to allow SME’s to provide their employees with proper healthcare facilities. So In May 2020, Onsurity launched India's first healthcare membership. This runs on a monthly subscription, which enables SMEs to provide health care support to their employees. One, having spent 14 years working in the startup ecosystem and the other being the youngest one to clear the actuarial exam, this duo is the prefect combo. Listen to Yogesh and Kulin from Onsurity talk to Krishna Jonnakadla from Maharajas of Scale, about building and scaling an Insurtech startup, the challenges that come with it and much more on this episode of Maharajas of Scale Podcast.

Born in Abu Dhabi, then moving to Singapore, then to Malaysia and then back to India, Prateek Singh spent most of his childhood travelling. Prateek credits his dad for getting him into trading. This trading experience led him to write a blog called Market Scientists. Here he taught people how to trade. Post Market Scientists came an investing and stock trading education platform called Trade Academy. From here, Prateek talks about the many lessons that he learned from these ventures which eventually led him to start LearnApp. Prateek is a true example that shows with a whole lot of experience, comes a whole lot of wisdom. You don't want to miss out on this one!

Many pet parents have faced trouble finding the right product for their beloved pet, for example one might not be able to find a comfortable blanket, bed, toys etc for their pets, as each of them are very different from each other. One such pet parent is Rashi Narang who, not only solved this problem for her own pet only but found Heads Up For Tails which provides products to help build a deeper relationship between pets and the owners. Hear Rashi speak On Scaling with Unconditional Love for Pets.

The World of Start-ups is fraught with failure. It is estimated that only 1% of Start-ups succeed which means millions of start-ups fail. Yet, Ashish Kashyap's Story is an interesting one. From being Google India's First Country Head to Growing and Selling GoIbibo for a whopping $2 Billion, making it India's 2nd largest startup exit, Ashish's resume in the world of start-ups reads like a dream resume. He is a man with the Midas Touch! But here he is again teaming up with Amrita Sirohia to build IndWealth which has already notched up several early successes. Ashish knows a lot of secrets about building and scaling startups. Listen to this freewheeling episode on everything that he has done and how he succeeds again and again in a world of failure. Amrita talks about her experience and the lack of solid solutions in Wealth Management and how they are bridging it with IndWealth.

An IIT Rourkee Graduate, Ankit Garg found initial funding success with a product he created out of his laboratory. But having funding and a good product did not mean success. He realized that managing financial side of the startup had a role to play. He soon shut shop and was out of a job. This meant sleepless nights and sleep walking. Today, Ankit Garg has built a Rs.500 Crore Mattress Brand in Wakefit. Its ironical how he went from being sleepless to building a brand that would assure others a sound sleep at night. How did he go from being jobless and being sleepless to doing this? Its all here!

Ajay was a newly mined graduate at MuSigma, one of India's premier Unicorns in the data analytics space. On a fine day, while house hunting, he is bewildered by the commission the broker makes for the little value that he added. Unlike most renters, he feels that he is getting compensated disproportinately compared to the value he added. He takes a deep dive and 2 months later, quits his high paced and exciting job to found TheHouseMonk in 2014. TheHouseMonk currently has over 1000000 properties managed thru its product. They are pushing the levers of scale in the housing sector with their product. The journey thus far is interesting and full of ups and downs. A fascinating listen.

Ashish Singhal is a lifelong problem solver. Most people are consider working for a high powered Jeff Bezos team as their end "dream scenario". Not Ashish. Amazon was just his starting point. Having cut his teeth with Bezos Teams at Amazon, he went on to found Urban Tailor and eventually CoinSwitch with a vision to make Crypto Buying as simple as buying groceries. While discussing his story, he gives out a lot of secrets building user base of millions. If you know what secrets to look for, you will find them. DONT MISS THIS EPISODE.

Raghu was a network engineer working for a telecommunications networking firm. Network engineering can be exciting and yet boring at the same time depending upon which part of the industry you worked in. It was in this boring industry that Raghu had an epiphany to start a consumer oriented business and thus the business of home improvement was born. However, he soon left it for a lucrative career in freelancing making over US$200K in a single year and ended up traveling to more than 30 countries in that time while working as a freelancer. That is when he hit upon the idea of freeing blue blooded professionals to experience the same rewarding path he had taken thru CrewScale. But the path was anything but straight. How did he scale CrewScale to more than 60K freelancers around the world? It's all in here.

Some professions and roles evoke a feeling of exoticness in us. One such profession is that of a Marine Biologist. Aman was fascinated by it and became a Marine Engineer and even worked for the Merchant Navy but stagnated. He broke out and tried his hand at selling T-Shirts which kind of worked out but didn't scale. He tried his hand at propelling civil activism thru a platform called Write for India. Eventually, realizing that creating wealth is the best way to make impact in India, Aman Co-Founded HighApe. How did they survive the graveyard of event based startups and another startup graveyard called Covid? How did he make the transitions? It's all in here, in this episode!

Amit Mishra comes from the town of Amravathi in Maharashtra. Originally from a family of teachers, Amit grew up in the Slums of Amravati in whose schools generations of his ancestors as well as his parents taught. Forever taunted by his mother to do something vocational, Amit decides that he would do something that would outstrip everyone around him. From a life where he does all his schooling till 10th grade in Marathi and refuses to relocate overseas as he loves to live in India, Amit's down to earth attitude and dogged persistence in solving a problem has made iMocha a big success skill assessment. In a nation where skills are sold for a song, iMocha is a breath of fresh air. This is a heart warming story unlike any other.

While still in College, Vivek Khandelwal embarked on a journey of discovery with Jagriti a train journey unlike any other that takes young minds to see the best of entrepreneurship and innovation across India. This inspired him to become a creator and an entrepreneur. He shares how he and his co-founders have built a multi million $ SAAS business working with businesses across the Globe.

Rahul Prasad joined Brother Ankit and built Bobble, a keyboard company that helps Indian users express themselves in Indic languages using their key board. Bobble today has millions of users and thru their recent partnership with Xiaomi, will be loaded onto 30 Million Xiaomi devices but that is not how it all began. Rahul and Ankit want to make it The No.1 Keyboard in the World. Are we there yet? Listen on!

If you are an entrepreneur wanting to make a difference, the question is - what are the challenges in scaling a News Startup in India in the age of Sensationalism.  Anu and Dhimanth began The Better India as a blog, they have stayed true to their roots of bringing a balanced perspective and news about what is right about India. More than a decade later, their monthly audience has touched 70 million. This is their story of how they did it!

Abhishek Shah of Wellthy had an interesting upbringing. He was an engineer and had a scientific bent of mind. Having parents who were successful entrepreneurs, he had seen them run their ventures but existing care not catching up with their lifestyles. Working with Ronnie Screwvala and investing in startups gave him an outside in perspective on ventures. How did he combine the two to build and put Wellthy Therapeutics on the path to scale? That story is here!

Sanjeev Barnwal can come across our typical IIT Grad. Coming from the small town Jharkand where the dream is to crack IIT, he did not just that but went on to work for Sony in Japan. But a chance discussion with his old buddy led him to pursue entrepreneurship and found Meesho. And he has never looked back. Listen to this small town boy who is going places!

Gotama is a very unlikely entrepreneur. His father's career inspired him to tread a different path - one of Journalism, only to be later smitten by entrepreneurship early on. Gotama had a very different start. He tried his hand at a Quick Service Restaurants and a bakery. One failed to launch and the other succeeded but with a series of twists and turns that led him to launch and succeed with an IOT startup. Listen to him talk about How he launched and scaled an enterprise IOT with almost no sales or entrepreneur background? This story has it all!

PC Mustafa or PC as he prefers to be called had to walk miles to go to school. At a certain point, he considered dropping out as he was a below average student. He continued this streak of being a below average student into adulthood. Smitten by the IIM Campus in Bangalore and being unable to summon the courage to request the security guard to let him take a peek, he swore he would get in right royally. He eventually got into the hall of fame. Around the same time, he was throwing around ideas with his cousins in Bangalore to start something. One thing lead to another and they ended up starting a business manufacturing and distribution of Idly batter. But the road was not an easy one. How did PC overcome challenges and make ID the largest fresh food distributor in the world? This is the story

Akshay Chaturvedi's entrepreneurial journey is a story of humility and persistence.  An entrepreneur at heart, Akshay is excited about the impact a startup can have. He begins a venture putting students and mentors together. A few thousand downloads and a few months later, he realizes that he needs something much bigger. Something that will bring in revenues and is monetizable. He shuts down the venture and embarks on a journey of learning, working at Snapdeal and doing an MBA at ISB. In the process, he realizes that what he was personally doing - helping other potential students get into ISB could be the right angle to put on top of his erstwhile mentor network idea. He dives in and begins LeverageEdu and LeverageEdu picks off well garnering a lot of users in a matter of months. So much so that, when it comes to funding, he is in the position of choosing investment firms that match his value ethos to help him realize the larger goal of creating something big. What failures did he encounter on his first journey, how did he meet all of his awesome advisors and how does he see the education landscape? All in our episode. Fascinating listening!

Toilet - A Love story - but of a different kind. In the movie Toilet - Ek Prem Katha, Akshay Kumar builds a toilet for his wife who refuses to live with him because his home lacks a toilet. Deep Bajaj went a step further and helped millions of women. Deep realised on a road trip with pregnant wife the complications women face with personal hygiene and toilet cleanliness or the lack of toilets.  Deep's start-up Peebuddy and Sirona- hygiene products for women, was a result of several bad experiences all the women around him faced including his mother, wife & female friends. He did this by exiting his secure events career and helping his wife with stabilizing the business of making Handmade Carpets. Listen to Deep Bajaj explain his product development challenges and the thousand days scaling strategies for an innovative product designed to help women avoid dirty toilet seats.

An inventive young entrepreneur breaking the conventional myths of start-ups with his zealous attitude. On a journey to finding solutions and emerging trends, Nischal self-taught organic growth hack and founded start-ups that are today lashing definitions in the ecosystem. A passionate coder, realised his IT corporate job did not let him understand the impact he was making to the end-user.  This quickly lead to a career switch at BURRP - One of India's earliest restaurant discovery platforms. After learning the ropes of start-up Burrp, he launches CrowdFire which notches up millions of users. Using a simple formula called ETC, Nischal goes on to repeat his success of scaling at his next startup WazirX now owned by Binance, the world's most pre-eminent Crypto Organizations. What is ETC? What Growth Hacks did they apply? You definitely want to hear Nischal Shetty's insight and the start-up story that has an abundance of wisdom to offer.

Shrijay Seth came from a reputed business family that was into the business of offset printing for generations. He followed the trodden family path of acquiring a management degree from the US. However, working in the US for Legalzoom and his own inner entrepreneurial spirit prompted him to jump headlong into entrepreneurship. Most of us work at a job and imagine either changing jobs or growing in the same organization. Shrijay took the awesome things that Legalzoom stood for and set about to replicate the same for Indian entrepreneurs by founding and setting up LegalWiz on the path to scale. Four years hence and having served thousands of entrepreneurs, he still feels like he is just starting up. A tale full of humility and excitement. A great story!

Alex Lazarow comes from the small city of Winnipeg in Canada. Coming from this small town, having a first hand view of m-pesa's growth and working in Venture Capital with the likes of Omdiyar network gave him a perspective about startup playbooks. The strategies and tactics and playbooks that entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley employed fascinated. They fascinated him so much that he decided to dive deep and chronicle their stories. 200 interviews and numerous discussions later, this fructified into the book - Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs from Delhi to Detroit Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley. We are always interested in new scale play books that are taking the context around them and putting a startup on the path to scale. We are even more interested if they are from around the world where the context is varied and dynamic. Our hope is that some of those tactics become relevant to our entrepreneurs who are trying hard to scale their ventures in India. Listen on and read the book!

Anindita is a pragmatic entrepreneur. She loves to trek and travel and it was during her jaunt in the US that she thought about delivering Tasty and Healthy Breakfast options to Indians. When she looked around, she realized that there were hardly any Tasty and Healthy eating choices and she decided to jump head long into entrepreneurship along with her Sister Suhasini to start Yoga Bars. When they started, no one was making breakfast bars in India. And India's varied temperature conditions meant that recipes and manufacturing processes that worked overseas would not work in India. It was similar to what Sam Pitroda faced while designing telecom solutions for India. Anindita and her sister brought a pragmatic approach to figuring out how to make the bars, what to put in them and were also smart in taking advantage of the digital commerce trend to scale their reach. Even though she is not from an entrepreneurial family, it feels like she knows the basics and like a good startup, their focus and clarity has helped them scale to where they have. They are well positioned to scale further from here. Great story! Give it a listen!

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

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

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

There are dreamers, there are doers and then there are some who are dreamers who are also doers. Jimit Bagadiya of Social Pilot falls into the third category. Jimit had built a fairly successful IT services business which involved developing and maintaining programs, platforms, products and tools for Clients. Yet, he was hankering for more. Sooner or later, the treadmill nature of the IT services business gets to one running it. Many dream of building a product that would relieve them from the tyranny of the revolving door nature of revenues from IT services. Making the switch from being a services company to that of a product is fraught with failure and uncertainty. Yet, once the chasm is crossed, the going gets better. The IT services business on the other hand is the direct opposite of a product business. How did Jimit make switch from services to products successfully? What were the challenges he faced? How was the journey? Can Indian SaaS companies compete with the rest of the world? Is he out of the woods yet? In spite of having scaled, no. This and more was what he faced and that is what we cover in this episode. Give his story a listen!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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