The One Percent Project- Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Resilience

My next guest on The One Percent Project is Ashwin Suresh. This is an intriguing conversation where Ashwin talks about how he went from being an investment banker on Wall Street to becoming a New Media entrepreneur and co-founding Pocket Aces and Loco.Pocket Aces is the production house behind the hugely successful web shows such as Little Things, What the Folks and Please Find Attached.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation, he talks about:His decision to move from Investment banking to building a career in New Media.How did he navigate through the media industry with no background and network?His first Angel Investor, Mohan and how he funded the whole seed round and kept himself invested even when Ashwin and his co-founder planned to pivot the business.Being venture-backed, at what point do you need to think about growth Vs profitability.How he decided to launch Loco, a gaming platform especially in a competitive ecosystem with multiple well-established players?Building a communityWhy is success your best teacher?Finding a product-market fit in the content industryBeing decisive as a founder

About Utsav Agarwal:My next guest on The One Percent Project is Utsav Agarwal. Utsav is an entrepreneur, a networker and a hustler. He kicked off his career in the music industry, managing Indian rock bands and went on to build a music app. Post his entrepreneurial stint, he joined Uber and launched it in eight Indian cities and Dhaka in Bangladesh, breaking all growth records. After Uber, he joined Glovo and launched it in nine Eastern European markets and built a team of 250+ people. Delivery Hero acquired Glovo for $2.6 billion. Utsav is now back to entrepreneurship, building Evenflow, a roll-up platform acquiring and scaling e-commerce businesses.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation, he talks about:His entrepreneurial journey and his learnings?His experience launching Uber in Dhaka;How did he land his Glovo offer and his framework for launching new markets?The power and technique of cold emailingWhy is he building Evenflow?

About Sabeer Bhatia:My next guest on The One Percent Project is Sabeer Bhatia. Sabeer is the co-founder of Hotmail.com and ShowReel. Sabeer and his co-founder started Hotmail with $300,000 and sold it to Microsoft for $400 million within two years. Sabeer believes the success of Hotmail or any startup lies in the core idea of the business and the problem it is solving.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation he talks about:How to validate a problem worth solving?Why is it essential for a consumer to connect emotionally to a product?Why was Hotmail a success?Why do we need ShowReel?Can founders outsource sales?

About Ravi Mehta:My next guest is Ravi Mehta. Ravi was the Chief Product Officer at Tinder, Product Director at Facebook, and VP of Consumer Product at Tripadvisor.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp GroupIn this conversation he talks about:What makes product development challenging and exciting?Mental and executional frameworks that Product Managers should develop?How can products managers make good decisions?Why difficulty in prioritisation is a strategy problem?Why have Tinder, Facebook, and TripAdvisor products stood the test of time, especially when hundreds of clones come to market every year?His views on the evolution of the Chinese tech product ecosystem in the last decade?Metaverse’s futureWhy do today's founders need to have a product orientation?Entertainment Value Curve: Netflix Vs Quibi

About Pramath Sinha:My next guest on The One Percent Project is Pramath Sinha. Pramath is an entrepreneur, educator and institution builder, having conceptualised and built hallmark educational institutes such as the Indian School of Business and Ashoka University. Now, he is on the journey of building Harappa Education- a platform that helps future leaders learn essential cognitive, social and behavioural skills.He has also founded the Vedica Scholars program for women and the Naropa Fellowship. He kicked off his career with McKinsey & Company, headed ABP media and founded the 9.9 Media group.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation he talks about:His journey to finding purpose;How he goes from an idea to execution;What does an Institution mean to him?Who are early adopters, and why are they unique?Building Harappa; andHis legacy and contribution to Hindi LiteratureSome Key Highlights:How to identify Purpose? I have realised that your Purpose doesn't grow on trees, nor is it buried somewhere for you to go on a treasure hunt and find it and dig it out for yourself. Your Purpose, you find by discovery. And to discover it, you have to try out different things. The more different things you try out, the more you realise what you don't like or what is not your Purpose. And somewhere, you hit upon things that seem like your Purpose. So you engage in that, and you stay with it for a long time, or you say, no, there's a slight variation on this that I want to do, and then that becomes your Purpose.How do you start as high as possible? Because the lower you start, the longer it takes to get to that high benchmark. And sometimes, you can never get there because the lower you start, the more you get stuck at that level. Quality doesn't scale. You have to set the quality bar from day one and then scale on quantity without diluting quality, but trying to scale quality is almost an impossible task.In taking the idea to execution- You can't execute it all yourself. So your real skill lies in identifying great people, setting the vision and a high bar. You have to hire a crack team of people and be uncompromising about it. 

About Pushkar Mukewar:My next guest on The One Percent Project is Pushkar Mukewar, Co-founder and CEO of Drip Capital. Pushkar kicked off his career at Capital One, went to work for Oliver Wyman and Saama Capital. He has a Masters from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Wharton School of Business.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation he talks about:His journey building Drip Capital, going from 0 to 2 billion dollars in transactions on the platform.Getting incubated by Y Combinator when Drip Capital was just two founders with just an idea.Scaling the business across three markets, building a team of 250+ employees, and raising 500M+ in venture funding.Key Take-Aways:Building a startup is about experimentation, understanding the customers’ pain points and launching something - failing quickly - launching again.Your success as a startup depends on how and why you uniquely solve your customer’s pain points.Scaling up a business is like building a scalable machine. You start with generalists who can do everything and bring in specialists who can build specific functions once the business scales.

About David Fallarme:My next guest on The One Percent Project is David Fallarme. Before joining On Deck as their Marketing Director, David was the head of marketing for Hubspot Asia. He has led the product and content marketing initiatives for Electronic Arts, App Annie and ReferralCandy. He also runs the APAC Marketers Roundtable, one of the most active communities of marketers in APAC.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation he talks about:What is marketing and the types of marketers?His content creation frameworkWhy should marketers focus on who should be buying vs who is already buying?How should early-stage founders think about marketing and marketers?How is marketing different in 2021 Vs a decade ago?How Hubspot's strategy may seem weird but it works?Zoom's and Afterpay's product-led growth through the pandemic.Why he joined On Deck, and how will it add value in Asia?Key Take-Aways:There are three types of marketers:  Artist: Marketing = winning hearts and minds.Soldier: Marketing = achieving objectives by working through the system and operational excellence.Gambler: Marketing = finding opportunities with an asymmetric upside.Marketers are multipliers. So if you're a pre-seed or a seed-stage start-up and don’t see a predictable level of traction and don't exactly know who your customer is, you are not ready for a marketer.In future, your social media audience size will be more important than your resume because your followership is an indicator of your influence. 

My next guest on The One Percent Project is Amit Garg. Amit is the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Tau Ventures, an AI-focused seed fund. He kicked off his career at Google and then went to work with Norwest Venture Partners and Samsung NEXT- Samsung's investment arm. He has also co-founded HealthIQ, which is valued at USD 450M. He did his bachelor's and masters from Stanford and MBA from Harvard Business School.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation, he talks about:How his professional and personal journey helped him as a venture capitalist?Why did he set up an AI-focused seed fund?What is his venture evaluation and investment framework?When should a founder consider raising from a VC?How should seed-stage founders build their teams?Why is bottom-up market sizing more insightful?His thinking behind investing in nuTonomy and Misfit.Key Take-Aways:Venture capital money is "Rocket Fuel". If you take rocket fuel too early, you will burn in the atmosphere before reaching the moon and the stars. It is not about 'WHAT' you do but about 'HOW' you do it. Team, Technology and Traction are the three most significant aspects a venture capitalist should look for while investing.

My next guest on The One Percent Project is the incredible engineer, inventor, investor and operator Miten Sampat. He kicked off his career in Silicon Valley, then headed strategy for Times Internet, India’s largest digital products company with 600 million monthly users and is now building CRED, one of India’s fastest growing payments apps. He is also a graduate of Virginia Tech.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation he talks about:How his education at Virginia Tech shaped his thinking in analysing and operating new ventures.His views about the Indian Internet Consumer and the impact of the internet in Tier-3 cities in India.His experience building his first startup: What he learnt and why it failed?His experience as Chief Strategy Officer at Times Internet which reaches 600M active users in India every month?What has he learnt from investing in early-stage startups?Key Take-Aways:Underlying conditions will keep changing so capabilities will keep changing and therefore, and user behaviour keeps changing- This is the fundamental principle in building and scaling new ventures.If there are many gatekeepers between you and your customer, the chances of mortality for your startup are very high.If you move when there is broad-based consensus, then the magic is already sucked out. It's already been priced in. Therefore, you have to be right about something ahead of it being a general consensus.

About Shravan Tickoo:My next guest on The One Percent Project is Shravan Tickoo. Shravan is a principal PM at BYJU'S-world’s most valued EdTech startup. Shravan kicked off his career as an entrepreneur by building an app while in college that went viral, and he landed up selling in 2012. Since then, he has worked across industries with India’s leading tech unicorns such as Flipkart, Blackbuck, Time Group and Edureka. He is also a product mentor, influencer and angel investor. Join our No-Spam WhatsApp groupIn this conversation he talks about:Why is it essential to think about product and product management in terms of first principles?How to create product defensibility through positioning?Why is engagement a critical aspect of product assessment and how to measure it?How is a product different from a service?Key Take-Aways:First principle thinking is about how you break down complex non-deterministic structures into deterministic structures that don't change with time.Engagement doesn't necessarily mean anybody coming into your product and doing anything. It is about doing the intended activity that you want the user to do because you believe that it is going to add the maximum value to the user.Product positioning is more critical for your success compared to the uniqueness of the idea. Product management is the art of problem-solving at scale.Accessibility differentiates good product managers from excellent ones.