SeedToScale | Curated by Accel

Podcasts have been one of the ways we try to bring out untold stories of startup founders. Continuing with this tradition, we at Accel are excited to introduce our new podcast mini-series: Untold Seed Stories. This new show aims to unravel the first 500 days of our founders’ startup journey — ranging from how they first conceived the idea and met their co-founders, to details of how they secured their first funding and challenges along the way. For the third podcast of our Untold Seed Stories, we chat with Sri Harsha Majety, Co-founder and CEO of Swiggy. (Bengaluru-based hyperlocal food delivery platform. Founded in 2014 by Harsha, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini, the startup now operates in more than 600 cities in India.

Most of our other podcasts are targeted towards early-stage founders looking to build and scale their companies. But now we are also launching a new podcast mini-series keeping in mind the founders of fast-growth companies. The Scale Playbook, as the name suggests, will help unravel the playbook of large startups for founders to understand how to solve scale challenges across different business functions like engineering, product, sales and strategy through candid conversations with specialists from some of the most successful startups in the ecosystem. A lot has always been said about secret sauces, key factors and the different drivers of value creation and growth to build any business. It’s a subject that has received a lot of attention over the last 30 years, that does not just confine to venture-backed or self-funded private companies but also public companies. For digital companies, in the recent past, Venture Capital firms around the world have started to observe this aspect closely. Including some analysis from within the Accel Community through the lens of digital companies, there are four key drivers that primarily contribute to value creation in a company. In our second episode, Ajay Sethi, Venture Partner at Accel takes us through these four key drivers. Over the years, Ajay has worked with most of our portfolio companies to help them achieve deliberate and sustainable growth. Listen now to learn how Scale, Habit, Brand and Network Effects can contribute to value creation in your company

Podcasts have been one of the ways we try to bring out untold stories of startup founders. Continuing with this tradition, we at Accel are excited to introduce our new podcast mini-series: Untold Seed Stories. This new show aims to unravel the first 500 days of our founders’ startup journey — ranging from how they first conceived the idea and met their co-founders, to details of how they secured their first funding and challenges along the way. For the second podcast of our Untold Seed Stories, we chat with Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Co-founder and CEO of Urban Company. (Gurugram-based home services marketplace that offers services in cleaning, painting, spa & beauty, plumbing, carpentry and so on.) Now having its centers in 22 cities across India, Singapore, UAE and Australia and Singapore, Urban Company boasts of 30,000+ service partners and more than 10,000 beauticians.

Most of our other podcasts are targeted towards early-stage founders looking to build and scale their companies. But now we are also launching a new podcast mini series keeping in mind the founders of fast-growth companies. The Scale Playbook, as the name suggests, will help unravel the playbook of large startups for founders to understand how to solve scale challenges across different business functions like engineering, product, sales and strategy through candid conversations with specialists from some of the most successful startups in the ecosystem. For our first episode we have two industry stalwarts from Flipkart — one of India’s largest ecommerce platforms. Jeyandran Venugopal is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Flipkart. He has previously led several engineering and product teams at Myntra, Yahoo and Amazon. Naren Ravula is the Vice President and Head of Strategy at Flipkart. He was leading product strategy and operations at Salesforce and NetApp previously. Today’s episode is focused on building a strong engineering team and strategy. We will also touch upon Flipkart’s Leap Accelerator program which is targeted towards early-stage founders.

Thiru is a serial entrepreneur in its truest sense. He founded six startups including a coaching academy and a Biryani cloud kitchen before he landed on Ninjacart - which, interestingly, isn’t the same business as it was initially perceived. Though the first six companies failed to take off, he did not give up and kept charging ahead with one idea after another. His attempt at building these companies came with its set of learnings but his biggest learning of building a large, fast-growing company was from his stint at TaxiForSure. “This is where I learnt how to build a culturally strong startup,” says Thiru about TaxiForSure. After the Ola acquisition, Thiru decided to revisit his last startup, Shout, which was initially a location-based social network app. He decided to convert it into a location-based e-commerce app which eventually became Ninjacart.

The 56th episode of the INSIGHTS podcast features Sairee Chahal, Founder and CEO of SHEROES- a social networking platform with over 20M women. Sairee is also an Aspen Fellow and serves on the board of Paytm Payments Bank. She has been an entrepreneur for 15+ years. In this episode, Sairee shares insights on building successful products around communitiesTo learn more about Sairee’s inspiring journey, tune in to the latest episode of the Insights Podcast by Accel.

In this episode, we hear from Vetri on what OKRs are, how they are different from other goal-setting frameworks, how businesses can go about adopting them, and some common challenges and pitfalls to be careful about.To learn more about how you can adopt OKRs as a powerful tool in your organization to increase alignment and engagement around achieving goals, tune in to the latest episode of the Insights Podcast by Accel.Listen hereSpotify                                             Soundcloud                                         Apple Podcasts

In today’s special episode of the INSIGHTS podcast on ‘student entrepreneurship’, we cover the journeys of two well-known founders in the startup community whose entrepreneurial journeys started right from their college days: Shashank Murali from Tapchief and Farid Ahsan from Sharechat.We hear from Shashank and Farid on their early life and college days, how they decided to take up entrepreneurship, how they arrived on the idea they went after, how they worked progressively to build their companies, and finally how they would do it differently if they were to do it all over again. Listen hereSpotify                Apple                                     

In this episode of the INSIGHTS podcast, we have with us Neeraj Arora, who played a pivotal role at WhatsApp as an early employee and then as the Chief Business Officer.  We hear from Neeraj on his early career days, non-obvious career moves, learnings from the WhatsApp journey, the multi-billion dollar Facebook- Whatsapp deal, his experiences from investing in India, and finally some advice for startup founders.Listen hereSpotify                                                        Apple                                            Soundcloud

Listen hereSpotify                                                        Apple                                            SoundcloudAnand and Sudheer give a glimpse into their respective startup journeys - skillsets they brought from their previous experiences, new challenges that they were not prepared for, and milestones that marked their journey. The podcast covers all the different phases of their journeys: from identifying the problem to go after and building the MVP to scaling the product, figuring out monetization, and solving for Sales GTM and funding.To learn more about what it takes to build scalable global SaaS companies out of India, tune in to the latest episode of the Insights Podcast by Accel Notes:04:24 – Early days of startup journey11:22 – Picking the right mountain and validating it (Vertical vs Horizontal SaaS)20:40 – Finding the first set of customers29:55 – Business model and monetizing34:55 – Funding the early phase: bootstrapping vs fundraising39:20 – Scaling up phase, expanding geographies48:30 – Advise for early-stage SaaS founders50:30 – Rapid Fire Round