SeedToScale | Curated by Accel

In this episode of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, Ashwin Damera, Co-founder of EdTech company Eruditus, speaks about the effect the 'founder-startup fit' has on scaling a company and the importance of a mentor. The #INSIGHTSPodcast series continues with Ashwin Damera, Co-founder of Eruditus, an EdTech company that makes Ivy League education affordable and accessible to the world. Eruditus offers a wide portfolio of customized and open programs delivered in India, Singapore, Dubai, and other global locations. It also runs Emeritus Institute of Management, which provides short-duration online courses. The company currently has 30,000 students across 85+ countries pursuing certificate courses, diplomas, or online degrees. In the podcast, Ashwin, who belongs to a South Indian family and was 'expected' to work for an MNC, talks about his journey into the world of startups. He recaps his college journey at Harvard Business School and how studying in Boston in an Ivy League institute changed his perspective about education and life. He also talks about the origin of Travelguru, his first startup, and the risks he endured to start the company and run it for five years before it was acquired by Travelocity. While every founder talks about product-market fit, Ashwin speaks about the 'founder-startup fit' and the radical importance it holds when it comes to scaling a company. "Somebody maybe very good at starting a company and taking it to $10 million in revenue, but from $10 million to $100 million, is that founder still a good fit for that company, at that stage?" Ashwin envisioned Eruditus as he firmly believes education is transformational. He credits it for teaching him to take the plunge and become an entrepreneur. With Eruditus and Emeritus, they decided to solve the problem of lack of high-quality education. "How many people from India, Southeast Asia, China, or Mexico can pack up their bags for two years, spend more than a crore, and get that education. In most cases, even though people want to, the schools only accept five-10 percent. Accessibility is a huge challenge. So, one of the things we set to do was solve this challenge," he says. As Eruditus scaled, Ashwin speaks about the launch of online programs through Emeritus and providing education that is completely opposite to the massive open online course (MOOC) model. He emphasizes on learning from their mistakes and understanding that classroom audience and online audience may not always demand the same product - in their case, courses. The path Eruditus took, in 2016, by accepting capital was completely different from the one they had previously travelled for five years as a bootstrapped startup. Ashwin tells us why capital was essential to grow and scale. As a founder, he also speaks about doing something you are passionate about, while also trying to find a big business space which allows you to launch a new S-curve every two years. Comparing travel to education, he explains why it is crucial to building a sustainable enterprise over the years. The team that builds a startup and the team that is helping it scale is extremely important, Ashwin says. He also emphasizes the importance of a mentor and the guiding angel they can be through this journey. On finding work-life balance, he says: "If you are running your startup as a marathon you will cover 24 km, but if you sprint you will cover 100 meters. To run it as a marathon, you need to have work-life balance." Tune in to listen to Ashwin share his knowledge about the startup culture and the exceptional growth of Emeritus in eight years.

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition, we have Ritesh Arora, Co-Founder and CEO of Browser Stack, a mobile and web testing platform. In this podcast you will hear about Ritesh’s journey as a young engineer how he pivoted through a few startup ideas before landing on the BrowserStack idea. And how he bootstrapped the startup to more than $20M in revenue - a humongous achievement for any founder. Ritesh comes from a family background in business, and always had an eye for venturing on the entrepreneurial journey. Teaming up with his roommate from IIT Bombay, Ritesh started his first startup in final year of college: building a product for sentiment analysis in 2005, which involved him picking up machine learning and natural language processing way before AI/ML became fashionable. “I read probably about every research paper published on the topic at that time, about 76 of them. Went through them multiple times and came up with our own algorithm.” Unable to come up with a go-to-market for the product, Ritesh and Nakul decided to take up jobs, but the desire to build something consumer-facing got them started soon on their second venture, in the space of information aggregation on the internet. This time around they were even able to gain traction, but monetization and identifying the right business model proved to be a challenge. Ritesh and Nakul spent a year brainstorming before stumbling on the problem that BrowserStack solves today, while consulting with companies that were seeking their help in building machine learning solutions. ‘Testing website on internet browsers’ was a challenge for thousands of developers globally and something that Ritesh and Nakul experienced first hand as developers . Ritesh and Nakul, set out to simplify the journey of developers by helping them test and debug their website on different browsers (mainly Internet Explorer at that time). The traction they got this time around was explosive, starting with 10K beta users in three weeks (thanks to John Resig’s tweet), moving to a paid offering soon that grew to $20K monthly revenues in about 4-5 months and $1M annual recurring revenue at the end of year one- all this when they were just a team of two, working out of a coffee shop in Mumbai! The focus on global market from day one helped them scale to $20M annual recurring revenue in a span of four years with just a 50 member team. They realised the need to scale up the organization to be able to sustain the growth and decided to get advisors on board who can help mentor the team in the right direction. The fund-raise for BrowserStack was more about finding the right partner than about raising money. Ritesh speaks about the value that a good investor brings on board especially in the scaling phase, because the founder is always doing it for the first time while the VCs have helped many such companies scale. Apart from talking about the journey of choosing the right investor, Ritesh shares learnings for younger entrepreneurs, from the early days and emphasizes on focussing towards solving large problems, getting feedback from customers, not solving for monetizing in early days and building a great product that makes the customer’s journey frictionless. “When your customers use your product, they should feel that it has changed their life” he says. Tune in to the podcast to hear Ritesh’s phenomenal journey which has become an epitome of bootstrapping your way to success.

On this edition of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, we have Rahul Pangam, Founder of Simility, a fraud prevention and risk management platform that was acquired by Paypal late last year. In this podcast, Rahul talks about his early days working at Google, how he met his co-founders, started off with a focus on building solutions for e-commerce companies, which became interesting enough to pique the interest of larger banks as well as Paypal. And of course, the entire phase of the exit. Building fraud detection and risk management systems at Google led him to the thesis that there would be a greater need for new ways of managing the risk of fraud as more and more businesses went digital and the conventional methods lost relevance. He found great complementary skill sets in his future Co-founders Kedar Samant and Uttam Phalnikar, with Rahul taking charge of the business and operations, Kedar leading data science and Uttam heading infrastructure and engineering. Rahul talks about the team's thought process at the time, saying, "We knew right off the bat that we were a self-contained unit that could build a POC (proof of concept) and sell the product. The three of us could build a company without needing a fourth person, for at least first 1.5–2 years" So, Simility started off with the vision of using the power of machine learning to detect and adapt to the constantly changing fraudster behaviour. They decided to first chase ecommerce companies, as they were the easiest with whom the team could build early traction. Moreover, e-commerce was a space that Simility understood better than banking or any other industry in terms of customer pain points. As Simility scaled, they hired sales, marketing, and user experience teams out of the US while the engineering and data analytics teams were based out of Hyderabad. This was possible thanks to Rahul's network from his days at Google and the incredible young tech talent present in the city who were excited about working for an enterprise startup. Simility's success with ecommerce players led to inbound interest from fintech players and banks who collaborated to customise the product for the banking industry. As Simility gained traction in the banking industry, investors began showing an interest. Accel, one of their early investors, helped connect Simility to Paypal, who saw great promise in Simility's technology. The road from Paypal's participation in Simility's Series B funding in December 2017 to the final offer of acquisition at $120 million less than a year later was full of twists and turns, but resulted in a happy ending for everyone involved - investors got a quick return at decent multiples and the folks at Simility found a new and equally loving home at Paypal. Tune in to the podcast to hear their story.

On this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we have our youngest guest so far, Farid Ahsan, Co-founder of ShareChat, the most popular company in the Indian languages, i.e. vernacular, space. It has over 100 million monthly active users, a feat that they have managed to achieve in less than four years. On this podcast, Farid talks about his early days at IIT, what motivated him to start up, how he and his co-founders came up with the idea for ShareChat, what has helped them scale, and his learnings from the journey so far. Growing up in six different cities because his father's job involved regular transfers, Farid became adept at adjusting to new environments and making new friends. At a very early age, he became cognizant of the differences and the commonalities between people of different cultures. He also began to understood the nuances that come with diversity, which lies at the core of ShareChat today. Farid jokes about the job prospects for his stream, Material Science, not being the best, which meant he had to look at investment banking, consulting, analytics, or joining an early-stage startup as possible career options. Farid did an internship in investment banking, which helped him understand the foundations that made a company successful, but he also realised that he wanted to become an entrepreneur. More on how that came about in the podcast. Farid sums up his learnings right in the early days in three simple points: It's not the idea that makes you win. Is your product a 'good to have' or a 'must have'? It's important to understand how big the opportunity is Executing your vision is key "A company is much more than a set of features or products, it is a way of building and solving problems," he says. He talks about how his team was able to implement some of these learnings. For instance, they shut down their initial venture, 'Opinio', a debate platform which they quickly realised was a 'good to have' product for a niche customer segment. Talking about how they stumbled on the idea for ShareChat, Farid shares the story of how his co-founder Ankush Sachdeva figured out an anomaly on Sachin Tendulkar's Facebook fan page, where a staggering 80,000 people shared their phone numbers so that they could get added to a WhatsApp group. Farid, Ankush and Bhanu Singh quickly wrote code to create 600 WhatsApp groups and decided to observe user behavior: why were they on WhatsApp, what their problems were, why did they share content on WhatsApp, what was the bragworthy proposition behind sharing content on WhatsApp…and more. This led them to the core idea that people wanted to find content, were not great at searching for what they wanted, their vocabulary was limited, and this audience was excited about the prospect of interacting with new people. "Group kisi ka bhi ho, dhamaka humara hi hoga, (IT doesn't matter whose group it is, we'll be the ones making waves)", he says, citing the common user mindset. For the new-age audience who communicate in their own language, the mobile phone with an internet connection has become the gateway to a new world outside their immediate social circle in the past few years. What the trio realised was that, all that this set of people wanted was a platform that helped them with discovery online - and this was what ShareChat was going to be. Given their success, the strategy has obviously paid off. But between then and now, the road has hardly been an easy one. Farid talks about these and other challenges further in the podcast: Hiring - who are the kind of people they bring on board and why The financial freedom that the ShareChat team has ShareChat's culture of innovation and experimentation (while keeping things efficient) Optimising the founders' bandwidth and helping each other grow He closes with his take on success and how it is achieved. Listen to the podcast for these and other insights.

In this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we have serial entrepreneur Meena Ganesh, Co-Founder and CEO of Portea Medical, the leading provider of in-home healthcare services in India. Meena has had an illustrious career spanning corporate and the startup world. We talk to her on what has helped her scale across these various environments. Growing up across the country owing to her father’s job in the Indian Railways, Meena believes her initial days of studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya served as a very good indoctrination, and helped shape how she treats people today. “Studying in a KV really makes you very egalitarian, and you learn to respect people from every background,” she says. Meena had always been a good student in school, and decided to pursue her undergraduate in physics with the intention of becoming a nuclear physicist, before realising that she was more of a generalist and didn’t have the mentality for research. She pursued a masters from IIM Calcutta and soon after graduation, married her classmate Ganesh. Growing up in an environment where the idea of women having careers was uncommon, the question of whether to continue a career after having children always lingered, But Meena was clear that there were no second thoughts about continuing her career: it was as important as family for her. Tutorvista reached a scale of managing 35 schools that housed a total of 35,000 students and was eventually acquired by Pearson. In 2013, Meena set out to look at different focus areas that offered the next big opportunity and felt there was a lot of disruption that could be done in the healthcare space. She observed that there had been a lot of investment in the healthcare provider space in the form of new categories: multispecialty, single specialty and quaternary care hospitals, but not a single well-known brand existed in the outside hospitals space that served as a partner for patients in their long-term healthcare journey. New to the healthcare sector, other than her experience of being a user while helping her father through his cancer treatment, Meena spent the first six months identifying market problems and realised the importance and need for an ecosystem in the continuum care space. Convincing hospitals to hand over their patients, convincing patients to adopt a traditionally unknown concept of healthcare delivery at home, and convincing medical professionals to see this as a legitimate career option were all challenges that Portea had to overcome to reach today’s scale of 4,000 medical staff on their platform across the country in over 16 locations. This need gap quantification, and aligning the opportunity with Portea’s capabilities proved crucial in its success. The visionary in Meena is evident as she shares the one question she’s constantly asking herself, “Does your solution make a big enough impact on people’s lives?” Summarising her learnings from a plethora of experiences, she says the willingness to shed your ego and learn from everybody, along with the ability to look at the 30,000 ft view as well as work with colleagues in doing ground-level work have been important in helping her scale. Meena’s advice to fellow women professionals is simple, “It is important to prioritise. Work towards making things work at home as well as career, but never second guess yourself. Be open to reach out to people in your circle and ask for help”.

We continue the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition, we have the ever-inspiring and charming Shradha Sharma, Founder & CEO of YourStory. In this podcast, we uncover Shradha’s journey from being a young girl from Patna to building the media powerhouse that YourStory has become today, with a team of 93 people, 80,000 stories published, 1 million subscribers and 20 million readers reached. Being on the other side of the hot seat for a change, Shradha reflects on her successes and how she scaled as a founder over the past decade. From starting off as an idea to tell positive stories (something that she saw was lacking, in her experience at established media houses) to reaching a stage where the Prime Minister called out to the nation’s youth to read YourStory for inspiration, it has been a long journey for Shradha, where staying true to the vision proved crucial. We get a peek into Shradha’s childhood: growing up in a family with four daughters and a son, raised alone by her mother while her father was away on work in the Merchant Navy. Shradha was a go-getter from the start and left no stone unturned to give her mother ample opportunities to be proud. She went on to major in History from St Stephen’s in Delhi, where she discovered her love for communication and writing, and also met the love of her life. Shradha did stints with The Times of India and CNBC in Mumbai and climbed the corporate ladder before finding her calling in sharing relatable stories of common people, which she felt needed to be celebrated. Shradha recalls the struggles in the early days – not just to convince investors that she was not building an NGO but also in getting friends to join her. She was ridiculed, everyone said it wasn’t going to work, but she always had the conviction. In fact, the constant undermining helped stoke a fire in her belly, she shares. “I chose to be the heroine of my story and not the victim. I used every stone thrown at me. I knew my business was not going to be an overnight success, and that it will take time to build. I wasn’t chasing big money or building a unicorn but drew joy from the work, it was what I loved doing.” Talking about lessons learnt on both professional and personal front, Shradha has creative acronyms MNM (Mind, Network, Market) and 3Ms (Meditation, Medication, Mentorship). She says it’s important for founders to control their “mind”, invest in building a network with a focus on ‘giving’, and for the market to align with you. She illustrates on how increasing digital penetration and the coolness quotient associated with starting up provided tailwinds to YourStory’s growth. At a personal level, Shradha has benefitted from both meditation and medication to overcome the agony of personal tragedies. She emphasises the importance of mentors and being open to asking for help from young and old alike. She laughingly points out that entrepreneurs become comfortable with being shameless in asking for help, thanks to the innumerable times they get no as an answer. Things change for the better, though, as one treads along the path to success, “Aaj kal toh mere acche din aaye hue hain (My good days are here!),” she jokes. Shradha adds that the ability to communicate well (storytelling) is extremely crucial while building for success and that the narrative should evolve as stakeholders change. She talks about how investors have been a positive force in her journey, helping her shape into a better CEO by ensuring for discipline, rigour and accountability. Just like any other founder, the journey has not been an easy one for Shradha and has involved making some hard decisions and surviving through tough times including those in personal life such as the unfortunate tragedy of losing her mother, who was a major source of inspiration.

In this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we are joined by Kunal Shah, Founder and CEO of Cred, and Founder and former CEO of Freecharge. Freecharge was part of the first wave of ecommerce startups in the country, along with the likes of Flipkart and Paytm. It was acquired for $450 million by Snapdeal in 2015, making it the biggest startup M&A in the Indian startup ecosystem at the time. In the podcast, Kunal starts off with talking about his early days, and how he started working at the early age of 15 to help his family tide over a financial crisis. He juggled a full-time job while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in philosophy (which he chose based on class timings given his work commitments) and some freelance work in the evening, making him financially independent at a very young age. He talks about his journey from a being a freelance designer and programmer to building a small SaaS company that pivoted many times to eventually become Freecharge. After the acquisition of Freecharge, Kunal had a couple of stints in investing, before deciding to start up again in 2018 with Cred. In true entrepreneurial spirit, Kunal jokes about how he has done almost everything under the sun - from selling music CDs and mehendi, to running a SaaS business and even a BPO company. He also had a laptop import business for a while before finding his calling with ecommerce. On how he achieved the product market fit for FreeCharge, Kunal says it started with the simple idea of offering a mobile top-up (which was the largest selling product at the time) free of charge to draw enough customers on the platform to potentially build a business. This was very much on the lines of the ‘loss leader strategy’ adopted by grocery stores to attract footfall. Kunal says he saw big opportunity in the mobile recharge space, which had a use case for 99 percent of the population who were on the verge of getting comfortable with online transactions, thanks to IRCTC. That, along with reduced interest among merchants who were selling mobile recharges offline due to diminishing margins, made it a no brainer for these transactions to move online. As Kunal puts it rather nicely, “I saw recharge as the gateway to a transacting India.” He calls himself a mediocre founder who found a great product market fit, and adds, “Terrible product market fits, even with the greatest founders, can never create value. Fighting headwinds never creates value, you only burn fuel.” In the podcast, Kunal also talks about how it is challenging to get investors and team members on board when dealing with original ideas that do not have any global models to serve as comparables. Interestingly, it is these original ideas that have disproportionate wealth creation opportunities. Kunal also gives the listeners a glimpse of the philosopher in him as he explains how platforms with a high frequency of transactions almost always win because the trust and habit built over many transactions enables such categories to expand faster in a mistrust democracy like India. He also speaks of his famous Delta 4 theory, which encapsulates the need for new products to create significant delta in value creation for the customer through superior product/ service experience, making the switch from old behaviour to new behaviour irreversible, instead of giving massive discounts to infuse the delta in value creation for customers which is not sustainable without systematic change in consumer behaviour . Answering a few questions from the audience, Kunal shares some words of wisdom for fellow entrepreneurs to succeed in a rapidly changing world. “Founders that try to fit in don’t raise the bar. So, if you want to be an outlier, don’t try to fit in.”

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition we have Girish Mathrubootham, Co-founder & CEO of Freshworks. Freshworks scaled from $1 million Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) to $100 million ARR in five years and two months, making it one of the fastest growing companies in the ecosystem, and one of the first VC backed software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in India to achieve this milestone. In this podcast, Anand and Girish discuss Girish's early life, and the series of events that led to starting Freshworks. They speak about how Girish's ability to translate even the most mundane stories, his product training, and focus on culture has helped build a successful organisation poised to grow even further. Girish talks about his upbringing, and about how he was an average student in school and college. But he really loved to learn; just not in a classroom environment. He attributes most of his learnings to after college as he could learn through practice, not confined to tests and a specific set of topics. Teaching is something close to his heart, and he is always looking for innovative ways to teach or communicate. This has honed his storytelling ability. His learnings from Zoho, and his ability to tell stories has helped him immensely as he scaled Freshworks. This is especially so when it comes to hiring (Helpdesk is very boring, he says), and selling his vision for the company to a new hire. His motto for fundraising is very simple and is something he's been meaning to tweet for a while: "Data is your enemy, story is your friend". Girish further delves into how he got into products at Zoho, and later how business models influence products and not vice versa. Company culture is very close to his heart - Happy "work" organisation is his motto, and he's always had an eye on how to build the organisation's culture. The importance of culture fits within your organisation, and gearing the organisation to stay true to its values is further highlighted. We end the podcast in true Girish fashion, discussing the next leg of growth for Freshworks - the jump to a $1billion business, and how he believes that Freshworks is not an aberration in the Indian product space but is just the beginning of India producing great global product startups, with a simple, yet intriguing story.

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast Series with a conversation on the evolving role of a Founder-CEO with Elad Gil, serial entrepreneur, investor and most recently, author of High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People. Elad Gil has had a lot of experience with super-high-growth startups, having grown Google from 1,500 people to 15,000 people in just over three years. Following the stint at Google, Elad started a company called Mixer Labs, where he expanded the team from 90 to 1,500 in just a couple of years. The firm was acquired by Twitter in just a few years. It was around this time that he started contemplating high growth and how to build a machine that can recruit 10 people a week instead of one person a month. What was supposed to be a blog post became a massively successful book. Elad is also involved as an operating executive, investor or advisor to private companies such as AirBnB, Coinbase, Gusto, Instacart, Optimizely, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, Wish, and Zenefits. In this podcast, we talk about the role of the startup CEO. Until very recently, the Founder was CEO only until they could get the company off the ground. After that, professional management took over. Mark Zuckerberg changed that, establishing a tradition where the Founder and CEO became the mainstay with a very strong executive team backing them. Elad tells us about the importance of the Founder-CEO, and the vision and entrepreneurial spirit they bring to the table. He also goes into greater detail about the evolving role of the CEO. While hard work is important for success, avoiding burn-out is even more critical. It is important for founders to take a break and make some time for themselves. Founders should focus on building relationships outside of work, because this will be their support system when they go through really hard times at work. The typical image of a Silicon Valley founder is that of an individual who works very hard. What we don't hear about is the vacations and breaks they take that allows them to push that hard. As startups scale, it is important for the CEO to play multiple roles, but it is even more critical for them to realise their weaknesses and hire for those positions. They also need to be willing and open to learn from the next level. The "growth mindset" is extremely important for founders to lead the company and make it a truly generational one. Learning from your peers, and being able to trust them with their work and letting go is key to taking the company to the next level each and every time.

In the first episode of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series for 2019, I had the pleasure of speaking to Binny Bansal – his first ever interview after his departure from Flipkart. The pace at which Flipkart scaled remains unparalleled in India – it inspires both envy and awe. The pitfalls of scaling too fast are well known but scale is what every startup aspires for. It’s what Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal wanted, and it’s what they achieved, that too in just a few short years. With scale comes having to let go – something that most entrepreneurs struggle with. It requires a level of trust that is not easy to give. But Flipkart wouldn’t have been what it is today if the founders hadn’t made that leap of faith. In this podcast, Binny takes us through his childhood growing up in Chandigarh and how that moulded him, his early interest in computers and how he was "lucky" to join the Computer Science Department at IIT Delhi. We get a glimpse of his life in IIT Delhi, his love for the "not so popular" courses and how a very unique set of circumstances had him meet Sachin, a year senior to him, as well as the woman he would marry. He talks about the businesses that he and Sachin considered going into before zeroing in on ecommerce. Coding was easy, convincing distributors to sign up with them was not. Binny also talks about why Flipkart bought Myntra (and the one reason they wouldn’t have done so). He’s candid about the acquisitions that didn’t work out. When it was time to plan the next leg of growth, what it took to decide to bring in the likes of Kalyan Krishnamurthy (now Flipkart CEO) and Ananth Narayanan (until recently CEO of Myntra). Binny also discusses his next venture and the role he plans to play in India’s startup ecosystem – one that was synonymous with Flipkart for the longest time.