Maharajas of Scale

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,...

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 ...

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-...

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 ...

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 ai...

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 w...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 Fa...

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 l...

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...

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 havin...

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, flyer...

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 goa...

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 hea...

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.

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