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What VCs Really Fund: Rajiv Srivatsa (Antler India) on PMF, GTM & AI Disruption
138 Plays4 years ago
How did Rajiv Srivatsa go from building one of India’s most beloved furniture brands, Urban Ladder, to backing the next wave of founders at Antler India? In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, we explore his journey through IIT, Infosys, Yahoo, Urban Ladder, and finally into venture capital, while uncovering timeless lessons for entrepreneurs navigating India’s startup ecosystem.
Rajiv Srivatsa’s story is one of resilience, customer obsession, and reinvention. As the co-founder of Urban Ladder, he pioneered India’s online furniture revolution before steering the company through a brutal funding winter. Today, as Founding Partner of Antler India, Rajiv is betting early on founders building across AI, consumer, fintech, and deeptech. In this candid conversation with Akshay Datt, Rajiv reflects on his early failures, the product insights he carried from Yahoo, the hard pivots at Urban Ladder, and why India’s next unicorns will come from capital-efficient, contrarian founders. For anyone building, operating, or investing in India, this episode offers a masterclass in founder mindset and startup survival.
Key Highlights:
- How Rajiv built Urban Ladder into India’s top omni-channel furniture brand
- Lessons from steering a startup through India’s funding winter
- Why Antler India is betting big on AI and pre-seed founders
- Insights on product management, culture, and customer obsession
- The future of India’s startup ecosystem and Rajiv’s contrarian takes
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00:00 – Rajiv Srivatsa’s startup journey begins
05:15 – Lessons from IIT, Infosys & IIM Bangalore
12:40 – Yahoo years and the decline of a giant
19:10 – Founding Urban Ladder and scaling furniture e-commerce
27:45 – Surviving India’s funding winter & tough pivots
36:20 – Urban Ladder’s exit to Reliance Retail
43:05 – Launching Antler India and early bets on AI
51:50 – Future of Indian startups & Rajiv’s advice
Rajiv Srivatsa, Antler India, Urban Ladder, Akshay Datt, Founder Thesis Podcast, startup funding winter India, India VC ecosystem, AI startups India, consumer tech India, Indian unicorn stories, Urban Ladder Reliance acquisition, furniture e-commerce India, pre-seed VC India, Antler India investments, product management lessons Yahoo, capital efficient startups India, contrarian founder insights, Indian startup podcast, building unicorns in India, venture capital trends India
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Transcript
Introduction and Purpose of the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Take me on a tour, I'll take you on a tour. This could be a great intro. Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Saurabh and you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
Rajeev Srivatsa on Entrepreneurship Success and Failure
00:00:26
Speaker
Hey, I'm Rajeev. I'm a partner investor at Antlo India and I was one of the founders at Urban Ladder. Life is a wheel and success and failure are two parts of it. Where there is great success, great failure is also sure to follow. And the best entrepreneurs are people who embrace great failures because they realize that great success is not possible without it.
00:00:52
Speaker
Let this be the one thing you remember anything after listening to this insightful conversation between Akshay Tat and Rajiv Srivatsa, founder of Urban Ladder and partner at Antler VC. This conversation is insightful at multiple levels with a deep dive into what is customer obsession and how to build a business that earns customer love, the importance of focus, the theory of happiness and the funding treadmill.
00:01:18
Speaker
Listen on as Rajiv tells Akshay about his early years while growing up in Chennai.
Rajeev's Early Life and Educational Journey
00:01:31
Speaker
I'm originally from Chennai and pretty much the first, I would say almost 30 years of my life in Chennai. 2008 is when I moved to Bangalore. I had a one year journey in Zurich, Switzerland, where I realized why moving abroad and living abroad was such a knock for me. But pretty much outside of that in Chennai and Bangalore largely.
00:01:51
Speaker
And what was your family background like? Were they like in the sense or working? Oh, no, no. Very typical middle class salary employee background for whom education was sort of the elixir to get out of the lower middle class poverty like any other Indian family. So very conservative.
00:02:14
Speaker
What was your dad doing? He's a CA. He used to work as an accountant in a bunch of companies and then became head of finance for a bunch of companies. Today he still helps companies even at 67, 68. I don't think he will ever stop working. I think even my granddad worked at 85. So he used to take a bus and go do accounting. So my dad, my brother, all the CA's,
00:02:41
Speaker
I got the engineering and MBA route like my dad's brother. So why engineering? Like what made you want to follow that route? You come to Chennai, you do your schooling in 1995-96. I think it'll be hard to not because everyone either is an engineer or gets into medicine and you know literally becoming a doctor was like a very very rare event or
00:03:07
Speaker
or you become someone in the field of commerce, right? It's only these three. There's no other field. So, and, you know, somewhere it also makes, you know, you get good marks into engineering. So that's sort of at least the stupid perceptions in the 1990s. But yeah, so no specific reason, I guess, strong in math, reasonably okay in science, love computers. So I think it's sort of naturally went into the field of engineering.
00:03:33
Speaker
That must have been the era of the 386 and the 486. Yeah, I remember my first ever game, Carmen San Diego. It was my first game too, Carmen and Prince of Persia. Yeah, exactly, Prince of Persia.
00:03:49
Speaker
The first time I ever saw my own code show the output on the screen, I literally, it was orgasmic. So this was 10th grade. So I think that is when I fell in love with computers, 1994, to be precise. And then got a computer, I think, for myself in 1996, first year of college, maybe. And from then on, pretty much glued onto that device. Just when the device became a mobile phone, glued onto that device.
00:04:20
Speaker
And how would those four years for you at IIT? You must have been staying at home only, right? It wouldn't have been a hostile thing.
00:04:28
Speaker
So I did stay in the hostel actually only to play cricket because I was part of the IIT cricket team. And it was a very up and down journey. Honestly, the first time I think I saw failure right in front of me because I don't think I enjoyed it as much because I didn't do too well. And it sort of set the tone on just the way I deal with failures. I don't think I dealt with it so greatly in IIT, but
00:04:55
Speaker
Every other phase of life, I think I've always had a lot of wins, a lot of failures, and I think it sort of helped set the tone. But overall, I had a lot of fun because I had a great gang of people around me, my friends, and played a lot of cricket, somewhere, decided to just about study in the last year. I didn't do too much studies in the first three years, and finally got a reasonable enough grade. But it was a bunch of fun, a bunch of failures, and overall, nothing to complain.
Professional Growth: From Infosys to IIM Bangalore
00:05:23
Speaker
Failures in what sense? Like you're saying academically you were not in like the top 10 and all? Yeah. And that's it? Okay. Yeah, I was pretty much in school in CBSC, pretty much the topper in school in 10th and, you know, in 12th, but my IIT rank was not very great. And even in IIT, you know, I just didn't get good grades and sort of you suddenly start questioning because obviously, first of all, you're surrounded by a lot of smart people and to
00:05:48
Speaker
You also, you know, some of the subjects I loved, some of the subjects I hated, I just wanted to code always, but I didn't get into computer science. I got into naval architecture, right? So you're left wondering why on earth, you know, are you doing something?
00:06:03
Speaker
I think the good part is I think I was always a massive patriot and I was one of those rare ones who decided not to write GRE. In 2000, in the year 2000, literally I think 95% of my friends and I think it was a batch of around 350-400 people, I think 95% of the people wrote GRE and probably 75% went abroad.
00:06:24
Speaker
So to even take a call to not write GRE was sort of a very contra call and that sort of mini taking contra calls I think also started in IIT and actually wrote my IAM exams. I never prepared, went, wrote, cracked all the cat first round because in that year they actually changed the format of cat. So all those were prepared really well.
00:06:49
Speaker
royally screwed and those that didn't prepare but just went with a bit of you know some level of common sense I think did well but I again there you know the first round I cracked everything in the second round I flunked every single GDN interview right so you know the because you were an introvert or like what
00:07:09
Speaker
I was a big introvert. I was very comfortable with my own friends, but I was a massive introvert. And today, obviously, I am on the other spectrum, probably, in terms of people and speaking and stuff. But I think that transformation has happened probably post-double ladder. But I was quite an introvert at the time, very bad in communication. And I mean, very good in written communication. I got, I think, 92 in English and 10 standard, but very bad in oral communication at that time. I don't think I could speak a single sentence fully in English.
00:07:40
Speaker
And so I would say I think failure sort of, I think, was a trend that I loved. I think I talk about it far more openly today. And the good part is I still landed up in Infosys. And for me, anything to do with coding was a dream job. And at that time, to even crack Infosys at $2,00,000 a year salary was a great outcome in 2000.
00:08:06
Speaker
As I said, I think I did a lot of side hustles even in IIT. I used to learn coding and I did a bunch of stuff. I was just glued to the computer. The only thing I did well in IIT was the computer science course and my final year project where I had to code a ship's path on MATLAB, which is the software.
00:08:26
Speaker
I think I got a 10 on 10 on that in an eight credit course, and that set my grade also well. But I think overall, it was all about, I think, technology computers. And I actually wrote an Indian version of Carmen Sandiego on Visual Basic. And my entire set of friends in campus, my at least juniors and stuff, loved it. And I just used to develop a lot of apps and stuff at that time. So I landed up in Infosys right after IIT.
00:08:56
Speaker
How were those two years at Infosys like? It was quite outstanding. I just suddenly became this complete very, I won't say social, but I just came into my own. The whole failure of IIT versus, when I say failure, obviously, it's all relative. But that mixed bag of IIT and then Infosys was just a complete other spectrum. I developed the largest
00:09:23
Speaker
website, personal website, inside Infosys. I used to get what, you know, I used to get 1000 active, daily active users at that time. I had like a massive collection of songs and downloads and I don't know what not. And I developed all of this was like on the internet or something like that.
00:09:40
Speaker
Yeah, so Infosys, you know, obviously you do your own work and I love the work itself in terms of, you know, I did a bunch of projects for Boeing and Amex and a company at that point in time called Greenpoint Mortgage and 3Com. I even was one of the first ones to go on site even in the second year. This was all in 2001, 2002. Humongous set of friends, a lot of fun we had, you know, the Infosys gang. I still am friends with a lot of people there.
00:10:08
Speaker
and developed my personal website and really, you know, crank that up in terms of, you know, literally everyone in Infosys Chennai used to come to that website every day and was doing very well at work. So literally the polar opposite end of the spectrum and Infosys was sort of set the tone for
00:10:28
Speaker
pretty much the rest of my life, you know, understanding what company culture could be when you get so many people together, you know, what is entrepreneurship, what is, you know, what is just taking up a notch on everything that you do. And the kind of people that I interacted, I have to thank Infosys a lot on some of those groundings. So why did you not want to like
00:10:50
Speaker
be a career emphasis man. Why did you want to move out and do the MBA thing? Funnily, in hindsight, if you look at it in the last 20 years, everything for me, I think there's a four to five year time in which I either have to question myself whether this is what it is or
00:11:08
Speaker
I start getting bored if there's not something new. That didn't happen in Infosys. Doing an MBA, I had given CAT, I didn't clear it in 2000 and was always just on the anvil. I thought, okay, two years was a good time, so let me again retry the CAT. This time, I again gave the CAT. The only difference, I had just come back from onsite and I didn't prepare as much for the CAT again.
00:11:33
Speaker
But lesson learned from the previous time, I again cleared I think four out of the six irons at that time. And this time I said, OK, let me prepare properly. I suck at something. Let me just go prepare. I went to one of those coaching institutions. I think it was time. I went for a one week course on
00:11:50
Speaker
handling group discussions and interviews. And it was, I think for me, my role model, even within the family was my dad's brother. He did his engineering from CIT and he did his MBA from I am Ahmedabad, very celebrated. He went on to become the CEO of one of the biggest, he was the CEO of KevinCare. His birthday is one day before mine. So it was like, okay, if Ramesh Peripa, which is Ramesh uncle did this, okay, this is the path that I also have to follow. So,
00:12:18
Speaker
IAM was just, you know, sort of IIT IAM, you know, I was at that time for sure, you know, behind brand names and, you know, it became very obvious that I had to go crack IAM and it, you know, it worked out well. Two years may, you know, that work experience also gave me the confidence. I was slightly better off on communication.
00:12:39
Speaker
I cleared IMB and landed up at Bangalore. I think just the confidence in Infosys probably had a great thing to do with respect to getting into IM. For me, I always was a jack of all trades in terms of just overall in life right at school to
00:12:58
Speaker
Loved a variety of things. I was never the all-work, no-play guy. So it just made sense to get into an MBA. And though I do regret stopping coding in 2003, right after getting to maybe during IIM, I coded last. After 2004, I have never coded in life. But that's my one small regret. But otherwise, going for an MBA in IIM made a lot of sense. So was it a better experience than the four years at IIT?
00:13:26
Speaker
IMB probably was the best two years of my life. If I said in Infosys I came on to my own, I think in IMB I came on to my own power, I don't know, 10 or something like that.
00:13:40
Speaker
I ended up with a gold medal for the best all-round student and stuff out of a batch of 200 people. And that was sort of the outcome of a lot of massive learning, massive fun. I just was part of every single club. I created the intranet. I literally coded it, named it.
00:14:00
Speaker
developed it, made it popular, it still exists even today. And I think just overall, you know, I was part of every single placement community, not just me, a bunch of seven, eight close friends, including, you know, my co-founder at Urban Ladder, I think seven, eight of us were part of placements, cultural fest, management fest, you name it, we would be there, right, in terms of making sure and we
00:14:25
Speaker
I would say it was also the outcomes in terms of I think we moved everything up a notch in terms of, for example, the Management Fest till the previous year had run on a budget of 1 lakh. It had nothing. And in the year we ran the Management Fest, we moved the budget up to 15 lakhs.
00:14:41
Speaker
we had Siddhartha Basu for the quiz, we had P. Chidambaram for one of the sessions and we had C.K. Prahalat for the opening ceremony, right? So it was like a massive, you know, just move everything up a scale and that's when I actually felt the, you know, while Infosys had sort of started it, you know, the whole part of power of technology on everyday life and making sure that, you know, how it can actually impact
00:15:11
Speaker
I would say users and leaving a legacy and institutions and also working with so many people being front and center of, you know, sort of championing, you know, and, you know, we sort of in IMB in our year, we had had an unfortunate incident. And I think that sort of made a lot of us become very different in our first year. So one of our, you know, batch mates are actually committed suicide and
00:15:36
Speaker
That I think had impacted a lot of our, just a bunch of us in the way we lived life. And this was after the first semester where I don't think I was very social and stuff. And somewhere I think that had a very deep impact on many of us. He was not very social. He was a very good student in his undergrad. For some reason, he didn't do well. I think at least personally for me, it just changed the way I looked at just everything about making friends and networking and just
00:16:05
Speaker
That's something that I certainly made sure that even our junior batch, I would know every single person in my senior batch and my batch and my junior batch, I would know by first name, right?
00:16:16
Speaker
And when I say I also mean a bunch of us, it's not just me, but I think a bunch of us just put together and made sure that people were really helped across batches. And I think the camaraderie and that network even still stands today. Some of my biggest friends are still from that IMB, 2000 to 2004. And yeah, that was a life-changing two years.
00:16:41
Speaker
Hmm, okay, okay. And where did you join from campus then?
Career Decisions: From Cognizant to Yahoo
00:16:46
Speaker
I went to Cognizant because I figured that I did my summers in Britannia, great company, lovely industry. I wanted to try something else. I think finance for me was well left outside the off stem. Don't ask me now, how did I become an investor? I'll come to that later. But in campus, certainly, I realized very soon that certainly I'm not going anywhere near investment banking and finance and economics and stuff. I did my summers in marketing just to figure out if that was something that I would love.
00:17:14
Speaker
Two months of Hyderabad heat in summer made me realize that I was not geared for selling biscuits or soap or shampoo. And that left me pretty much with my de facto option, which is to go back to technology. 2004, of course, internet and product companies were all not yet popular. I did try. I did cold, mail, Microsoft. And I don't think Yahoo was that big at that time. I think I tried to get into someone.
00:17:40
Speaker
It was just not happening. So I landed up at the next best, which was the services companies and a service company that had importance for MBAs. So Cognizant really stood out at that time for giving importance to MBAs as sort of a stream of work. And I went to Cognizant for the next four years. And that's what I would say was sort of the end outcome after IMB in terms of placement.
00:18:04
Speaker
Okay and in Cognizant is where you also lived a year abroad and also how was I mean you know what did you learn in that stint at Cognizant? I learned in Cognizant that I sucked at enterprise selling and you know and my heart was in the internet right because Infosys and IMB I was still doing a lot of stuff you know on the you know on websites and development hands-on
00:18:30
Speaker
2004 to 2008, I loved Cognizant. I think some of my closest friends again are from Cognizant. I loved the people. I loved the company itself. I think it was great grounding. Again, a lot of confidence building for me. I wrote a blog inside. I started actually writing inside Cognizant.
00:18:49
Speaker
And someone encouraged me to write a blog. That blog went up all the way to the CEO, Francisco. And Francisco called me all the way to Florida to present that entire thing to the entire leadership team. So it was sort of a massive, very tangential thing again.
00:19:10
Speaker
Cognizant in two years, I love doing requirements gathering. That is something that I really like. But if you're offshore in Cognizant, you sort of either have to end up travelling a lot on short-term projects, which while I liked, I was not too gung-ho about that, or you'll end up managing people and ending up in delivery, which again, I was not kicked about after MBA.
00:19:34
Speaker
So the natural choice that existed was to go abroad and become a client partner or engage with clients and do the wine dine and sell enterprise products. I said, let me not go to the US and UK, which is what every other human being was doing. Let me go to some other more sophisticated or different locations. So I chose and I had the opportunity to go to Switzerland of all the places.
00:19:57
Speaker
So I went to Zurich and that one year was a bit of a disaster for a variety of reasons. One is I think I was a bit too uptight, never sort of gelled in with the culture and really, you know, and selling enterprise to European clients without the language, without the culture.
00:20:15
Speaker
I was not a wind die and I was a complete teetotaler then and I just could not fit into the scheme of things. Very conservative, Tamil boy suddenly landing up in Zurich trying to sell to enterprise clients. Not happening, didn't enjoy life, didn't enjoy work.
00:20:34
Speaker
And as I said, I think my heart was in the internet. And at that time, you know, I think the likes of, I would say Flipkart and everyone was just about starting and really said, okay, let me just, you know, I don't like the location. I mean, Switzerland was great for touring for two weeks, but it was pretty depressing, especially in winter to live without a network and said, let's get the hell out of Switzerland and let's get back to India.
00:21:01
Speaker
That's when I sort of moved to Bangalore. As I said, again, cognizant, a lot to learn, selling enterprise. Some of those still I help. It helps me when I look at SaaS companies or just looking at SaaS as a field, but certainly not where my heart was. And internet is where it had to be.
00:21:21
Speaker
So interviewed with a bunch of companies. Thankfully, you know, I landed up with Yahoo. I actually flew down from Zurich for a week and did a bunch of interviews over one full day, some eight, nine interviews, five, six phone conversations, five, six interviews at Yahoo's office, UBCT in Bangalore. And the Yahoo team like me, I love Yahoo. And then that's when I landed up in Yahoo in 2008 in Bangalore.
00:21:45
Speaker
So you landed up there as a product manager. Did Yahoo do product in India or was it all like coming from Silicon Valley? So finally Yahoo was one of the few companies that actually did product in India. And that was one reason I think I was lucky to sort of get into Yahoo compared to other companies where you were just sort of either doing the back end work or just not having enough of a say. And even with Yahoo, I landed up in a team which was building for India in the emerging markets. All of the four years that I built products for India.
00:22:16
Speaker
And that was something that was just a lucky break, because to come from the enterprise world, it was purely out of passion. And I think four years again at Yahoo! was phenomenal in terms of, I think one thing that's been consistent across my entire 25 years post-school, and even in school, funnily, we reconnected with school friends way later, four years back. And that's when I actually established far deeper bonds with the people.
00:22:43
Speaker
Yahoo was also fantastic in terms of the people. Some of these are friends for life and a lot of learning. I think Yahoo completely changed my sort of one-on-one learning on internet and product management, working with super smart UX designers, engineers, product engineers, very different breed from service engineers.
00:23:02
Speaker
Even interactions internationally, in terms of Yahoo globally, the CEO, Jerry Yang, likes of people that Yahoo had, the kind of smartness both in product and engineering, those four years were just phenomenal in terms of learning.
00:23:20
Speaker
We were also building for India. So a bunch of stuff. I used to handle all of Yahoo India's media products for the first two years. So Yahoo India News, Movies, Cricket, Finance relaunched that, the first version of Yahoo India's ICC partnership with the 2009 World Cup. So imagine you're watching cricket for a job. And that was like anyone's dream job. You're building sort of product.
00:23:45
Speaker
We are sort of interacting, making sure the traffic was great. And Yahoo was number one in the 2008, 9, 10 time period, even in the 11, 12, 13 time period for a lot of media on all of these.
00:24:00
Speaker
today, maybe Times of India or ESPN Quick Info is. And it used to be a, even at that time, a head-to-head between us and Quick Info. And there were months where we were number one, there were months where ESPN was number one. So it was a pretty interesting and a lot of one-on-one ground-up development on everything from scorecards to
00:24:20
Speaker
very interesting experiences on series and inline videos. We were one of the first ones to actually have, as you see the commentary, you sort of get false only that we get video right on the second ball or a boundaries video so that you don't have to watch the full live. And so some interesting stuff we did on the video platform. And these are all the desktop days, of course.
00:24:45
Speaker
And I would say again there, I think failure also, as I said, across my life has sort of been along in terms of there will always be in one big win and one big failure, one big win, one big failure. And that sort of at least made me realize that the equanimity of life sort of comes along across everything that you do. So don't be, you know, celebrate if you do something good.
00:25:07
Speaker
What was the big failure at Yahoo? Sure. I think the big success in terms of I think 2010, 2011, we got the number one on a lot of websites. And I would say the CEO called us. We were right in San Francisco flying business class to receive an award from the CEO Carol Bartz of that union.
00:25:29
Speaker
for the best product or the best project, me and my counterpart on the engineering side. And then the good part for me is I just don't like, I mean, I could have just continued on, handled more media products, just done that, handled the 2011 World Cup, which India eventually ended up winning. But actually in 2010, and I decided, okay, let me do something new. I started Yahoo India Education.
00:25:54
Speaker
Complete ground-up development and launched that in 2011. Very one-on-one, a lot of user research. And that, I would say, was the best experience to do something like urban ladder in terms of understanding as to what it meant to do something ground up. Did that against, there's a lot of backers. There's a lot of haters. When I say haters, a bunch of teams didn't care about it. A bunch of teams wanted it.
00:26:20
Speaker
We got the product up. We got the content up. We were even number two, number three. Was it an LMS-based approach, or was it just content that you can consume as you want? So it was actually content on colleges, content on which careers, content on what you would do next for people who are just passing out of school. And that sort of after a lot of competition analysis, what the market needed, user research, all of that stuff, it came up to that. This was the most important thing.
00:26:49
Speaker
We had a complete empty canvas. We could have developed anything. But also saw the challenges of when, let's say, the region doesn't subscribe to something. It's a very matrix organization, Yahoo is. Or when it is not really tied in into the core media advertising business, you don't get the same kind of backing that might be required. So a lot of challenges, a lot of wins also. We were number one in Comscore, the rating agency, for quite a bit.
00:27:16
Speaker
Finally, the product obviously ended up getting shut down after I left, but really the ups and downs started with that, right? The win was certainly not of the order of Yahoo India Cricket. And the same with my next, just before I left, the last thing that I did was a celebrity-focused site called Yahoo Stars. It was an iPad experience, an iPad-first experience, and it was a very interesting
00:27:42
Speaker
product. Again that also got shut down a year after I left and that was done in a rapid six month development cycle along with engineers from China. It was sort of a joint development between Yahoo India and Yahoo China or Yahoo Taiwan if I'm not mistaken and it was again something very different, very new, very risky. Didn't know whether the region really wanted it. There was a lot of pros, a lot of cons but
00:28:09
Speaker
Honestly, at the end of the day, I started doing more presentations to justify the product rather than product. And when you do that for a while in a corporate, it starts getting to you. And that's what made me realize that maybe I should go do something of my own. So I think every sort of failure point also gives you the energy and the risk to go to something next. I mean, there are so many people who have been in companies, of course, doing well, 15 years, 20 years.
00:28:36
Speaker
But I just don't think it's a life fully lived, right? You don't experience different cultures. You don't go create something interesting. You don't get a flavor of the world and different people. You just get into your comfort zone. And for me, that was just not me. Every four years, I just needed something different. So yeah, so that's sort of what ended up happening.
00:28:58
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders, then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts, and subscribe to the show. You know, while you were at Yahoo, did you form any opinions as to why Yahoo did not
00:29:28
Speaker
I mean, why did it eventually like, you know, die down? Why didn't it like, you know, Microsoft, for example, is older than Yahoo and continues to grow even today. Why didn't Yahoo go that way? Why did it kind of, you know, wasn't the culture or what was it?
00:29:47
Speaker
It was very simple. There was always a confusion between whether I'd be a media company or I'd be a technology company. There was a push and pull and that confusion led to, I would say, one reason for the close to death of Yahoo. The second was missed the boat on mobile. The third was missed the boat on everything else also, which is social.
00:30:10
Speaker
And that's it. I mean, you miss these two, three big boards. You're not going to obviously end up being someone meaningful, right? It's sort of literally two, three different things are just lack of clear focus and most startups, most big companies, I think, fail due to lack of focus or lack of experimentation, right?
00:30:33
Speaker
And it's on two different spectrums. So I would say experimentation boldly. I don't think they did enough of that and focus on its core. I don't think Yahoo did enough of that. But it was also not clear what the core is, like whether the core is media.
00:30:48
Speaker
Yahoo still had a lot of great talent. I think the culture was fantastic in terms of just developing stuff and engineers really wanted to do stuff. So I wouldn't sort of call that upon as much as, and again, this is all very easy to say in hindsight because you have a 10 year, 20 year thing and now I can say as to why that happened. At that time, I don't think anyone.
00:31:10
Speaker
I mean, if someone knew it, I think they would have done it, right? So it was not for want of trying, it just different, you know, different things happen, leadership changes and all of that stuff. But anyway, yeah. Okay. Okay. So when you decided that you've had enough at Yahoo, so
00:31:27
Speaker
But tell me about that journey from quitting Yahoo to launching one ladder.
The Birth of Urban Ladder: Challenges and Focus
00:31:34
Speaker
Did you have a clear idea that what is it you want to do next or you took your time to figure out and then what was that journey like?
00:31:43
Speaker
So somewhere around 2011, middle is when I started thinking, okay, something needs to happen. And then coincidentally in a car conversation with Ashish, he brought up that, you know, Ashish right after IMB, we used to do literally everything together in campus. And he was my next door neighbor also. So he went to Mackenzie and he went to Amachitrakatta.
00:32:05
Speaker
2011, middle-end, he was also thinking of moving out. I had had talks with a bunch of friends, explored some start-ups. I actually interviewed with Flipkart around August 2011 and I was sort of ready to leave. I still remember when I talked to Bini also, I told Bini, he interviewed me, Sachin interviewed me. And Vaibhav Gupta, who's sort of the founder of Udon, he had just joined as the head of product then.
00:32:33
Speaker
He also interviewed me and I was just, you know, we were just talking about Flipkart. I had gotten an offer from some other company in Bombay, again, very respected founder. And so I was like, okay, I have to do something startup-ish. Then the thought occurred as to why should I do this logical thing of moving from a big company to a startup and then do my own startup? Let me
00:32:55
Speaker
why not just skip one step and really start up. And that coincidentally, I was talking to Ashish around August September of 2011, right around the time I had to either confirm or go ahead with the process of one of these guys.
00:33:13
Speaker
And one thing led to the other. We said in a call conversation in Indranagar in Bangalore, which is going for dinner, I think one of those days, we both stayed in the same apartment complex. And we used to meet literally every other weekend. But let's do something. And one thing led to the other. And in a month, we said, OK, let's do. Funnily, the first idea was online grocery.
00:33:32
Speaker
And that was September 2011. I think in one month of doing some customer research, I think the first VC we talked to was Kanwal from Helion at that time and Fireside Now. And we decided, OK, it was not going to be grocery. I don't think we found grocery. Well, grocery, the market size was big end.
00:33:57
Speaker
Obviously, a big customer problem. We just didn't feel passionate about it. So after a month or so, I think we dropped that idea. We then branched into, let's do something in the field of Gurme food. We even named, funnily, that company that we named in Gurme was Kornladder, C-O-R-N-L-A-D-D-E-R.
00:34:17
Speaker
and the word ladder sort of carried on from there. We even got the domain and you know then we realized okay Gurme was interesting but people not too many people want to really cook Gurme and too the market size was so small that if you're spending 10 years of our life on something let's not do something where the market is so small. So we dropped the Gurme food idea in October of 2011.
00:34:38
Speaker
So October 2011, we had all the startup energy. I had said no to the joining another startup. And I was inching to get away from Yahoo, but we had no idea. So then we went through all the different spaces that we were either passionate about or where the need was from education to energy to electric vehicles to
00:35:02
Speaker
It would be that one space I would not be interested or one space he would not be interested or one space could just not be monetized, right? For example, both of us had a background in digital media, but we knew at that time digital media was, you know, it is a very hits and misses game cricket and Bollywood control everything and Google and Facebook were maybe $100 million companies at that time.
00:35:21
Speaker
Facebook, I don't even think, has started monetizing. But the whole of media was only $4-5 billion at that time. And we said, let's not. What's the point of, again, if the market size is only and it's growing 35% or so, today maybe that's $12-13 billion. But we said, let's not play in such a small market. So I think we came by elimination. We landed up at commerce, again, as probably the only place that we should play on.
00:35:47
Speaker
Then I think this was already October, November. Then we said, let's do something for women as a consumer. And that's the first time we ended up meeting Vani Kola from Kalari, who ended up becoming our first investor. We sort of brainstormed. She said, hey, everything women is just too wide. Let's just, why don't you focus on one category? Then we said, OK, maybe it's fashion. She said, what were you getting? Mitra is already doing it.
00:36:15
Speaker
There are enough people. So then we said, OK, maybe that's home. And maybe that's sort of generic enough that we understand. And around November, December is when we realized, OK, maybe it was home. We sort of very logically came to that, that that's probably a sector which is going to come in last. We were still very skeptical. So we said, maybe it is home decor, because I don't think anyone is going to buy furniture online.
00:36:40
Speaker
And then one thing led to the other. I think we did a bunch of user research. And I was still in Yahoo. Ashish had just moved out of Amar Chitrakata, which was getting acquired by Kishore Byani's group. And then he started spending more time in December, January, January of 2012.
00:36:56
Speaker
and figured that furniture and he and both of us finally had had this problem a year back when we were moving into you know we used to stay in Marthali in Bangalore when we were moving in in 2010 2011 into our houses we had this problem we had jokingly said let's do something in furniture you know no one who's giving a good product but we had said who are we kidding no one is going to buy furniture online
00:37:19
Speaker
and sort of dropped that idea after, let's say, maybe one conversation. But 2011 end, we were again coming back to, hey, maybe that is the space that needs some level of disruption. And one, obviously by elimination, and two, by some level of consumer analysis. And then we talked to, I would say, around 1,500 people. Every single one of them had ratified that need in terms of
00:37:48
Speaker
in terms of having that consumer need. So I think that was something that certainly told us that, hey, this is not just a need for the two of us from 2010, 2011. It was a reasonably unanimous consumer need. And we got serious about it towards the fag end of 2011, December, I would say. And then we brainstormed on the name, I think, December 26, 27. We stuck onto the word ladder, and then we added urban.
00:38:17
Speaker
And I think we just got the domain that we got for $4.99, where Facebook and Twitter was available. And I think December 29 or 30, we got the domain name, urbanladder.com. And even at that time, we didn't know what we were going to sell, and nothing else. It was just the two of us brainstorming. That's when I would say sometime January, I think I told the Yahoo folks sometime November and December. January 31 was the last day, 2012.
00:38:47
Speaker
The stars product the celebrities product was just released on 16th of Jan I still remember so I had to get that release out and then move out so I came on board full-time Feb and We thought we will you know start off with beds Sourcing from Bangalore and we just didn't realize honestly even at that time that
00:39:07
Speaker
So we just didn't realize at that time as to which category where we were going to source from, what is the kind of company. We just knew that we were going to build a technology online brand selling great home stuff for customers. And even in the second conversation with Vani, Vani was like, hey, you know, just do one category even within home. Don't.
00:39:25
Speaker
You can't do A and B and C. That just becomes too much if you're creating a brand. I think a few things we were clear. We were clear that we would hold the quality and the designs of the furniture that we were going to put out because at a very early phase of our life, we finalised both the vision and some of the core values. We said,
00:39:46
Speaker
The whole point of us doing homes was India homes were just not as beautiful as some of the Western counterparts. So let's make Indian homes beautiful. So that was something that we realized very early on and people were just selling crappy looking stuff and we said that had to change.
00:40:03
Speaker
Two is we also said, you know, we were super inspired by Zappos. Tony Cher, who passed away recently, the book that he wrote, Delivering Happiness, sort of became the Bible for us in terms of the way we looked at the company, right? Everything from net promoter score to the culture to everything else. And we said, you know, and this was even before, I would say this was even in the September car conversation, even before we realized that it was going to be home decor or anything else.
00:40:28
Speaker
We said we're going to build a company which stands super strong for customer service and super strong for the people that are part of the company, which means that get great people, enable them to do great things so that at the end of the day failure or success, at least those two stand out always. I would say even today, if you were to look back at the 10 year journey or the 8, 9 year journey,
00:40:53
Speaker
Those two are things which have been very strong in Urban Ladder. And we have an alumni group of 1,200 people. Something consistently that gets talked about is that, the culture of the people and the relationships and the bonds that were found there, or the ethos on customer service and the way we build the brand. So this obviously came from very ground up thinking on the kind of company we wanted to build.
00:41:20
Speaker
I would say that's pretty much what we did, right? In December said, okay, so let's now do something. Why did Vani entertain you and give you so much time when you, I mean, you know, today, I cannot imagine a VC doing that, because everyone wants to see product market fit first and stuff like that. So
00:41:43
Speaker
What made her back you so early? So Vani knew Ashish from the Amachita Kata days. So she knew. And not just Vani. I would say even the prime folks, Bala, at that time, it was Bala, Sripathi, and Sanjay. They were very gungo about working with us. And all of these folks gave, given Kanwal, all of these folks gave time in terms of. And even today, I would say investors
00:42:10
Speaker
do spend time. It's not like every investor only says that come after product market fit. You do see investment happening way before also. At the end of the day, it is about, I would say obviously our pedigree helped, obviously some of our experiences helped, and that the two of us with reasonably complementary skills came together also helped in terms of having worked together in the past.
00:42:33
Speaker
very complimentary in terms of core skill set. I think that also helped. And I would say even today, people do spend time. I don't think that's an issue. But some of those conversations really helped shape the thinking up. But we also took a lot of contract calls. While I think the general consensus was to go for home decor, we said, no, we will do furniture.
00:42:54
Speaker
We said the toughest problem is furniture. The biggest gap is furniture. The deepest consumer need is furniture. So let's get furniture right or wrong. It doesn't matter. But let's get furniture right. Whereas conventional wisdom would have said decor is easier to sell online. Pretty much all of the competition at that time that was fab furnish or pepper fry were all going after the decor. No one really could try to sell furniture or they were just doing a pretty shoddy job of it.
00:43:21
Speaker
We took on furniture as the first category and between Jan and June of 2012, pretty much got the first million dollars from Kalari. We used to call that series 8. Today I think dollar 1 million is on the lower end of a seed race.
00:43:37
Speaker
I think we were lucky to get that money before we started out because we needed to buy inventory outright at that time and suppliers were not going to give some to complete newbies in the field of furniture and e-commerce supplies.
00:43:53
Speaker
So it also helped us recruit some really smart people, people who are obviously friends to this day or people who continue on some new journeys with me to this day in that time period, Jan to June of 2012. And we launched actually to the exact month, July 2012. How many products did you launch with? We launched with 40 products, 40. I think we got an inventory of around three or four of each. And what were these products?
00:44:23
Speaker
They were all probably 3,000 to 5,000 coffee tables, side tables. I think we had maybe five, six categories. I don't think today an e-commerce site will launch with such low number of SKUs or low number of categories. But we actually launched with that number, which is 30, 35 SKUs maybe. That's what we did, actually.
00:44:44
Speaker
And these were like, assembleable, like you could compress them and deliver them and then assemble at home or what were they like?
00:44:54
Speaker
They were actually things that we had to go and assemble. And thankfully, they didn't involve any great assembly. It was all literally just, you know, even I think it was all small products. So they didn't require any assembly. It was just you open the packaging, you have the product, right? We went with those kind of products at least in the first shot only because, you know, we didn't want to complicate the supply chain. And we also needed all those kind of products, I think happened much later in the first half of the year or the
00:45:24
Speaker
first year or the last half of the first year. And that was sort of thoughtfully done in terms of we just introduced certain new ranges in terms of very colorful furniture. We had something that was reclaimed wood. We had something which was denim. We had something which was metal. We actually brought in a very interesting angle of design into the furniture that we did. So I would say that became a differentiator in hindsight. And we actually had a tagline
00:45:48
Speaker
great furniture made easy and really our tagline just meant that we were going to bring in very good quality furniture and make it super easy for you to buy online and you know the website was a very simplistic offering and everything that we did was just super simplified right in terms of the first offering. Okay and when you launched that you know what kind of sales did you see and how did you acquire your early customers?
00:46:16
Speaker
Thankfully for us, the first set of customers are all from word of mouth and people that we shared. We made sure that at least 300, I think I had maybe 600 friends on Facebook at that time. 300, I made sure that I pounded people to at least get 250 to 300 to actually like us on Facebook as a brand.
00:46:32
Speaker
And pretty much a lot of them started doing word of mouth that we launched. And the first sale happened, I think, on July 12th, the day we launched the website. It was at Denim. We had a sale offline before that, one of my seniors from IMB. He actually bought the first product, which actually ended up becoming a product quality issue much later on because of the kind of material we actually recall that entire range.
00:46:57
Speaker
But and then one of my friends who had a reasonably active fan following in Twitter at that time, maybe 1000 people, he retweeted that, you know, and that we launched and the site actually crashed. We did I think seven lakhs in the first month, if I am not mistaken, which is quite a big number in terms of
00:47:20
Speaker
sales. Our average ticket size was maybe 5K and that essentially means probably about 27, 150 orders. We used to get around 3, 4, 5 orders a day and that was good. 7 became 15, 15 became 20, just kept growing after that and I think we started marketing maybe Q4, maybe
00:47:45
Speaker
September, October of 2012, and Facebook at that time was arbitrage, right? We were the first ones to use Facebook for Facebook ads in India, right, for commerce. We actually literally became a case study for Facebook. So I would say, yeah, first few
00:48:00
Speaker
Sales all happened directly out of the network and just doing a bunch of targeting on Facebook. That's, I think beyond 20 lakhs, I think it started because of Facebook and the way we used Facebook for targeting and very little money. We got all those and we did a bunch of offline events also, you know, in the first six months. So things that did not scale like a pop up store or something.
00:48:21
Speaker
We went to one of the very popular events in Bangalore called Soul Sunday and we also put up posters and apartments and did some pop-up things in certain apartments. I don't think any of them individually got anything major but I think all of these put together, at least in Bangalore, people started knowing of us.
00:48:44
Speaker
And your sales were largely coming from Bangalore only, like you were focused on Bangalore as a territory. So funnily we started off all India and then in a month and a half we pulled back only to Bangalore, Delhi and Bombay. So I think by August we started July in all India, we got
00:49:02
Speaker
It all anchored around the NPS. I think in Bangalore, where we could put in our own delivery team, we got an NPS of around 65 or 70. In everywhere else where we were working with third party logistics providers, we got an NPS of, I think, five or 10 or zero or something like that. And we said if customer obsession is the first value we are building the company on, let's not do this for sure. So we pulled that overnight. We lost 25%, 30% of sales.
00:49:31
Speaker
we could thankfully install an installation team in Bombay and Delhi because of our network. These are all people who stay even till day in terms of Urban Ladder. So these are the people who became the first employees in those cities. And even in Jodhpur, we got a big sourcing hub there. And that continues to be one of the big sourcing hubs still. And really, the idea was to say that let's do installation. And this was the contract calls.
00:49:59
Speaker
We did anticipate on day one that we were going to be having to do everything from design to delivery. But it ended up within two months, we realized that every part of the supply chain was broken. And we had to do everything from design to delivery to all of the stuff. And so that's precisely what happened. And we set up a team and we pulled back any other third party logistics. And from then on, we have only been doing our own delivery and installation. Now maybe things have changed in the last year.
00:50:29
Speaker
Really, that's what happened by August and we were in three cities. I would say Bangalore was probably 40-50% of orders. Delhi was maybe 30 and Bombay was maybe 20. Okay, so you did not have like third-party sellers like a marketplace model. Everything was like your own inventory basically which you designed or you purchased outright and then you were selling it.
00:50:54
Speaker
So yeah, so we sort of converted to a curated marketplace kind of a model much later. But that was where sellers used to come because the sellers became the manufacturers. But that was way later. In the first year and a half, we were just completely designing and developing everything. And we had a, even by the end of the first year, I think we had maybe a catalog of 250 products or so.
00:51:16
Speaker
across maybe 20-25 categories. And really the idea was to make sure that we got in products that made the consumer's house look good and they could easily purchase it. We started I think so far sometime in the fag end of the first year. Bigger products, I think the ticket size slowly started increasing, right? I think at its peak, double-added ticket size was probably around 1820K. It started at 3 or 4K in the first month. And really the idea was to obviously sell the bigger products because the end of the day,
00:51:46
Speaker
Your main furniture needs in the house are so far bed and dining table, right? Everything else sort of becomes secondary to that. And so that's sort of what, and I think dining tables, maybe we launched within six, seven months, so fast within eight, nine months and beds within a year or so.
00:52:02
Speaker
and mattresses came actually much later and really that's sort of the evolution in terms of the product range. Cities wise we were only in three cities because we wanted to get it right. It's a very localized supply chain. It's a very heavy you know dependency on quality of transport and stuff. So we I think got the first three cities right for the first year and a half or so and then opened
00:52:24
Speaker
the next four cities only in year two, sometime fag end of year two. And I think the following maybe 10 cities we opened only in year five or something like that, right? We didn't, we were just, you know, because again, furniture is a very localized play that way. So a lot more focused on everything from product range expansion to design styles to the cities we were in to pretty much everything that we did as a way of life.
00:52:50
Speaker
So during this time, what was Pepper Fry doing? I mean, you know, they are like the biggest competitor. So were they also following a similar approach of doing everything on their own or, you know, what was happening on the competition front around this time?
00:53:06
Speaker
So finally, I think the whole of the furniture category was so unauthorized. I don't think any of us were taking market share from anyone else. So 10 years out today, I don't know. I mean, I'm slightly disconnected from the furniture industry itself for the last year and a half. But really, at that time, honestly, if you were to ask me, at first, Pepperfry was far more of a marketplace. They had thousands of designs for maybe a few hundred designs.
00:53:31
Speaker
Quality-wise, once you go the marketplace route, you have a very good quality, which is super expensive. You have a really bad quality also. Since they were working a third party on pretty much everything, it was very unpredictable in terms of the quality of service that NPS was hovering in the very low 0 to 20 range. Our NPS was absolutely bang on always in the 75 range every single month of our life.
00:53:55
Speaker
So calculate NPS. Can you just as a quick aside, just tell me that. NPS, thankfully, is a very standard metric. You ask customers whether they would refer us on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely they would refer us to their friends. And if you do a 9 or a 10, that's great. If you do a 7 or 8, you're neutral. And if you do anything less than 6, you're bad. The NPS is calculated as those that gave you 9 or 10 minus those that gave you anything 6 or less up.
00:54:23
Speaker
by the total number of respondents. So just to give you context, if you need an 80 NPS out of 10 people, let's say you don't screw up or you screw up one order, you need the other nine to give you a nine or a 10, not even a seven or an eight, in which case you'll land up at an NPS of 80, which is why great companies do an NPS of around 50 to 60. It's very difficult to have NPS beyond 60 actually.
00:54:48
Speaker
Because even if at scale, you're always going to get some detractors who had a bad experience. Maybe not because of you, but because someone screwed up something on that way. So it's a very difficult measure to hold consistently at 70 and 80, which is what we did outside of a few months where we had system upgradations or some massive supply chain blockages. We pretty much through at least the seven, eight years I was there at Urban Ladder.
00:55:12
Speaker
We had a 70 NPS and I would obviously that the NPS three big parts to it. One is the entire experience with our delivery installation customer service. Two is the quality of the product that lands up at the customers place.
00:55:28
Speaker
And three is the entire online experience and just them as a brand and how good the brand is as a referable source. I think all three came together to give us that NPS. And whenever, as I said, months where it didn't do well, one of these three would probably be a massive hit.
00:55:48
Speaker
So NPA is a great measure. I would say the number one measure for any consumer facing business, enterprise or consumer in the early days to measure whether what you're doing has any legs at all. Because customers are paying money. So that's something that we did right throughout our life. Just have to go deeper and deeper as to if let's say it does get shaken up in a week or a day.
00:56:10
Speaker
You have to ensure, and it's something culturally weighted. One of the other things we did was to put in a set of values, as I said, in addition to the vision statement of making millions of homes beautiful. We also said that we would focus on this whole thing about having fantastic customer experience and values. So we actually named our value system at that time Chef's CHEFS.
00:56:34
Speaker
C for customer obsession, H for honest transparency, E for excellence in every small thing we do, F for fun as a way of life and S for stepping up. And chefs became taste later on and I'll talk about it. But really the idea was every single person coming in, they can be super smart, but if they're not customer obsessed, they're not going to come into the system.
00:56:53
Speaker
And we had our own ways to evaluate it and stuff. And, you know, honesty and transparency became the way that we lived life in terms of feedback, whether we talk to customers, whether we talk to each other. Excellence, because we are building a brand and India is known for Jugat, not for building high quality brands. We wanted to build a brand that was ready from day one in going global. We never went global, but
00:57:15
Speaker
It was ready from day one in terms of being a very globally looked up to brand in terms of its creators, in terms of communication, in terms of everything that we put out there. Fun people were just fun. Fun was just embodiment of everyone inside Urban Ladder and stepping up because we were doing, we created a category.
00:57:34
Speaker
right? Selling furniture online was not a category before we came in, right? So if you want to be doing something like creating a category, you better step up and learn things and try some bold things because otherwise you're never going to do something new, right? So I would say in all of these five, we would make sure that people who came into the fold, they're breathing all of these fired, you know, across their life at urban. Okay.
00:57:58
Speaker
And how did the turnover, what was the run rate like over the next couple of years?
Thoughts on Scaling and Identity at Urban Ladder
00:58:07
Speaker
From that 12-13 period till about 18-19, what was the trajectory like? So we actually grew from, I would say approximately a crore in the first year per month to two crores.
00:58:19
Speaker
in the second year per month. I think it was pretty consistent. I think years three and four, we had huge spikes because we raised a lot of money. And we raised $70 million. And two became 10. 10 became 20 a month. 20 became 25. 25 became 30. I think at its peak, I think we have done even I think one month, we did 50 crores a month. I think Diwali 2018 probably.
00:58:44
Speaker
was probably the peak 50 crores approximately a revenue rate of around 600 crores or so. But yeah, that's sort of at least the evolution and there have been times when it is sort of states that are stagnant too. There have been times when it just easily spiked up.
00:59:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, outside of those, I would say I think the periods where we were more consistent was the most steady, predictable. I think we were doing things far more thoughtfully, I would say. I think times when we were really spiking up, I think something or the other gave in, right, in terms of whether
00:59:16
Speaker
Maybe it was a marketing cost that gave in. Maybe it's the product quality that gave in. Maybe sometimes when we were not growing, I think the momentum of the morale sort of was not great. So it is sort of, I think the times when we were steadily growing to X a year. And this is my biggest lesson in learning for founders, right? I think unless you are in a winner takes all marketplace where just the market demands you to sometimes just spike up what Reed Hoffman calls blitz scaling.
00:59:44
Speaker
Don't do these spiky things because spiky things are probably important in certain of those markets. And even those just be thoughtful on where you are spending crazy amount of money or energy. But outside of that, I would say consistent growth 2x a year, 2.5x a year, 3x a year, 3x is phenomenal. Even 50% to 100% is great. But if you can go around the 2 to 2.5x a year, I think you're building something very, very meaningful in a 10-year period.
01:00:14
Speaker
And whether that's D2C brands, whether that's enterprise place, I would say there's a lot of just basic one-on-one business building if you do it far more steadier than these spiky events. Spiky events on the highs are very great.
01:00:34
Speaker
you can't predict that it is always going to be the heist, right? Leave aside a macroeconomic thing like COVID, you just sometimes just the market is not ready for you, right? And when the crazy heist or you've used some crazy unsustainable thing to spike up marketing spends and you get those spikes, when things go down, it's just not going to be very pleasant. And we've gone through, we've gone through all of this the seven, eight year journey.
01:01:01
Speaker
So what was the, you know, you had like a pretty massive fundraise of $70 million. What was that used for? Like largely, what was it for? In hindsight, I think we donated a lot of it to Facebook and Google. But, you know, to be honest, I think, you know, to be fair, I think the pluses of it were
01:01:24
Speaker
I think we increased crazily in scale. I think we became a reasonably national brand. We were on TV. We increased the catalog size by 4x. We started sourcing from China and Malaysia and Europe. And I think it just gave us a lot of, I would say, firepower to just go really international in sourcing, really high quality in talent.
01:01:46
Speaker
really wide in terms of our reach. And we also built a pretty strong tech team and did a bunch of things. It also brought in a lot of indisciplines, you know, moving to a fancy office, spending money on things that are not sustainable, too many experiments.
01:02:02
Speaker
Ah, there's so many of it. I mean, we did TV ads too early. I mean, we were not ready for TV ads. We should have probably gone into offline slightly earlier. We, I think, grew the team too fast. Fancy office, unnecessary. Got in too many products too fast. It just expanded the catalog just crazily fast. And yeah, a lot of mistakes also we did. And too many categories we got in too fast. I mean, we went into modular kitchens when we were just not ready for it.
01:02:32
Speaker
of the kind of capital that's required for it is $100 million on its own. And just try to do things too fast. Now, when your brand that's trying to uphold the quality of the customer experience and the quality of the raw materials and the manufacturing process and timelines and stuff, you can't unnaturally grow beyond a point. If you're a marketplace, you can still attempt something like it.
01:02:55
Speaker
But I can tell you, if you're holding every single part of the value chain, to be able to grow 4x, 5x and all is almost impossible in a category like furniture. Because there are so many loopholes in the supply chain. In a category where some of it is predictable, maybe electronics, maybe later on today I'm talking to the board co-founder Raman and I'm going to ask him that question.
01:03:17
Speaker
But a category where manufacturing is at least more predictable or design is more predictable or customer demand is more predictable. I think you can still probably aim to grow 3-4x but in a category like furniture, you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
01:03:33
Speaker
So I would say that's sort of, as I said, I think the learnings were immense. I think every phase, that's true of every part of my life. There have been some great things achieved. There have been some huge screw ups, which is why I think overall in a 25 year period post-school, I think it's just been, the concept of equanimity has just been closer home. So I think no better case than herbal ladder that way in terms of just, it was almost like sitting on a sine wave.
01:04:04
Speaker
Was it that you got into a cycle of fundraise and once you do fundraise then you also need to show much faster growth and to show much faster growth you burn more money and then you need again the fundraise. Did that mentally cause you to make these kind of mistakes that you talked about?
01:04:32
Speaker
See, honestly, you know you enter the VC game. It's a game, right? It's a treadmill. Yeah, it's a treadmill. Absolutely. Yeah, you have to keep running on it too.
01:04:41
Speaker
Otherwise you should not. So the moment we entered that treadmill, we needed to know as to what we were getting into. So I would just, you know, nothing to blame. I think it was just, just decisions we did and things that didn't work out as per plan and things that we, uh, you know, strategy mistakes, mistakes in terms of expansion. And as I said, I think the good parts of it was we still held the customer service and the NPS. We still held the product design and a lot of learnings, right? Again, the ups and downs in terms of how you react is also important.
01:05:08
Speaker
I think the moment you enter that treadmill you also need to show growth and somewhere there I think the market has also been sort of very wavered. 16-17 it sort of pulled back on growth so we pulled back as a system in the 17-18 time period then by the time we got into fundraise zone in 18-19 the market again wanted growth and it's you can't you know like it's not like you know you switch this on you switch it off that's not how it works so
01:05:32
Speaker
So I think it is also a lot about timing in terms of new regulations on the government. There are just so many variables in terms of everything from decision making to market to highest in terms of why things happen the way they happen. So it's probably a bit- Why did the term sheet get pulled back? That's what I'm saying. Nothing predictable. I'm just giving these are sort of examples to say that
01:06:01
Speaker
There are, it's almost like the butterfly effect. And you do, you control certain things. You don't control certain things. And it would be both silly and trivial to sort of try to encompass seven, eight years into either a half an hour conversation on urban ladder. There is one single aha moment that either costs something positive or one single aha moment that costs something negative. It is just a lot of decisions and a lot of things
01:06:29
Speaker
in terms of over a very elongated time period. My bigger learning is I think founders should just sort of stick to certain things which are their strengths, understand where they need help, get in people that can help them, have very clear, and this is sort of very universal, be very obsessive about customer orientation. Otherwise,
01:06:51
Speaker
you know just using capital to grow or using capital all this press all of this is all fantastic but really unless you're just fundamentally being close enough to customer solving a customer problem and really the only true great example in this world is amazon right of you know 25 years later
01:07:07
Speaker
If there was one company that is still as crazy customer obsessed as it was in 1996 and it shows with the power of the wealth that has been created in terms of just the company or the Offering and how it has just become part of a verb, right? And I would say that's only the true essence of what you're building everyone talks about it everyone make enough of a
01:07:30
Speaker
Bruja about it. I think in Abu Lada also, I think we were one of those rare ones that just didn't talk about it. We just embodied it into every one of those 1,200 people that crossed the system in Abu Lada. It is just the times I think that we did not do well. I would all point to where we were moving away from doing it well enough. And be singular in terms of focus. Don't just play to the tunes of either amount of capital. And be true to who you are as leaders, who you are as people.
01:07:59
Speaker
Beyond that, there is always going to be macro market situation. I mean, COVID just came and really screwed the entire industry. And it was just funny coincidental that at that time we didn't have too much capital in the bank. So we have to start off, make do with what was best at that time. And there are things which are just beyond your wildest predictions. We were getting to in that 1920, which is a very challenging time period.
01:08:22
Speaker
We were getting to, you know, the team was just doing, putting so much effort to get back to track and get to zero burn by, I think June 2019, we got to zero burn. We got to zero burn on a much lesser revenue scale, you know, compared to the 360 crores at peak, we got to it at 200 crores.
01:08:39
Speaker
But something like covid that happened in 19 and shut down everything, I don't think anyone predicted. I mean, the theme was heart and soul giving its best in that 1920 time period. So I would say, you know, the end of the day, you know, startup paths take on so many different meanings when they get acquired, when they get a new life.
01:08:59
Speaker
when they shut down or when they become unicorns and decacorns, that it's always a culmination of a variety of things. But the only unanimous thing is being super obsessed on customers and making sure that the strategy is focused on playing to your strengths and being a lot more steady in terms of how you deal with either people or with customers instead of just a lot of freebies when you have a lot of capital, pull back everything when you don't have capital. All these ups and downs just don't work in the real world over a longer time period.
01:09:28
Speaker
So was Urban Ladder a furniture company or a tech company? You said that in case of Yahoo, there was a confusion on whether it was a media company or a tech company. Was it something similar in your case? Were you clear? No, we were not, I think.
01:09:45
Speaker
15, 16, maybe we thought we were a tech company that was selling furniture. I probably made the mistake the most. And that was just stupid. We were a furniture company. And we should have played to that strength. And tech was obviously a massive DNA of the company in terms of data, in terms of the way we did things. But tech was, we were not a tech company. We were a furniture company. I think we realized that by 17, thankfully. I don't think the cost of that was
01:10:15
Speaker
maybe one and a half, two years of very heavy use of capital, but in terms of tech team size and, you know, the fancy office and all of that stuff. But I'm glad I was a furniture company and he's a furniture company. And yeah, so I think that was something that we realized, thankfully, early enough. But I would say I think all of these are things that beyond that right now, every company is a tech company, right? Because if you don't have tech in something that you do,
01:10:45
Speaker
you're not going to do something really well. So these all become mood points. But at that point in time, what you asked is a very fair question. In the 15, 16-time period, this confusion did exist. And we were trying to be A and B and C. Because you could also ask, was our own logistics company? Because we had our own everything in terms of delivering. I mean, at scale, we were delivering the number of orders and the amount of supply chain effort we were putting in, the size of the warehouse we had and stuff. We could have been a logistics company also.
01:11:15
Speaker
So I think we were a furniture company first. Everything else was sort of to support the furniture company. That's how I would put it. Do you think it was a mistake to go and do the whole full stack yourself? You know, unlike say Pepper Fry, which you told me was largely doing third party and they continue to thrive, you know?
01:11:35
Speaker
None of what we did at the foundation level was a mistake. The focus on product, the focus on customer, the kind of team members we got, the way the brand was, the NPS focus, every single thing was absolutely right bang on, which is why if things don't turn out the way overall, there are just too many nuances that cannot be captured in a conversation. So I don't think any of that should have been any different. If at all, maybe we could have done the omnichannel experience faster, better.
01:12:04
Speaker
I would say that's one. And two, I think we should have just played to our strengths and just gone on the front of design far stronger. As I said, the capital usage of the capital was where probably the mistake was. I think a lot of capital was wasted on things which trying to get to super high speed growth. So as India spent the capital on customer acquisition instead of on design and developing more innovative furniture and stuff like that.
01:12:35
Speaker
That's about it. I think it is always about, you know, which is why I said you need to know who you are at your core. Keep delivering on that consistently. If we were good on design, we were good on customer, we shall listen to the customer and gone on the channel earlier. And we were good on our technology and experience. We should have done that experience integrated back to the supply chain. We should have just none of it would have been different on we should have been a full stack player.
01:12:58
Speaker
that's what our USB was, that's what our culture was, that's what our DNA was. I don't think any of that should have been or would have been different. So Omni-channel like Lenskart, was that what you started doing? Yeah, Lenskart is, you know, we've had so many chats with Piush and Ramnik and very good friends and we wear Omni-channel and you know, see the product is different, right? They had to go all the way to manufacturing and your
01:13:24
Speaker
margin structures are very different in a product like, you know, glasses. So because we were obviously our supply chain at the end, supply chain, the installation is something we had to do, right? They needed trials. They had much smaller stores. They could franchise much faster. So a bunch of stuff is very different because, yeah, I mean, if you were to look at close, similar similarities, yeah, maybe bluestone, carotid lanes,
01:13:49
Speaker
are all the equivalent ones, both. Like a customer can look at the product and then place an order online or from the store, either way it gets delivered to their home.
01:14:02
Speaker
We did a bunch of stuff in terms of trials. And we had stores in the center of the city for exactly that reason. We didn't have stores far away from the city. We also had something called the SOFA trial, which we sent three samples SOFA to your house in a small truck. You could sit on that. These three single-seaters would go up your house. You could sit on it. It had a 50% conversion. So there's a variety of things we tried new in terms of just
01:14:30
Speaker
I mean we pulled it back later on because of the scalability of something like that by the time we got stores we said okay the stores can do the same job so a lot of stuff obviously you know we had VR experiences we had AR experiences where people could just see the sofa in their house a variety of technological improvements a variety of technology features we did try
01:14:51
Speaker
But at the end of the day, I would say, and you know, as I said, I think the consumer need is still immense. This is still unicorns that can be created in the space of online miniature, home decor.
01:15:03
Speaker
I know IKEA is there today, but still, I don't think anyone has solved the need fully yet in terms of just good quality, great designs for the Indian home. Thermalad is trying it. Pepper Fry is trying it. IKEA is trying it. But this market needs, I would say, a lot of innovation there.
01:15:23
Speaker
hopefully we'll get either one of these existing ones or some new one to be a unicorn in that space.
Urban Ladder's Acquisition by Reliance
01:15:30
Speaker
So where did you realize that it's a life or death situation for urban ladder and you know you needed to sell and you know like
01:15:42
Speaker
How did that whole thing happen? I think that was around COVID. As I said, COVID obviously we needed cash or we needed a company like Reliance to sort of take it to that phase four of Urban Ladder. If you look at it, the first two years
01:15:56
Speaker
Very thoughtful expansion, very low capital. That was 2012 to 2014, 2014 to 2016. We really got a lot of capital, crazy expansion. 2016 to 2018, pullback. I would say very focused on the omni-channel retail. Shoot towards profitability and IPO, I would say that was 2016 to 2019. But 2019, what happened is we could not raise capital. We needed at least a boost of another 25 to $30 million.
01:16:25
Speaker
to get to that IPO, to get to that expansion on retail. Because we could not raise that capital, we had to get to burn zero, which we got to by June 2019. It's just that 2020 COVID hit. And we certainly needed a boost of capital because revenue was zero for two, three months.
01:16:42
Speaker
That's the time when certainly a player like Reliance. And we wanted to, again, get back the mojo of expanding across cities. And no one better than Reliance to understand both the scale of expansion of speed, as well as strength on supply chain, as well as really providing the platform and intelligence and the capital to be able to do that. So I think that's sort of the deal that we got with Reliance. And yeah, we had to take that.
01:17:10
Speaker
Okay. And like you have sold off your stakes completely also like Reliance owns it fully or? Reliance pretty much owns it fully. Okay. Okay. Got it. So then what what next then? You know, once you once that chapter of Urban Ladder ended in your life, it must have left a void. No, I mean,
01:17:30
Speaker
Actually, no, I'm very pragmatic about all this. The job of founders is to create institutions that last beyond them. And I don't attach as much emotion. And I mean, that's true of my own daughter. I mean, she will have her life. There is no point of attachment. And if you're creating institutions, I mean, right from 2000, when I created either that website in Infosys or intranet in IMB,
01:17:58
Speaker
or Yahoo India Education or Yahoo Cricket. The job of creators is to create stuff and let it out in the world. For me, personally, I knew my job at Urban Ladder probably in 2016 was the first whiff of, you know, I think I have that four or five year, you know, I told you that. Every four or five years, 2016, I knew that I needed to perform a slightly different role, which is what I did in 16 to 18. I performed a different role from what I had played in.
01:18:27
Speaker
12 to 16 as a founder. How did your role change? Very simple. 12 to 16, when you're small, you're sort of doing everything front and center. You're figuring out what your strengths are. You're expanding. 16 to 18, I took on a very specific role of really grooming the next level leadership, focus on HR and tech only, and really groom what the next stage should be. 18 April, I had the conversation with Ashish saying,
01:18:53
Speaker
seems like 18, 19, we should raise money and I will move out. It just so happened that the script became a slightly different way because we could not raise money.
Exploring Happiness and 'One Life Theory'
01:19:03
Speaker
And 19 October is when I officially moved out, but it was pretty clear. I just didn't know what I was going to do next. So that I spent the next six, nine months between 19 and 20 because I had
01:19:13
Speaker
I had three broad areas of interest, which I figured by 18. One was the field of happiness. One was the field of careers and human potential. And the third, which I figured, was the field of startups and the founder journey, because I had gone through a very interesting founder journey. And the more I talked to people in the first two, three years of startups founders, I talked to at least 60, 70 of them. It seemed like that platform to make that journey far smoother or far better was just not there.
01:19:43
Speaker
I just literally converted the first two areas into hobbies and I took on a day job which focused on the third area. It could have been anyway. I could have done exactly the reverse where I did a startup in the field of the first and second and did converted the third into a hobby. But I just chose at least for the first five to ten years of my life that let me do the, which is what you see, one life theory is the hobby in the field of happiness. I run a podcast which I have been pretty lazy for the last year.
01:20:13
Speaker
But I have my own framework on how to be happier and I've talked to a lot of people the idea is to sort of run that as sort of a podcast and And you know something on Instagram over the weekends as the blog so I think I have to get to it the number of people who have told me this in the last month that I need to
01:20:31
Speaker
do that continuously, founders, team members, people that I just randomly bump into on social media, it feels like I'm just not doing something which the world needs. What's like a TLDN version of your theory of happiness? Okay, so you want to talk about happiness? See, I'll tell you, I've been researching this in that 16 to 18 time period.
01:20:55
Speaker
I will try to do a TLDR version. We all have one life. You realize it either at 40, like I realized it, or you realize it at 30 or 20. The one life that you have till you die is your own. You have to make the maximum use of that life that you have ahead. It doesn't matter what you have done, because the past is pointless. You can sit on the laurels. You can talk about it for half an hour for a podcast. But beyond that, there's literally nothing that you can go and change
01:21:24
Speaker
So there's no point either in being too nostalgic, good about the past. It's good. Five minutes here, five minutes there. Or there's absolutely no point suddenly brooding over the past. The future is totally unpredictable. I don't think one year back anyone could have predicted COVID or anything that happened because of COVID. So if you don't know anything about the past or the present, the current moment is all you have. The current moment I'm talking to you right now, the current moment after this, I have a call with the founder.
01:21:49
Speaker
I have a webinar at two o'clock, whatever it is, right? So be completely immersed in that moment and do complete justice to that moment. So now, if the current moment is all you have, let's take a week ahead. Beyond the week, I don't think anyone can prepare anything much. Your week has 168 hours. Now, whether that's Bill Gates or whether that's Akshay or whether that's Raji or whether that's my daughter who's nine,
01:22:11
Speaker
Everyone has that 168 hours, of which 48 hours you have to cut off for sleep. And that's seven hours a day, seven days a week. Sleep and just basic chores. You have 120 hours. I would park off 20 hours as basic human health.
01:22:30
Speaker
You spend 5 hours a week, 45 minutes a day eating. You spend 5 hours a week, you should, even if you don't do, doing some basic exercise, moving your body. You spend 5 hours a day reading stuff, what's happening, you know, maybe that's a book, maybe that's a social, whatever it is, and you spend 5 hours a day calming your mind, getting your mind ready for life.
01:22:49
Speaker
That leaves you 100 hours a week. All of us have three aspects of life. I mean, everyone has four aspects of life. I covered the first 20 hours in what I call self. The other three aspects of life, what I call service, which is either work or education. The third aspect of life is what I call social, which is your relationships, family, friends. And the last aspect of life is what I call census, which is fun, hobbies, whatever else you do.
01:23:17
Speaker
All human beings and when I say all human beings have 100 hours or 120 hours across these four aspects of life or 100 hours across these three aspects of life. That's it, right? Whether you're a 20 year old who's just graduated getting into your first job.
01:23:34
Speaker
whether you're a 30-year-old, figuring out and maybe having a midlife crisis, whether you're a 40-year-old who has a daughter who's maybe running an investment company, whether you're a 50-year-old, you have these 100 hours a week that you can, quote unquote, allocate into different aspects of these life.
01:23:53
Speaker
The way you allocate these different aspects of this life is all the decision you can make to make sure that the present moment that you are spending on is worthwhile. You don't have any regret on the present moment. You're not thinking of spending that anywhere else.
01:24:07
Speaker
If that's what it is, so now let's come from the easiest to the toughest. You anchor at a very specific aspect in life. Maybe in your 20s to 30s, you want to anchor around getting great global experiences. Maybe 30 to 50 in your life, you want to anchor around work. You want to create a startup. You want to do something really well in your work life.
01:24:28
Speaker
Maybe 50, you want to anchor around travel, you want to anchor around relationships, I don't know, right? There are no templates to any of this. You could choose to do this at 20, you can anchor around startups, you can choose to do the 20 to 61 anchor around work. But my foundational aspect of this is, these are three aspects of life. If you are going to be just doing a startup, don't take on personal commitments, you go do that only, okay?
01:24:53
Speaker
Don't take on a relationship like a spouse, a kid, and then spend 80 hours of these 100 hours at work. That is just stupid. You are not really doing justice to anything. Why is it worse? If you want to go do something meaningful and you're going to be traveling the world, you're going to be Netflixing, you're going to be watching stuff with friends, you spend 50 hours on that, then don't say you're going to go create a startup that's going to change the world. You cannot.
01:25:18
Speaker
So be clear at any point in time. I divide life into maybe four, five years, not just because I get bored personally for five years, but I divide this 30 years, 40 years into blocks of three to five years at any point in time. At least be clear on what your three to five year journey is going to be for the next three, five years. Beyond that, I don't think anything can be said about anything for that matter.
01:25:40
Speaker
In those three, five years, based on, as I said, keep self aside for 20 hours. You have to do it. Otherwise, you're going to get screwed very soon. Those 100 hours, whether you spend 60 hours at work, 40 hours across social and census, you spent 50 hours at work, 50 hours across social and census, 40 hours at work, 60 hours, that's all that you actually have. You're running a startup, you're going to probably spend 70 to 80 hours a week on the startup, and you probably have 20 to 30 hours.
01:26:09
Speaker
If you're going to spend anything more than that, just go do that. Don't take on anything on fun and social. I think if you're spending 60 hours, for example, I allocate around 60 to 65 hours at work.
01:26:21
Speaker
because I've taken on a very important mandate at Antler and I also have this hobby that I'm running. But I also have a daughter, I also have a partner, so I want to spend justice to them. If I don't spend 10 hours with them a week, I don't think that's justice, because that's like 10% of my time. So this is a very left-brained mathematical view to how to live life.
01:26:40
Speaker
And the way you come to whether you're spending time with the right people, whether that's your partner, whether that's you want to have kids or not, it's the right kind of work that you're doing. There's a bunch of frameworks that I've devised to even figure out based on your strengths, your wiring. So that's what just one life theory is. And I will try and given the amount of feedback I'm getting on making this more widespread because it is certainly a lot of people have very passionately just
01:27:09
Speaker
In two hours, I just have two hours of recorded podcasts over 20 episodes on season one. A lot of people have come back and said, why on earth are you not doing this far more? So it just feels like I'm certainly not reaching towards my own impact or potential. So I will demystify it over the next year, sitting on Saturdays and Sundays, spending four, five hours every weekend. And next year, maybe, hopefully, a few thousands of people are using that framework to
01:27:34
Speaker
just get to making sure that that moment that they are spending on is worthwhile, meaningful, and is the right with the right person or the right job or the right place, right? Because at the end of the day, that's all you can control. So do you obsessively document how many hours you spend on what?
01:27:56
Speaker
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. These are all broad, you know. Yeah, I mean, my daily calendar is reasonably full, right? For at least for the coming week of because you have, you know, found a journey, you know, your founder interviews, I have capital raising, I have, you know, time with the team.
01:28:12
Speaker
I have to do certain podcasts or marketing. I have to spend time with potential next founders. So obviously in a field like business, you have to unfortunately, unfortunately slot times way ahead, right? So probably 70% of my calendar is full for the next week. Maybe 20% is full for the following week. I have broad times that I, you know, I mean, you do sleep from 12 to seven. It's not some rocket there.
01:28:38
Speaker
You have to get up, you have to, you know, I have some broad times, but unfortunately, there's a particular personality type that I am, right? I mean, there are, you know, one of the things I didn't go deep into, each of us fall into one primary personality type. And this is the call, the YUM framework. It's the basis of the MBTI Myers-Brigg frameworks, but it is not the Myers-Brigg framework.
01:29:00
Speaker
I mean, there are a lot of topics, Akshay, that we can keep talking about. I have to wait for the next 10 minutes, too.
01:29:10
Speaker
So based on my personality type, the reason why I said that was I need that balance of predictability and freedom. If I slot too much, I absolutely hate it. If I don't slot enough, then also I hate it. So based on your personality type, I think at the end of the day, if you are very right-brained, if you are too much of a, there are four personality types. One is called Intutor. You can go check it on Google. Intutor, Feeler, Sensor, Thinker.
01:29:40
Speaker
For someone like a censor, they need some level of freedom, but they are OK and be violent. For someone like a thinker, they need everything to be slaughtered, and they need to block out times really based on their thing. Otherwise, they just cannot get into the flow of things. For someone like a feeler, they just hate anything which is a schedule. They are completely impulsive. For someone like an intruder, I am, again, a bit of a balance. OK, I'm an intruder. I'm also a bit of a thinker and a feeler, right? And these are all reasonably hardwired personality types which
01:30:10
Speaker
Leave aside at 40, even at 20, you can't change much. What you can do is to, if you know each person, there is no one right personality type. Every personality type has its pros and cons.
01:30:20
Speaker
And based on your personality type, you only know what your fall points are, and you can try and sort of make up for it and mask it, right? Either interactions or, you know. So, for example, an intruder is a big dreamer, right? They're not the best executors. So you have to fill, you know, I have to make sure that I fill my life or my... With good quality executors. Who are very good executors, right? And so, intruders are great communicators, right?
01:30:48
Speaker
But they are not, you know, this is why the podcast is probably as long as it is where I've not even fully covered Atlas, right? Because it's sort of obviously the framework has to, it's nowhere close to addressing all of this. My point is, I think it's a, for me, the next 10 years, I have at least finalised that one thing I want to spend time on is working with founders and helping their life in whichever form. Prandtl is sort of the vehicle in which I spend the 50 to 60 hours there.
Joining Antler and Supporting Founders
01:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, so tell me about Antler. This is a global fund, right? So yeah, so finally, you know, I actually, in October 2019, when I decided to officially move out of Urban Ladder, I only eliminated one option. I said I will probably join another startup. I will probably do some freelancing. I might start up again. I might even go global. I might even do something new for a big company, but I will not become an investor because I had never invested.
01:31:45
Speaker
And, funnily, like so many serendipitous conversations, in March of last year, just around lockdown, I was pretty clueless on what I was going to do next. And I had eliminated a bunch of things. I had eliminated big company. I had eliminated even a newly formed startup. I had two options in mind. One was to sort of freelance and work with a variety of startups, because I loved the energy. Or I wanted to be a founder again, and I was jamming with someone who probably would have been my CTO or co-founder.
01:32:15
Speaker
He was also ready, and we were just jamming ideas. And then I started talking to this cold pink from LinkedIn via Antler. I said I had no clue who Antler was. 2020 March lockdown had just started. I started talking. Over the course of the next 10 weeks, all on Zoom calls, I just fell in love with the mission of Antler and fell in love with the people behind Antler.
01:32:40
Speaker
And then I said by my end, I said, okay, this is something worthwhile. I had done my own understanding of the market. As I said, three areas, right? The third area was around helping founders in that journey. And given having been a founder, there's been literally zero founders from the last 10 years of India VC startup ecosystem who have taken to helping founders as that full-time job.
01:33:03
Speaker
And I said, OK, you know, I'm more a jack of all trades. If there is one place where it's almost impossible to get bored in four or five years, it's going to be in the VC industry because we are in the field of ideas. Right. So we are doing something new every year, like every company. So I can certainly do this as a 10 year journey. And this involves people. This is so early stage that this is not really investing. This is really working with founders. I mean, if you look at what we are doing at Antler, it is to help founders in the first 12 months of their journey.
01:33:33
Speaker
to build venture fundable scale companies, unicorns, decacorns, as the jargon calls it. And do this where Indian founders can actually go global by building goals. And I have a massive passion for technology and design and culture and setting the vision. So in the next three years, we will be working with 100 companies, bar founders, so maybe 200, 300 founders.
01:33:56
Speaker
which means that the way Antler works is to interact with 1,000 founders to fund 200 founders, which means that I'll be actually engaging with 1,000 founders, and nothing gives me more energy in this world than engaging with people, talking on ideas, helping shape up vision, shape up product. And Antler itself built a reasonable team now of nine people, including my co-founder at Antler India, Nitin.
01:34:23
Speaker
who I started talking around the time that I started thinking of Antler. And we decided to do this together as three co-founders, Antler being one co-founder, me and Nitin being the other co-founders. Nitin comes with a lot of fantastic investing experience. I come with a founder experience and product experience. And Antler comes with a global platform experience and very high ambitions. In just three and a half years, Antler now is in 15 geographies. This is the fastest growing VC in the world.
01:34:52
Speaker
And the kind of people that I have interacted with, every single interaction, every single discussion, I have been blown away by the quality of thoughts. So it is probably the smartest network of people in the world right now, and probably the fastest growing VC and the fastest growing platform. Success or failure, I don't think anyone can. It's as much as a success or failure of a company that we fund.
01:35:14
Speaker
But I think heart in right place, mind very sharp, set of people who are all very aligned and I would be surprised if we don't make something phenomenal out of this. So could you give like a quick reverse pitch to founders like what kind of founders should approach Antler and what do you look for?
01:35:34
Speaker
Yeah, so we look for people who are as ambitious as us. So someone who wants to go create great scale companies that essentially means a unicorn or a decacon in the next five to 10 years. When I say unicorn, decacon valuation is the way in which it's assigned, but really because it involves employing thousands of people and impacting millions of customers.
01:35:56
Speaker
So that's the first one, very ambitious founders solving deep problems that customers are facing today. So we love problems either in the field of as core as mental health, created economy work. So we are sector agnostic. So founders just need to use leverage technology and play massive scale games. And third is someone who's looking to do all of this globally to build
01:36:21
Speaker
India, we believe this decade, you know, while the last decade, there are 40, 50 unicorns that have been created, maybe seven, six, seven, eight of them, largely enterprise have been global, right? We believe this decade out of 150 to 200 unicorns that will be created in India.
01:36:36
Speaker
Probably at least 50 to 75 of them will be actually global right because Indian founders today have the access the platform and the Confidence to build companies from India global from day one not as an afterthought but go global from day one So that's sort of what we are looking for in founders ambition to go global some point in their life What are the reverse pitch? I would say One in terms of just we are all founders all nine of us are either creators or founders. We are not
01:37:03
Speaker
Even, you know, the people who have investing background here are all people who have done their own company, right? So we're all founders, ex-founders. So we are super founder empathetic. Two is we have a global platform like no other. No one even with $100 million has the kind of global platform that Antler has.
01:37:22
Speaker
And three is we just want to work with founders in the first six, 12 months, even pre-product. So we don't need any post-product signals. We want to work with the founder when they're ideating, when they're brainstorming, when they're just launching, when they're one week away from launch. We want to work with founders who are just that early, right? So we want to bet on the founder and the market and not as much on the product yet. Those are the three, and that's where I will pause on Antler.
01:37:49
Speaker
But there must be like tens of thousands of people who would think that
01:37:55
Speaker
they have that ambition and they fit into your criteria. How do you whittle down that list? That's a good question. Unfortunately, there is no one specific framework. But because eight, nine of us have all raised VC capital and have interacted with unicorn founders, we know what it takes. So our process is very tight that way. We got 2,500 applications. We just have a program that's open right now.
01:38:25
Speaker
We've got 2,500 applications. Obviously, founders are all very ambitious and are solving real problems, but we'll only be able to take in 15 people one by. Which means the process and the kind of questions that we ask and that somewhere will come out in terms of either what they have done in the past.
01:38:42
Speaker
the way they are thinking about it, the way they are thinking of scale, the way they are thinking of capital, the way they are thinking of culture, vision, there's a variety of, you know, which is why it's a very intense for interview process. And we test all of this at some level, because at the end of the day, it's not just the founder, it's also for us, it's a 10 year journey with those founders, right? And the founders should also get very comfortable that these are the people that are worth partnering with. It's also possible that the founder hates us, right? And it's very fair, we like the founder-founder hates us.
01:39:10
Speaker
But we have not had one such situation till now, at least. Because today, capital is very available. So I don't think capital can any longer be the differentiator. Capital is just a good to have. And we don't want to differentiate on the quantum of capital. That's not our game. That has never been our game. That will never be our game. It is the people that we have. It is the people that the founder will work with. It's the platform that we have, the platform that founders can go global with, which is going to be our differentiator. And yeah, that's the story. And that's why founders should come to us. OK. Got it. Amazing.
01:39:41
Speaker
If you are a founder or an aspiring entrepreneur interested in getting supported by Antler to build the next Indian unicorn, then do check out antler.co slash India to apply for their funding and scaling up program.
01:39:57
Speaker
If you like the Founder Thesis Podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit thebotium.in that is T-H-E-P-O-D-I-U-N dot I-N for a complete list of all our shows.
01:40:17
Speaker
If you like the Founder Thesis Podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit thepodium.in that is t-h-e-p-o-d-i-u-n.in for a complete list of all our shows.
01:40:37
Speaker
This episode of Founder Thesis Podcast is brought to you by Long Haul Ventures. Long Haul Ventures is the long-haul partner for founders and startups that are building for the long haul. More about them is at www.longhaulventures.com