The Neon Show Inside the mind of Jumbotail Founders, S Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina
In this episode, we chat with Ashish Jhina & Karthik Venkateswaran, co-founders of Jumbotail, a 5-year-old online wholesale marketplace for grocery and food items.
Jumbotail serves more than 30,000 neighborhood stores (popularly known as kiranas in India) in the country with its full-stack B2B e-commerce model, which includes warehouses, a last-mile delivery supply chain network, and a fintech platform for payment and credit solutions to store owners.
During the podcast, they talk about breaking down a problem to its finest version and then solving for it, they also talk about how capital has wrongly been seen as a golden solution by most entrepreneurs for solving all challenges at a startup.
Notes -
02:44 - Karthik & Ashish’s backgrounds as a Major in the Indian Army and Apple farmer respectively
08:55 - First-principle thinking applied at Jumbotail
13:57 - Core-Engineering Principle: Build for utility, not for the use case
19:24 - Problem statements solved by Jumbotail, for Kirana (Grocery Retailers)
23:18 - Capital cannot be an only moat, where “unit economics” are extremely difficult to figure out
24:32 - Rapid scale-up pushing towards $250 Mn
27:25 - Raising first-funding from Nexus Venture Partners
38:16 - Identifying your co-founders at a mature-career stage