Startup founders formula with Sai Krishna

In this episode, Sai Krishna, a serial entrepreneur, who calls himself a metaverse plumber, loves creating interesting applications based on emerging and maturing technologies. In this conversation, he shares

• How a decentralized squad model, working with local partners and having an engineering focus for differentiation would help scale and localize, as needed
• How to build an organization to realize the vision of the founders
• Cadence of 2 weeks or 12 weeks, multi-skilled squads
• Willingness to learn and time to feedback
• A founder’s feelings related to exit decisions
• Founder’s formula: have fun, optimize for joy
• A founder’s job is to make everyone in the team to reflect back and feel the impact of their work
• Metaverse: hype or old wine or something substantial?
• Why 3D printing technology underdelivered on its promise
• How finances (and capital)  are critical to help new technologies become practical and increase wide adoption
• How commoditized solutions can trigger a race to the bottom affecting the survivability of a company
• Impact of new technologies on the carbon footprint
• Oblivious, brash and corrective : the three stages of companies operating to exploit new and emerging technologies
• Tips for anyone looking to get deeper into the metaverse ecosystem
• Step1: understand what variables you want to optimize for
• Financial gains, Wealth: building a company is probably the hardest
• Joy of learning being part of an emerging space
• Solving a problem that itches you
• Find a reason to resonate with the cause
• The market also needs to be ready
• Would you see it as a decades long journey, 15 hour days.. Yes, not just as an option to make quick money
• Cobbling a team of like minded lunatics..
• If he chose to be in AI because AI is in his name!

Sai has spent more than 9 years in building deep tech startups. He was an early believer and pioneer in the Metaverse, and built & backed startups in the domain. Notably:

- His Virtual & Augmented Reality venture, Scapic was acquired by Walmart/Flipkart

- He backed a venture studio for the Metaverse, Cope. Studio, which was acquired by Polygon/Matic

- His marketplace for Metaverse assets, Reality Tools, was acquired by MotionPage

Sai currently leads Flipkart Labs, where he focuses on new deep tech initiatives such as Camera (Augmented Reality) & Firedrops (NFTs & Web3) in the Walmart Group. He is currently an advisor at Polygon & Polygon Studios. He is alum of Stanford University Graduate School of Business, recipient of the Indian National Startup Awards and a fellowship recipient from Ondeck. 

He's been awarded by organizations such as Facebook, the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards, Wharton and IIM. Sai has delivered 80+ keynotes at international conferences, IIT-Bombay, NSRCEL & more. 

When it's not about work, Sai is quintessentially south Indian, with an affinity to dosas and filter coffee. You can reach out to Sai at oho@5saitec.com on anything around building moonshots.