Plumbing for the metaverse 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

• His adventures and misadventures in IT
• Hailing from a south Indian family that emphasized education
• Moving to Bangalore to continue his education in RV College
• His attraction to build products, more with an intention of having fun in doing it
• His first product in the education space
• Understanding the need to think like an entrepreneurship and getting sponsored for an entrepreneurship program at Stanford
• Starting his company Scapic - with AR/VR as core technologies and being acquired by Flipkart
• His approach to identifying problems to solve
• Shiny toy syndrome: to pick something that looks cool; these may not be a venture worthy idea
• Choosing a problem that matches your expertise: your and your team’s complementary skills; this helps accelerating to market
• Select entrepreneurs: going after massive market opportunity
• Lousy team, great market, market wins
• Great team , lousy market, market wins
• Great team, great market - nonlinear outcomes
• How to think scale
• Visualizing the finish line: that is not a goal post; focus on the next milestone
• The importance of obsessing over the first cohort for a startup
• The value of creating a playbook after validation and further experimentation with the second and third cohorts
• Differences between B2B and B2C solutions
• How a decentralized squad model, working with local partners and having an engineering focus for differentiation would help scale and localize, as needed

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 organisations 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.