Episode 32: Miten Sampat- How to build and scale tech ventures?

My next guest on The One Percent Project is the incredible engineer, inventor, investor and operator Miten Sampat. He kicked off his career in Silicon Valley, then headed strategy for Times Internet, India’s largest digital products company with 600 million monthly users and is now building CRED, one of India’s fastest growing payments apps. He is also a graduate of Virginia Tech.

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In this conversation he talks about:

1. How his education at Virginia Tech shaped his thinking in analysing and operating new ventures.
2. His views about the Indian Internet Consumer and the impact of the internet in Tier-3 cities in India.
3. His experience building his first startup: What he learnt and why it failed?
4. His experience as Chief Strategy Officer at Times Internet which reaches 600M active users in India every month?
5. What has he learnt from investing in early-stage startups?

Key Take-Aways:

1. Underlying conditions will keep changing so capabilities will keep changing and therefore, and user behaviour keeps changing- This is the fundamental principle in building and scaling new ventures.
2. If there are many gatekeepers between you and your customer, the chances of mortality for your startup are very high.
3. If you move when there is broad-based consensus, then the magic is already sucked out. It's already been priced in. Therefore, you have to be right about something ahead of it being a general consensus.