Asia Tech Podcast Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 51 – Chitransh Sahai – Founder & CEO of GoComet – Transparency and Information Symmetry
Chitransh Sahai is shockingly insightful and mature beyond his years. If you speak to him for just a few minutes, it all starts to make sense. A Director and co-Founder of GoComet, Chitransh is also a graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi…as are the other GoComet co-Founders. Most of them have known each other since their university days, which makes them all well-educated, intelligent and comfortable with one another. The GoComet team is formidable, indeed.
GoComet is also not the first company they founded. While they were still at university, they noticed some anomalies in the way proptech companies dealt with the hyper-localness of real-estate agents. The team built a company called Plat, which was quickly noticed by Housing.com and was acquired soon thereafter. Not a bad outcome for a bunch of kids…They made some money (not enough to retire, according to Chitransh), took a bit of a break and started thinking about the next company to build. He reflected to me that, “Building companies is like a bug…”
Not surprisingly, Chitransh and his co-Founding friends leaned on the experience and learning they got from building Plat and went back to building something new. Initially, they started an import-export company to learn about the inner-workings of e-commerce. They were buying products in China and selling them in the United States on Amazon’s platform. This lead them to the challenges of the international freight market. With the knowledge that technology companies are fundamentally about building transparency and information symmetry, they set out to attack the international freight market for the following reasons:
- The market is huge and offers a clear revenue model from day one.
- The space is extremely opaque and was not using a lot of technology.
The international freight market mechanism is also very complex and provided them with some very difficult problems to solve. If they could create the proper solutions for these problems, the resulting company could be huge.
This was an incredible conversation.