Founders Unfiltered

After completing his MBA, Chaitanya started working as a management consultant in the US. There he learned about product management, user experience, and how large organizations function. He really enjoyed the work but didn’t like the travelling lifestyle and decided to quit to do something better. He came back to India and decided to startup in the consumer tech space. He ran the business profitably for some years and eventually exited the company and decide to remain in the startup ecosystem by working with Yourstory and LetsVenture. Finally while working at Tapzo he met his co-founder Ankit who shared a similar background - coming from a Middle-class family, studying engineering, and later founding a startup. While buying furniture for his new home, Ankit found out purchasing mattresses is a very costly affair. In search of a solution to buy a cheap mattress, eventually led them to Wakefit. Wakefit has been profitable from the start and remained completely bootstrapped for the first 3 years. For more details visit: https://ajuniorvc.com/podcast/

Last fortnight, Groww raised $83MM to become a unicorn, becoming the seventh fintech in India to do so. Join us for a behind-the-scenes peek at the A Junior VC piece "Can Groww Help Indian Investor Wealth Grow?" Article Link: https://ajuniorvc.com/groww-fintech-unicorn-india-mutual-fund-stocks-startup/ More info on: ajuniorvc.com

Sai grew up in Hyderabad and developed an interest in building things right from his high school. Studying at IIT Kanpur, he tinkered around with different ideas that didn’t work at the time. But taught him the importance of overcoming failures to grow. After graduation, he got a job at Zynga, a company making video games for social networks. It was there he learned the Art of Product Management and Game Design. His experience at Zynga had taught him that gaming works at scale only when Data, Device and Payments, All three are present. In 2016, UPI was launched and bridged that last gap. This insight gave birth to MPL, a mobile esports platform offering a plethora of games to users. Today, MPL is India’s largest mobile gaming platform, with 50+ games and over 60 million users in India. For more details visit: https://ajuniorvc.com/podcast/

Last fortnight, Urban Company raised $190M, propelling it to become a $2Bn unicorn, a record-breaking 13th for 2021. Join us for a behind-the-scenes peek at the A Junior VC piece "Can Urban Company Makeover India's Gig Economy?" Article Link: https://ajuniorvc.com/urban-company-clap-services-unicorn-gig-economy/ More info on: ajuniorvc.com

Seeing the rise of Indian talent in foreign movies coupled with their interest in film and media, Ashwin, Aditi, and Anirudh decided to come back to India and do something in the space. They started with a production studio creating films but soon pivoted to a content creation company as they witnessed the growth of social media. To build a community serving multiple interests, they created multiple brands under Pocket Aces with a unique content thesis for each. Today Pocket Aces is India’s leading original content company with over 700M monthly views. Their clients include all kinds of companies - large MNCs, FMCG brands, startups, and OTT platforms. Join us to learn how Ashwin, Aditi, and Anirudh built Pocket Aces to help solve boredom and provide entertainment to all of us. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast

Abhimanyu's interest in tech began in college where he met his co-founder Anshuman. The two of them worked together on many projects before joining as full-time engineers at young high growth startups in the US. They discovered how hard it is to scale a talented tech team. They started Interview Bit, a website that helped people prepare for tech interviews using high-quality content. But they felt there was a bigger problem at hand to be solved. Scaler Academy is a virtual university that acts as a focused guide with mentors, relevant courses, and the correct learning environment. Abhimanyu talks about how important it is for companies to hire the right talent as bad hires hit the hardest in the tech domain. He explains the hiring process and suggests ways how both companies and employees should go about it. Join us to learn from Abhimanyu about building talent-dense organizations. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast

Last week, boAt announced a ₹50Cr (~$7MM) fundraise from the venture arm of a major global technology company, on the heels of a ₹750Cr ($100MM) PE investment 3 months ago. boAt democratised audio technology in India. Will it be amongst the handful of Indian hardware unicorn startups? Listen ahead to know more!

After college Prateek got a job at a big bank. He enjoyed the job but often felt like a small cog in the machine. Witnessing the early Indian startup wave closely, he decided to leave his job in 2014 and startup. He launched a B2B marketing platform that after 4 years got acquired by an Indonesian firm. He moved to Indonesia and fell in love with its culture. The country’s budding startup ecosystem and sense of community led him to start Kitabeli, a social commerce app. Social commerce takes advantage of people’s behavior of sharing purchases and offers in their friend circles. This significantly reduces the logistics cost and the CAC as compared to traditional e-commerce. Join us to learn how Prateek built and grew Kitabeli to facilitate commerce in Indonesia. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast

Link to detailed article: https://ajuniorvc.com/nazara-gaming-ipo-esports-mpl-dream11/ Last week Nazara Technologies became the first gaming company ever to be taken public. This INR 583 Cr IPO was oversubscribed 176 times by investors. Even before a 21-year-old Nitish Mittersain could find his foothold with his fledgling startup, he found himself in a $660K debt after the dot-com crash. Nazara.com v1.0 was kept aside, and Nitish resorted to selling bulk SMS packs to stay afloat. But the wheels of his fortune were turning, and by 2005, Nazara had landed a $1.5 MM seed investment and Sachin Tendulkar as its brand ambassador. The journey ahead could only be in one direction - upwards. But there several more twist and turn that Nitesh had to content with. What did Nazara do to eventually spring back again? Was it just COVID, or did the demographics have a role to play? Will it be able to compete with the new-age fantasy gaming industry and come out on top?

Sumit grew up in a town full of small business owners. His family’s nudge towards STEM education was considered the unconventional path. While working as an equity analyst, Sumit discovered a unique problem in the fintech space - Indians have very high physical asset ownership, yet asset-backed lending makes only a minority of total borrowing. In 2015, he started Rupeek to fulfill this unprecedented demand. He believes Understanding customers is an ongoing process and one should keep running experiments to learn. Today, Rupeek serves over 1 lakh happy users across 25+ cities. Join us to learn how Sumit got to know his customers and built Rupeek. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast