Blume Podcast

In this episode, Sajith Pai, Director at Blume Ventures, chatted with Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-Founder, Group Chief Executive & Executive Vice Chairman at Fractal Analytics. From being wary of becoming an entrepreneur to succeeding as one for 22 (almost 23!) years now, Srikanth shares the incredible story of starting Fractal, trusting bright 20-somethings in their initial rounds of hiring, and building a people-friendly company.

In conversation with Karthik B. Reddy of Blume Ventures, Aniruddha Sharma of Carbon Clean talks about how he bunked IIT exams to walk the lanes of Sand Hill Road, the personal tragedy that influenced his decision to build in the climate tech space, and what made him stay the course even when there was no venture backing.

In our maiden X-Unicorns episode, Arpit Agarwal sat down with Niraj Singh of Spinny to discuss his journey from a small town called Daltonganj to becoming a unicorn founder of an online used cars marketplace. After two failed ventures, Niraj hit on his (literal) billion-dollar area with Spinny. But how do you know your idea works? How do you keep going without the validation of venture backing? How do you make sure you hire for success? Tune in for the answers.

When first introduced into venture parlance, the definition of a Unicorn was strictly limited to a privately-held company valued at over $1 billion within a decade of its existence. In 2013, this definition applied to only a few Indian companies such as InMobi and Flipkart. It is now becoming clear that India is birthing new variants of this mythical creature - the zebras, the hippos, and the rhinos of the venture kingdom and we're calling them ‘X-Unicorns’. In this series, we celebrate founders who play it by their rules, taking unconventional, or even long-drawn-out paths to get there.