Anand Chandrasekaran
Managing Partner, Celesta Capital. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutivefounderoperator@anandc ↗LinkedIn ↗celesta.vc ↗
He has led product organizations as EVP of Product Management at Five9, Director of Platform for Messenger at Meta, and Chief Product Officer at Snapdeal and Bharti Airtel. A prolific angel investor who co-founded Aeroprise, he has backed over 80 startups before becoming a Managing Partner at Celesta Capital.
1shows
1appearances
18statements
7resolved
5supported
0contradicted
71%fully supported
13said about them ↓ Everything Anand Chandrasekaran said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Chandrasekaran: Startups performing well rarely fail simply from capital scarcity
“I've actually I've not found a lot of examples where truly the company was doing well and deserved to raise capital and couldn't raise capital, right? Like, it largely could be traced to, like, either the cost structures or sort of getting ahead of where they …”
Chandrasekaran: Selling Breakout Startups Early Is One of the Worst Angel Moves
“So I've heard a lot of angel investors who are patient for two, three, four years, and then like exit soon as the company breaks out, right? And I would say this is probably one of the worse things you can do for yourself. And you know, if you sort of look at …”
Consumer DNA is accelerating enterprise SaaS product development cycles
“There is an interesting trend going on and Slack and Zoom et cetera, part of that trend where there is a increasing movement of a consumer DNA into SAS products where the cycles are becoming shorter. There's more iterative product development. More integration…”
Chandrasekaran: Customer care beat commerce and content on Facebook Messenger
“Of all the use cases that we started working on, ranging from content to commerce to customer care, ah, the customer care focus, ah, had the most traction”
Chandrasekaran: Only 10% to 15% of contact centers have migrated to cloud
“In terms of the percentage of this industry that has penetrated and moved to the cloud it's about 10 to 15%. So there's still over 80, 90% that is yet to move to the cloud.”
Chandrasekaran: Bharti Airtel built digital products in 2014 to preempt Jio
“Airtel was, ah, had, had sort of, ah, seen, ah, the coming of Jio, ah, in a few years, ah, and so in 2014 started to kind of preempt that and started to build out products, ah, and bring someone on board who had, ah probably never been at a telco, but I'd buil…”
Chandrasekaran: Snapdeal and Freecharge were too early with e-commerce payments model
“So today, if you look at what PhonePay is doing inside of Flipkart definitely that model has proven to be true, but we were also a little bit early we tried to do it in 2016, 20 17, that time frame.”
Chandrasekaran: Rupeek delivered a 90x to 100x return for angel investors
“It's been really honored, lucky to have been in the company since 2016, and there, I would say about a 90 to a hundred X return for the angel investors at this point.”
Chandrasekaran: Snapdeal cut 70% to 80% of staff over 12-18 months
“It became really hard to kind of right-size the company, and the company's taken, you know, drastic steps reducing, like, 70, 80% of people over a 12 to 18 month period before getting to a place where the company is now doing incredibly well.”
Chandrasekaran: In a crisis, companies should build windmills rather than bunkers
“Obviously you need to conserve cash, you need to sort of get into survival mode but also you don't want to, like, go in a bunker And hide out until everything clears, right? You want to sort of build windmills that actually start leveraging what is going on in…”
Chandrasekaran: Company values must be genuine trade-offs, not platitudes
“One thing that I learned was how values have to be trade-offs, right? So, if you have a value like, oh, you gotta be honest, and you shouldn't cheat people, or something like that, everyone will agree with that, right? There is no Other side of that that is eq…”
Chandrasekaran: Products earn personality only after solving pain points elegantly
“Find a huge A problem statement that's a pain point for your consumers or your business users you know, come up with an elegant solution, and then once you've done one and two, you earn the right to introduce a twist or a personality of your own.”
Chandrasekaran: Investors Make Money on Successes but Reputations on Failures
“As they say you make your money with your successes, but you make your reputation with the failures, right? So honestly, I would say the question I would ask is, if you went through an experience where the founder didn't do well would that founder work with yo…”
Chandrasekaran: Five9 achieves an LTV to CAC ratio of approximately 6
“And so that's sort of so Five Nines LTV over CAC is about six over a period of time.”
Chandrasekaran: Over 95% of India's gold remains unleveraged
“Like, for instance, the gold loan market, again only six percent of India's gold is leveraged in some way, right? About over 95% is not leveraged.”
Chandrasekaran: Fynd exited to Reliance for around $50M to $60M
“And for, I think it was like, around like a 50, sixty million dollar exit. And so, you know, all the investors did pretty well.”
Five9 gave cash bonuses to all employees below the director level
“At Five-Nine we actually did something that I'm incredibly proud of, which is we actually gave a sum of money to all the employees in the company below director level for whom that sum of money would make a huge difference when, so we did, like, you know, no, …”
The other half of the tape: Anand Chandrasekaran's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 2 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ashwini Asokan 7Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3Shailesh Ghorpade 2
Statements about Anand Chandrasekaran, by other people (1)
Exfinity backed Mad Street Den for its pragmatic enterprise AI vision
“One is that we actually both Ashwini and Anand have been really stellar founders. I think what we liked about them is the fact that how they were looking at the application of AI, you know, so AI per se, a lot of funds do it. And every second company that you …”
Every mention by year
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the Neon Show 12
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Anand's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NEON SHOWLEDGER | Managing Partner, Celesta Capital | 1 | 18 | 71% 5/7 | full record on the Neon Show → |