Anu Hariharan
Founder & Managing Partner, Avra. On 4 shows, 9 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderengineer@anuhariharan ↗LinkedIn ↗avracap.com ↗
Anu Hariharan is the founder and managing partner of Avra, a firm providing growth funding and scaling programs for startups. She previously served as managing partner at Y Combinator's Continuity Fund and as an investment partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
4shows
9appearances
71statements
28resolved
19supported
3contradicted
68%fully supported
36said about them ↓ Everything Anu Hariharan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Silicon Valley has erred too far toward founder-friendly boards
“I think we in the Valley have probably erred to on the side of founder friendly, and especially given, you know, companies are staying private longer as almost 10 to 11 years before they go public. I think the board composition really needs to adapt from Not j…”
Hariharan: Founders should only hire sales reps after demos become boringly predictable
“You hire a salesperson when your sales call and demo calls become extremely boring and repetitive because that's when you've figured out what your go to market motion is.”
Hariharan: Slow growth after hiring sales leadership usually stems from product deficiencies
“The most common mistake is you hired a VP of sales, they've cranked up your team, you have all these sales accountants, but your growth is slow. And the root cause of that is not that the sales motion isn't working, your product is not appealing enough.”
Hariharan: Startups with $5M-$10M in ARR should be default alive
“I usually say if you have hit five to ten million ARR, you cannot get killed. You should be default alive.”
Strong user retention, not fast growth, proves network effects
“Because engagement is a sign of network effect, not growth. This is where the confusion comes. Most people think every fast growing has a network effect. It doesn't. The retention is a strong sign of network effect.”
Uber and Lyft have low user barriers to exit during surge pricing
“Now play the same thing on Uber and Lyft. I find the barrier to exit for the user on Uber or Lyft to be really low because I'm not the one choosing the driver. So if I'm on Uber today, and if the prices are surging, I'm going to check lift automatically, and a…”
The global tech ecosystem will become a triangle of SV, Beijing, Bangalore
“I think Silicon Valley will continue to play an important role in the tech ecosystem. However, I do think in the future, you will actually see the tech ecosystem be a triangle between Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Bangalore. I don't think it will, it'll no long…”
Hariharan: Fast hiring before PMF creates resistance to product changes
“If you hire too fast before you have product market fit, now you have a bunch of people whose jobs depend on you not changing the product.”
Hariharan: Iteration speed is the single biggest predictor of founder success
“How fast do they ship? How fast do they iterate? Is the single biggest indicator and correlation to how successful they're going to be, how soon.”
Hariharan: Y Combinator is the only venture platform with strong network effects
“Well, I think YC is the only platform that has strong network effects, and as all network effects have shown, if you, if we mess up
The YC community, that, that is the, because it's, we are, we have this platform only because of the YC founders.”
Hariharan: Point-to-point ride sharing relies on scale economies, not network effects
“So I would say the general ride sharing, we think it's more supply side economies of scale. And what that means is the more drivers you have on the platform, you know, you can make sure that you get a good quality driver within five minutes, but that's where i…”
Anu Hariharan: Brands scale under Sarnoff's law, not Metcalfe's law
“So for brands, we actually think it's more like Sarnav's law. You know, some people argue, yes, it has Some network effect, but not directly incredibly value to the user, which is why the value is not as steep as Metcalfe's law, for example.”
Hariharan: Local execution gives Indian and Chinese startups an edge
“I do think there's a lot of elements in execution that's quite different and local to those markets. That's very different from The U.S. So it's not necessary that a U.S. Player going into those markets has all the advantages. I think there are local advantage…”
Hariharan: Foreign investors provide 90 percent of Indian startup funding
“One interesting thing that I learned in my recent India trip is that 90% of the funding is actually from foreign money and it's not from domestic.”
Hariharan: Indian Series A startups commonly employ 650 to 900 people
“For example, to give you an example, when you look at a series A, U.S. Startup, or a series B, if, you know, you sort of get surprised if they say I have 150 people or 200 people. Like, that's a lot of people. In India, it's quite common to say I have 650 or 9…”
Unit economics matter more in venture capital than in private equity
“At scale, really paying attention to the business levers, and paying attention to unit economics, and figuring out if you're truly building a scalable model is really important, and probably more important in the venture world than the private equity world, si…”
Facebook delayed expanding beyond Harvard for 18 months to ensure retention
“They first launched in Harvard, and there was a lot of craze about the app. A lot of schools demanded that Facebook be available in those schools, yet they did not launch it for almost 18 months, and the simple reason being, the one metric they measured was ho…”
Startups should form growth teams only after hiring 10 to 15 engineers
“I think that once, you know, you have strong retention and you probably have 10 or 15 engineers on your team, it may be time to actually focus on growth.”
Uber's growth team drove Indian expansion by introducing cash payments
“There's a very good example in Uber where, you know, the whole premise was it's a cashless transaction app. And they went to India, which has no credit cards. And the growth team actually ran an experiment by turning on cash to figure out how much it helped wi…”
Hariharan: Startups lack PMF if under 40% of users would be very disappointed
“And if at least 40% of your customers don't say very disappointed, you probably don't have a good enough product. It's just moderately appealing. So we say a rule of thumb is at least 40% of your customers will be very disappointed if your product goes away.”
Hariharan: True self-serve PMF overwhelms a team's inbound response capacity
“If your product is really good, you probably are not gonna be able, you don't have enough people on your team to respond to inbound queries. That's when you have strong product market fit.”
Hariharan: Nearly 100% of YC startups underprice their products
“The second mistake, which we've seen pretty much hundred percent of YC companies do, including the founder who's going to talk after me, which is Josh and Gusto, you should ask him, is they all underprice.”
Hariharan: Raise prices 30% to test whether customers are underpaying
“The best way I often tell you, tell founders to test is increase your price by 30%. And if your customer's not blinking twice, then you probably have underpriced a lot.”
Hariharan: Gusto finished year one with 100 customers and 80 NPS
“So for the first entire year, I was actually shocked at the stat. Can anyone guess how many customers Gusto had? Any guesses? Two thousand? 50? That's a wide range. What's that? One million. Okay, from your mouth to God's ears, we still have to hit a million. …”
The other half of the tape: Anu Hariharan's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 36 times in 15 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 24TS Anil 4Jesse Zhang 3David Rosenthal 3Jason Lemkin 1Henrique Dubugras 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 32
Acquired 3
the Official SaaStr Podcast 1
2025 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- TS Anil, CEO @Monzo: From Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS, To $1BN in Revenue | E1254 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 11 mentions in 7 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
- 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot
- Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: AMA with SaaStr's CEO
- Kirsten Green: The Biggest Challenges Scaling Both Teams and AUM | 20VC #912 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- Arena Show Part II: Brooks Running (with CEO Jim Weber) · Acquired
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 8 mentions in 1 episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy
- 20VC: 2 Levers To Fundraising: FOMO & Leverage and How To Use Them, How To Implement "A Sustainable Growth Mindset" & How To Put VCs To Work For You with Leore Avidar @ Lob
- 20VC: The Fundamentals Of Optimising The Fundraising Process, SAFE's vs Priced Equity Rounds & Why Hiring Is Really A Big Data Problem with Chris Hutchins, Founder @ Grove & Former Partner @ Google Ventures
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Anu's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Avra | 6 | 33 | 71% 12/17 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Avra | 1 | 15 | 50% 3/6 | full record on 20VC → |
| ACQUIREDLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Avra | 1 | 10 | 80% 4/5 | full record on Acquired → |
| SAASTRLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Avra | 1 +1 | 13 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |