Shivakumar Ganesan
Co-Founder and CEO, Exotel. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorengineer@shivku ↗LinkedIn ↗
Shivakumar Ganesan is the co-founder and CEO of Exotel, a cloud communications platform launched in Bengaluru in 2011. Before building Exotel, he founded Roopit and held product and engineering roles at Flipkart and Yahoo!.
1shows
2appearances
52statements
12resolved
3supported
3contradicted
25%fully supported
Everything Shivakumar Ganesan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Mumbai Angels Refused Exotel Clawback Relief After Pivot, Says Shivku
“One of them was that there'll be a clawback if it hit 500 customers. After about three 50 customers, we shifted to enterprises. Naturally, The number of enterprise customers is not as important an enterprise as the revenue itself, right? So, so we didn't actua…”
Ganesan: Generative AI on call audio makes CSAT and NPS obsolete
“So actually voice of customer or customer feedback is no longer necessary. You can now run generative AI on all these calls and you'll automatically now know earlier you used to ask for CSAT and NPS. All of those things are not required. You can actually prett…”
Ganesan: AI will eliminate 80% of contact center seats in 3-5 years
“So broadly, I think the total number of contact center seats will come down. My estimation is that it will come down by about 80% over the course of three to five years. By the way, timeframes are actually anybody's guess. As you know, in AI, things are changi…”
Ganesan: Enterprise MRR will 5x despite 80% drop in contact center seats
“So you start with a hundred seats, you go to 20 seats, but you do AI conversations, your bill will now increase from, let's say you started with one lakh MRR, you'll actually go to about five lakhs MRR. So so we find ourselves in a really interesting situation…”
Ganesan: Contact centers will never reach 100% AI automation
“But some of these older processes, I don't ever think they will become hundred percent replaced by AI. You will have people who will be needed for complicated questions, for overseeing the bots, for teaching the bots, for compliance purposes sometimes to take …”
Ganesan: Global AI players likely cannot capture Indian AI market
“I also think that it may be practically impossible for the global AI players to capture the India AI market as well.”
Ganesan: US AI firms will ignore cost reduction and chase AGI instead
“Even at the current inference costs I think that the savings in the west is so high that there will be, there is actually no motivation for American companies to further reduce inference costs going forward. So I think they're going to just forget about this c…”
Ganesan: Startups can disrupt Exotel by targeting left-behind SMBs
“Because of our enterprise focus, we actually now have left a lot of open space in SMB. And so if you are now thinking about getting into our Actually, the way to attack Exotel is to start with SMB and then grow up and then the cycle just keeps on continuing.”
Companies With 40% Growth Are Trapped Between Viability and Venture Funding
“One of the strange things about running a 40% growth company is that you can't shut it down and go home. Because it's still growing customers are still buying, you're, you still know that you're adding value. You're even making profits. So why would you just l…”
Ganesan: Founders Building SaaS, CRM, or AI Should Go to the US
“I also think that if you're building CRM, if you're building SaaS, if you're building software, you should go to the US. In fact, one could also argue that if you're building AI, you should go to the US as well.”
Ganesan: Market timing matters far more than founder ability or grit
“Market and timing is probably very important, much more important. Then how good of an entrepreneur you are. I think you might be the best entrepreneur in the country, but if you are working in a small time or if you're starting five years too early, this is n…”
Exotel Is Exploring an IPO in India, Says Founder Shivku
“We are actually talking about the possibility of taking the company public in India, and I'm afraid that actually that might come true”
Shivku: 90% of Blume's Exotel Seed Term Sheet Was 'Nonsense'
“The kind of terms and conditions that I had then accepted. Looking back, 90% of the term sheet was nonsense.”
Exotel Initially Earned More Per Ola Ride Than Ola Itself
“So I jokingly tell people that there was a period of about a year when we were actually making more money out of an Ola ride than Ola itself. So roughly they were doing about 2.2 phone calls per ride because nobody knew how to use this app, some new flashy, sh…”
Ganesan: 35% to 40% growth is a difficult "valley of death" for startups
“This 40% or 35% growth rate is a difficult place to be. Because it's neither big you're not growing earth shatteringly well, but it's not bad at all, right?”
Ganesan: Ameyo brought ~₹100 Cr revenue when Exotel was at ~₹120 Cr
“So I think they would have probably brought about a hundred crores of revenue. And we were at about one 20 ish crores of revenue at that point in time.”
Ganesan: Revenue drops after most acquisitions due to cultural and process friction
“In most acquisitions, what happens when an acquisition happens is that the revenue actually tanks because new people are coming in, processes are changing. There is uncertainty culture is changing.”
Ganesan: AI voice bot collected ₹3 crore for NBFC with zero humans
“One of our voiceboard agents collections agent about two, three months ago, I got to know that has actually collected almost three crores of rupees in a month for one of the NBFCs completely automated.”
Ganesan: Offering voice AI at two rupees per minute yields zero margin
“While it is practically possible to offer a two rupees a minute even today, actually there is no zero margin left for the vendors at this rate.”
Shivku: Top 500 Companies Hold 80% of Market Value in India
“First of all, in almost all markets, more so in India 80% of the value of that market lies in the top 500 companies.”
Ganesan: India stops being price-sensitive in 20 years at $15k GDP
“So I believe that that will happen when the India per capita GDP crosses 15,000 dollars right now. I think we are one generation away. So India is a price sensitive market. You have to do cost innovation. This is the, I'm connecting this back to the AI part. S…”
Early VCs Rejected Exotel Claiming India's SMB Market Was Too Shallow
“One of the difficult moments for me was that we went to the market trying to raise at that point in time, and most of the investors actually turned it down saying that the SMB market in India is quite shallow.”
Exotel Masked Up to 100 Million Phone Numbers Across India
“So it becomes a given now, but we actually literally safeguarded. 10 to 15% of the country's phone numbers. At that point, then about 80 to a hundred million for unique phone numbers we had. From going into the hands of people whom you never really intended to…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Shivakumar'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 | Co-Founder and CEO, Exotel | 2 | 52 | 25% 3/12 | full record on the Neon Show → |