The Ledger, every show

“I still continue to believe that there is no software company to be built unless you can be successful in US. And I hope I'll be wrong soon, and I want to be wrong actually, genuinely on that, but not yet. I don't think in 10 years I have seen that ability to …”

“There was WalkMe in that segment. But today, WhatFix beats WalkMe just in every SaaS metric one can think of.”

“They're just rethinking how sales enablement should be thought about using AI. And I don't think that the seismics and the high spots of the world are going to get there. I know that's a very strong statement to make, but I just don't think they will.”

“There are multiple companies in our portfolio, which had existing investors in the company. They decided not to Put more money behind those companies and despite their signaling, we have actually come and led the rounds in those companies also.”

“LPs as well as GPS. We have all realized that all numbers are good, but there's only one number that eventually matters. And that is DPI, right?”

“I think they're okay taking sometimes even lack of performance in a particular fund, but they're backing a certain strategy. What they don't like is sort of macho behavior where you said I will do X, but you end up doing Y because then that's not consistent wi…”

“My hypothesis or my projection, Siddharth, is that in the next three to four years, you will see at least ten billion dollar plus exits or IPOs in SaaS. All built from India.”

“I think 2023 is going to be a very hard time. What that means is that as public comms correct, or have corrected, I'm sorry, you will see that the late stage funding is going to go for a toss totally.”

“The biggest driver of multiples today is whether you're profitable or you're not profitable, right? Sentiment has changed.”

“I think of this as an exponential curve, Siddharth, not as a linear curve. You build one today, you build three tomorrow, you build nine the year after, and then 27 the year after. So, I think of it as an exponential journey and not a linear journey.”

“Some incumbents will get their act together. Bulk of the incumbents will not get their act together.”

“Now when a Swiggy goes public at a more than a ten billion dollar valuation, You will find people thinking much, much bigger than what they used to in the past. So I think just the bar of the ecosystem gradually changes, but I think we are progressing there ve…”

“We do not believe consensus is a great way to make decisions for venture deals. We also believe that nobody should have a veto. No single individual is so smart. Across sectors that they know what the world will look like in eight to 10 years data suggests tha…”

“There is no difference between taking an AI application to market versus taking the applications to market that used to exist in the past as well.”

“Even in SAS, you will find that in every category, there is like a massive market leader, which will be the outlier, 40, 50, 60% market share. There'll be two or three others, anywhere between 10 to 20, 30% kind of market share, and then there's a long tail. A…”

“I would argue that if they try to attempt and build a U.S. Go-to-market team with U.S. People, that is a very high-risk strategy. It can work, but I think it's too high-risk a strategy in my opinion.”

“At the later stages, the metric actually I worry about the most is net new ARR added divided by the net burn in a quarter. And if that ratio is more than one, you're healthy. If that ratio is less than one, you're not so healthy.”

“I personally don't even believe in the cost advantage. I don't think great SaaS companies are built because you have lower cost.”

“And not because we have four million developers, et cetera, because I would argue in those four million developers, it's only that very thin slice at the top is actually what matters to these product companies.”

“Is why I left Postman. In fact, if I may admit, I couldn't even understand what they did at that point in time. I looked at it at the same time as others did in seed stage. One of my colleagues was very keen, actually, that we do it, but I couldn't even unders…”

“Software productivity just has to go up. There is no other way. Or we will not have the software. Right? So the demand exists. Supply doesn't exist. And so the supply has to scale faster. And the only way supply will scale faster is when developer productivity…”

“I think we need to judge people for their learning capability, not their Prior knowledge of the problems and the solutions to those problems.”

“You know, if WhatFix had listened to most things I had said, I think they'll be dead five years back. The reason they're successful is because they apply their own judgment, and I'm not saying that everything I've said was wrong, but we sit at a distance.”

“We took a call right at the beginning that we will be organized by sectors. And these are fairly hard gated boundaries of sectors. If I do SAS, then I do SAS. When I find a FinTech deal, I'm actually going to send it to him. I'm not going to do that because qu…”

“We lead all our investments. So we are not trying to tag along somebody else's judgment or conviction in those situations.”

“If you look at Mama's journey, we came in that company in the second half of 2018, when they were just about 10 crore run rate in five years, they crossed 2000 and listed”

“Usually about 80% or so, maybe three out of four or four out of five actually do sail through in our case, which is, which goes back to the principle that by and large, we want to back the conviction of the deal team.”

“Today, you don't need a recipe from India. I don't think there is a kind of company you can't build from India today. You can build for the SMB. You can build for the enterprise. You can build classical sales led. You can build product led. You can build class…”

“Today, they have 65 Fortune 500 customers, right? Ah, they sell, their landed revenue in enterprise accounts is north of a 100,000 dollars.”

“In every down cycle, initially it's the multiples that correct, and then it's the earnings that correct, while the multiple stays the same.”

“You go and talk to Khadem and Vara, they'll tell you their 100,000 dollar deals, they get completely end-to-end executed out of India today.”

“At least we believe, Siddharth, that there is no perfect founder. There is no perfect human being, actually. And people succeed despite their flaws. People succeed because there is some spike that they have that actually covers up for all their flaws. So, our …”

“We are actually just a conduit for the money supply chain. It's somebody else's money goes to somebody else. We just happened to put our signatures on that checkbook. We think we change the world. We don't. It's clearly the entrepreneurs who change the world a…”

“There were some very high quality LPs that were keen on coming in the fund. We talked to our existing LPs as well. And collectively, we all felt that the fund will be a lot stronger by having them as part of the platform than not having them. So we ended up ex…”

“When we backed Wordfix, and this was an early 20 17 investment for us, our spreadsheet math on the exit size was we put six hundred million at that point in time, saying that that's the farthest at least we could imagine.”

“2018 when we did Mama Earth, Our exit assumption was a seven hundred and fifty million dollars valuation for the company.”

“Last year, we saw about 4000 deals and bagged only eight companies last year. That's all we did.”

“If I look at our own diligences in infra and dev versus apps, I think it's roughly now 50 50, which was practically zero or 10% at best in the past.”