The Ledger, every show

“I don't believe that this cost arbitrage is probably going to work for the long run because it's a very small part of the PLF”

“Every founder says I'm going to change the world. B to B mate, nobody changes the world. You're not changing any world. Very simple. In consumer, in deep tech science, yes, you are changing the world.”

“R and D you have 1.5 X leverage India to us engineers. It's not massive. Like let's say not an SF engineer, but somewhere in between engineer, like a Midwest or something.”

“If an average sales guy is able to sell the product without in a lesser time than the previous best sales guy, I have achieved PMS because this is pulled from the customer and average sales guy should be able to set a very non quantitative way.”

“I don't think we fundamentally understand brand marketing as SaaS in India. So whether you look at Dropbox or Atlassian or even Mailchimp when they started, they understood the value of brand marketing. We are more focused on this performance and quantitative …”

“As a founder, at some point, if you want to do M&A and the buyer is a global buyer, You're basically striking off half the buyers if you have an Indian holding company.”

“See, the most hated products in a company are the most difficult to replace.”

“M&A, if you looked at one of the stat by Thomas, only 50 to 60 companies in a year get acquired worldwide with fifty million plus exit value.”

“So those will come, but the commoditized SaaS, I don't think that will have the same allure going forward, both from a founder side or investor side, but I think it takes another couple of years or it will take another couple of years for people to realize it.”

“Nobody's making a dent in the world by B to B SaaS. You're making a dent in your customers' world, your employees' world, your investors' world probably, and to your world.”

“In AI, anytime somebody uses, if there's a high velocity or high performance user, he's basically taking your gross margins down because you have a cost of LN.”

“Bay Area doesn't care so much about as much as revenue as opposed to what sexy thing are you doing today? This is more, let's say Midwest or like more like you go to Chicago or probably even in New York Bay Area. Like today, if you talk SaaS and not AI, what i…”

“I don't think SaaS is dead. The sexiness of SaaS is dead. Now it's gonna move to a, hey, we have to run this business with business principles with the unit economics done right, it's gonna be more grind.”

“Though that being said from a listing perspective, it's easier in India for sure right now.”

“My hunch is at some point when they grow large enough, not the not linear, but the companies and they need more processes, they will have to sort of move up. Like people move from HubSpot to Salesforce”

“There are so many five million dollar companies, which could have been five million dollar companies who have died because they went the VC route and then they realized I'm going to no man's land.”

“What works for a big company, 99% would not work for a small company.”

“I would not over optimize my life choices, saying that I want to delay the death, because I am going to be, so, if you have to delay death, you will say, I'm going to make all the healthy choices in life. I'm going to leave I'm going to quit a whole bunch of t…”

“I fundamentally don't believe in the fire movement. I don't believe that, hey, you retire early and just enjoy life.”

“See two years down the line, we'll not even say AI first. Like, nobody says cloud first. It's the default. Yeah. So AI will be the default first in most of these SaaS and BtoB workflows at all.”

“Between a financial exit of IPO versus M&A, M&A has turned out to be cleaner for me. So most of the exits that I have made were either a secondary sale to the next round of investor Or companies got acquired by other public companies because it's very clean. I…”

“So what Intercom did with, let's say, Changing the per seat to per resolution. And in fact, this morning I was reading the tweet that they're in double digit million growing at 600% year on year just on their AI revenue.”

“You can take out leaves from somebody else's playbook, but you cannot replicate somebody else's playbook because the number of variables which are out there, you might not even know which variable has changed for you, whether it's a temporal change in context …”

“Sales is about process. Marketing is about outcome. Otherwise marketing people through a hundred things they have done. And if you're not getting the outcome, you'll still be enamored by, okay, you saw each here, but was my metric. Sales good process leads to …”

“Half of sales is not you fighting against the competitor. You're just basically fighting against the process of the mind of the customer, at least in a bit market or enterprise deals out there.”

“I don't think we are probably beyond 30, 35% adoption of even cloud in the world.”

“So we ran it profitably for 20 years while you're selling. And the reason also we sold, we had just headroom, sorry, headwinds, which is Against open source, against the overall market itself sort of not growing as fast as we want, and we could see our competi…”

“So in my mind, entrepreneurship, at the crux of it is, hey, I need to build something where I deliver value to people, and I need to capture value out of that. This is actually from Paris' framework, create value and capture value. If you only create value and…”

“IBM has about a hundred billion dollars in revenue today, even today. Nobody considers IBM in the tech industry or a startup industry to be a, oh, this is a great freaking company. Like none of their products, any of the startups use a hundred billion in reven…”

“If I can't hang out with the founder who I've invested in, I will not invest. Because if the founder is not willing to share, he is not open, he is not coachable, he is not adaptable, he is not somebody who's sort of, like, thinks of me as, hey, I respect your…”

“Every entrepreneur who has become successful or sort of company or two companies, they have this sense of imposter syndrome. Shit. Was it luck or was it me?”

“Us now has this new law called section one 74, where you cannot amortize. So your development expenses have cannot come in the P and L. It has to be amortized for 15 years.”