India

“In healthcare, there is no commonality at all. In India, it was always a retail play where you had to go to doctors and individual consumers and go and convince them that you're worth the salt and build a brand. And our business is not about only going to cons…”

“We took trip to US and saw 30 illicit companies in human resources. We saw none in India.”

“In India, the early checks have never been more than two or three CR, right? Past probably four, five years earlier, it was very difficult for an entrepreneur to raise maybe two, three CR as a first check. Now it's possible to even raise higher, a million doll…”

“I feel that in the West, for example, celebrities are very conscious of the brands that they endorse and they spot. They have teams who are actually handling their brand and looking for match between the celebrity brand and the product and service brand that t…”

“There was also a clear demonstrated business need, because I saw a lot of the teams that I worked with in India struggling to get back to work once they'd had children, because they'd migrated to these cities.”

“And the third biggest lesson for us was that in India, education is seen as dignified, but care is not. Ah, so care is seen as the helps, helps job.”

“When we started, there were no unicorns. Today we have, you know, at last count about 10 or 12 of them in the country.”

“When we started, there were probably 120, 150 angel investors. At last count in India today, there were about 4000 angel investors.”

“We've seen how this entire journey has moved from the average age of the entrepreneur moving from 24, 25 to 31, 32 today”

“Our feeling is that proprietary deal flow is not a very large chunk in this country, which means everybody gets to see everything.”

“India from the B to B side is not such a deep market. It's very shallow, and therefore, if they have to build a 20, 30, forty million dollar opportunity, they will have no choice but to go out and explore beyond the Indian shores.”

“When we started, we used to get about 50 opportunities every quarter to look at. Today we get close to a thousand, you know.”

“We were, as I said, the third or the fourth fund in the country doing this. Today there are about, 40 of us who are actually doing pre-series A tech and tech investments.”

“And it's because of new behavior creation that incredibly long, large long-term value gets created in the world. And India is almost the antithesis of it. All the large-term value you're trying to create is in Me Too's. Right? By pumping more money and trying …”

“We don't want to be shooting for less than five X funds. In India, things take time, so I have to adjust for a time factor that things will take two years more, so that hits your IRR. We're measured by IRR. And so, don't want to take an easy way out and say, t…”

“Those risky bets are the ones which are going to make the most money. Like my LPs tell me, historically, you were shying away from that. It's probably true. It was basically, you didn't know what's going to work, what's going to take off, so you're hedging, ma…”

“Because, you know, if, when Lee used to cut them from tiger, He's literally the only person in the world. If you think about it, you can say no, no, if Lee didn't, somebody else would have. I say bullshit. I say basically if Lee didn't, it wouldn't have happen…”

“I think we'll have a dozen of them by 20, 25.”

“The top end of the market in India, anything to do with luxury has remained small.”

“See the reason I think the reason Ola won in India versus Uber, they never, they were never a copy of Uber. It was an original idea. That the OLA team had that there are a million tourist vehicles in India and I can aggregate them.”

“In our mind, the root cause of that is that this industry suffers from a one size fits all problem. Where the product as well as the credit assessment criteria are the same regardless of what small business you're running. We think, and the more people we meet…”

“So my view is the four-wheeler game is, is pretty much played out, and that's why we're seeing sort of slowing growth on the four-wheeler side. So it's really going to be three-wheelers, two-wheelers, new kind of forms of vehicles, and so on and so forth. And …”

“In a country where, you know, we have four hundred million plus, over four hundred million daily actives, only about seventy million Indians actually, ah, today transact now with e-commerce sites, right? So, ah, you know, it's still less than 20% of the active…”

“This year we'll certainly see a third actually very soon you'll hear about a third SaaS unicorn.”

“Because of the cost structure in India, right, and also because of the need, a lot of our companies end up being full stack companies, right?”

“My view is India is going to create thousands of SaaS companies. Obviously you know, quite a number of them will become very, very large, but we can build, you know, hundreds of companies that are worth a hundred million dollars each in the SaaS space.”

“India has a hundred million people that have two wheelers, right?”

“We are probably, you know, we'll probably be at one a year for a few years, but then, you know, somewhere around, 20, 22, 23, we'll start seeing, you know, several SaaS unicorns every year, right?”

“India has a three hundred billion dollar SME credit cap, right?”

“I think India could have 10 unicorns in the education space. Today we have one called Baiju's. I think we're gonna see many more companies in the education space, simply because there's a massive, massive need.”

“Actually, if you look at the data last year, there were more B to B tech companies founded than B to C tech companies in India, right?”

“And you know, they, we are very much on track, I think, to you know, have a hundred unicorns in India by twenty-twenty-five.”

“And this was a company that we invested in when there was only one center in Whitefield, and now it has 150 centers throughout the country, probably the best in the country in quality, and what they hope to change.”

“In India, in particular, it is a rush to whoever you can hire fast, cheap for that day and get things done. And therefore, there's very hard to enforce standards. Therefore, it's very hard to enforce teaching and learning standards.”

“Unlike the U.S. Where each child is put into a cookie cutter And it pre-defines position. In India, each child who is unique may be considered a naughty or mischievous child for a while before they are put into a category of dyspraxia, dyslexia, Asperger, auti…”

“Coming from a conservative country like India, it is very important to have a laser focus as far as monetization is concerned, so that sooner you are self-dependent, the sooner are you, ah, not waiting for an outside infusion of funds, the better it is for you…”

“It is the second most trusted brand among women in India, and that is not to be dismissed as a minor achievement.”

“Most young girls today don't know that they can use the internet to learn, to upgrade their skills, and to access opportunities that can really get them closer to their dreams. Most young women think it's, think the internet is for WhatsApp or Facebook.”

“We had just released a TV advertisement, ah, talking about our scholarships program, and then we were inundated with calls, had to set up a 40 person call center, received 15,000 applications from every nook and cranny of India, and we realized what sort of th…”

“India, you know, McDonald's at that time was growing at hundred stores a year, and other chains were also growing, so there were a lot of American companies which were looking, looking at India to invest in, and grow their businesses here.”

“Chalo is doing exceptionally well, managing over 10, 12,000 buses already. A huge space in India. Buses are a sixty billion dollar market as opposed to, you know, cars, which Uber or Nola, which is like a ten billion dollar market.”

“We believe that the blue collar jobs market is a very interesting area. We believe the initial few attempts that were made were too early and maybe, you know, not enough people had devices and connectivity at that point. Now I think that, that that market is w…”

“In India, you know, three hundred million commutes happen every day.”

“There's a first mover disadvantage in many cases when you're trying to build companies in India.”

“The four-wheeler form factor is not the right product for a country like India, which is why we focused on shared mobility applications and solutions using two-wheelers, three-wheelers, and, ah, buses.”

“No matter how much you're funded and how many people you have, it is going to take two to three years to get the right product market fit. So you can't really speed that up”

“We were just compiling our quarterly report and I can tell you that last quarter we received 472 new investment pitches.”

“If you look at the size of e-commerce is only 24 to thirty billion in India. And if you look at just one company in China, ah, called PDD, it does sixty four billion of GMV.”

“One is seed investments, which are which are minimum check size of 500 K to a million dollars. And then we do Series B onwards, which is about, you know, close to five million to ten million dollars. And then we do large ticket transactions. So we don't typica…”

“Actually, we have leapfrogged China in one area that's in UPI because we were able to get all the 21 banks together to work with each other and make all payments, you know, almost frictionless and also the cheapest way possible.”

“There are, you know, four hundred million people who buy products in, in China compared to, like, maybe eighty million in India now.”

“India is is following I think more closely the Chinese market than the US market, you know in terms of business models for sure.”

“In India over the last two and a half years to three years, we have built a portfolio of about 10 companies so far, and we look to further build this portfolio into 20 to 30 companies and in, in China, RZ has more than 60 companies that are invested in, in US …”

“Africa is probably 15 years behind us, you know.”

“So I think there can be at least 10 to fifteen billion dollar companies in India in the payment, in the fintech space in different, you know, categories”

“Whatever happens in another country might be an interesting thought to look at, but it will not be a blueprint for how to fix an issue on the ground here, as no No thing that, nothing that's happened in, in India will be a blueprint for another country in the …”

“India has less than 10,000 cardiologists. For 1.3 billion people, which unfortunately is going to be the, you know, heart attack capital of the world. That is, to achieve even the same depth as the US does, right, of penetration, we would need 10 times this nu…”

“India has Essentially enrolled the country of Singapore every week nonstop for six years in a row, or the country of Australia every month nonstop for six years in a row to get it to, you know, over a billion users now.”

“Most underrated or I think almost stigmatized concept in India is taking help and asking for help. We are not good at asking for help.”

“I don't think a company in e-commerce could have scaled as well. If it was in 2007 in India, it would have. There were early signs, you know, the yatras in the, and the make my trips were the early signs of transaction level booking, but the e-commerce came in…”

“We have three people in the Bay Area right now, and we have four people in Mumbai, and four people in, in Bangalore. So it's an 11 member team, very small. We are India's largest homegrown fund, managing about a 1000000000.6.”

“If you look at the coaching center market, right? If you think, think about it, 80% of the people in the coaching center market are in, in, in remote areas, right? They had to come to cities to study and there's no coaching centers there, right? So like, For t…”

“If you take out, I think the unicorns in the country, if you take out the external funding today, I don't know how many people, how many of them will stand up on their feet. They can't. That to me is a big, big, big, big red flag.”

“Their repayment rates are far better than multinational corporates today in India.”

“IT salaries haven't grown at all in the last 20 years, right?”

“The people, that's the first e-commerce purchase, but from there to go buy online, right? You know, take the risk of buying online when you have very limited amount of money would be a far away transaction. But then consuming content where you don't pay anythi…”

“India doesn't have a middle class boom. It, however, has a huge lower middle class boom. Right. A huge number of people entering at 20, 25,000 rupees monthly income.”

“I am saying a startup, it starts next year, which will probably prove a product market fit, fit in less than two years from now, three years from now. At that point, maybe you don't need to go offline. Maybe you don't need to go and knock the doors of Supersto…”

“So, strategic sales, right, of course that can be a good exit, but in India, you know, typically the sale value or the multiples have been low compared to, you know, global standards, but that can be a good exit if a company has not raised too much capital, bu…”

“Big basket has half of the grocery market in the country, in spite of many other people being in the same business.”

“These seem to be the broad areas where there is a lot of headroom and digital penetration is only one, two percent in almost all of these areas.”

“But in India, everything is ground zero, other than probably retail and transportation, where there is some degree of maturity.”

“Given that we have two, three trillion dollars of GDP likely to get to five trillion. The size of our digital GDP still is very, ah, miniscule. So we feel that we are not going to be opportunity, ah, constrained.”

“Retail, as you know, is, ah, six hundred billion dollar industry out of two, two trillion plus GDP.”

“To win a market, software is not going to be the only thing that will work. We keep talking about, at least in logistics and SME, we talk about full stack solutions where you have to own the journey of the buyer because it's an unsophisticated buyer. If you th…”

“We think that while that model is, is definitely, you know, working for us across multiple companies we have made investments in, the model of building in India for the APAC market is also very, very interesting.”

“The middle layer is is where I think India lacks quite a lot, and the U.S. Is very, very, very, has a very, very thick middle layer, which is the VP and the directors, you know, especially in product sales and engineering. There are a lot many more Shelly Sand…”

“Walden was the first VC firm, ah, to actually create, ah, set up a India-focused fund along with Japanese investors Niko, a thirty million dollar fund investing one to two million dollars in Indian companies back in 96.”

“It's very difficult to build a product for top-tier India, and then re-customize it for middle India, because the customer profile is significantly different.”

“In fact, this is probably the first book, which actually It takes you through an inner journey and, you know, some of the thought process behind investments which are public in India. Obviously, this is the first book by a VC in India.”

“The first bet we took was a very promising company. You know, fundamentally it made a lot of sense. It was called G. Grahag. Great entrepreneur you know, thinking product first, but in an ecosystem which was very hard, ah, to actually roll that product out to …”

“At Helion, we chose to go the vertical commerce path. We, Felt we had missed on the horizontal commerce opportunity, and we were backing companies which were specifically focused on fashion or consumer electronics”

“People do not buy fashion the same way they buy food. People are looking for a lot of selection, which is not available with few shops around you. When people in India buying online, especially fashion, they're looking for discounts, which are not available un…”

“Now we just recently even launched in Indonesia, right? Because we realized this problem is not just in India, but in a lot of other developing markets. And Indonesia is one of the larger ones out there. And in the last two months, we have the same kind of sch…”

“Even among developing peers, participation of women workforce in India is the lowest across the world. 70% of women in India don't work after marriage. And that number is above 80% for large cities.”

“Let's say in FinTech, we saw a first generation of companies in India that were largely doing, Sort of a digital transformation, right? Digital lending, digital payments, and things like that, but I think we are now going to see a new generation of companies w…”

“I think India has seen far more mortality of hundred X growing companies versus they've seen steady growth.”

“To give things into perspective, India was doing three billion dollars worth of GMV for the full year, while China on its 11 11 singles day did seven billion that year itself.”

“98% Americans at some point in time in the last one week alone have consumed a podcast. We are creating a podcast as we speak, but 98% of India doesn't even know what the word podcast means.”

“I think many of these companies will choose their niches, their group of customers, and cater to their needs much better than banks, and create very valuable companies not just in the next three to five years but companies that will endure and become very larg…”

“The number of companies that have scaled today is probably 10 times more than what it was five years ago.”

“As Sequoia Capital India, we invest across a variety of sectors, including consumer, financial services, FinTech, payments, education, enterprise software, and healthcare. And we would have more than 10 companies across each of these spaces.”

“Agritech startups are usually focused on the top 20% of Indian farmers that own about half of the land in the country.”

“Dairy is four percent of India's GDP.”

“Omnivore has been around since 2011. We are India's first agri-tech focused venture fund.”

“You know, that the era of the generalist VC is over.”

“Close to 30% of the GDP comes from the MSME sector. And it employs about over a hundred million people, right?”

“When I compare our relief packages compared to rest of the countries globally I think as a percentage of GDP, we need to do a lot more.”

“Only like only about 21% of it is employed by what you would call small and medium enterprises. most of the people are running what you would call a single entrepreneurship or what I call solopreneur. And then there is some employment at the large enterprise …”

“Is it reversible? I think it is reversible. Will it take time? I do think it might take time.”

“95% of the workers, people who are employed are in the unorganized sector.”

“And we were both, we were all three very clear that if India does not build an ecosystem where a large number of our people start to create healthy enterprises enterprises that can create jobs for five plus people we will be facing a very large challenge both …”

“What we did realize was there was a significant market in Series D and Series C stage, which at that time we called as a growth investing in a VC market. And honestly, we did not find even a single dedicated fund which was focused on that market, and we decide…”

“At that point also it was a very high percentage, but in India it was only two percent. People were not aware of low cost passive investing. That market has now grown from two percent to almost six percent.”

“Agriculture is a global play, and I always think that India, and this has been played out in other industries, is the, is a really great sandbox where, you know, we have really good tech talent, That not much money develops world-class products, and that's app…”

“One is in imports and agri inputs and how that kind of goes in. It's again a 50,000 crore or 70,000 crore kind of industry.”

“Companies that are going to go on to become billion dollar companies will have to navigate some of those quirks, and just a pure India solution You know, may not work as well in another country. So your technology, your product has to kind of take into account…”

“Grocery retail is one of the largest segments of retail in the country almost five hundred billion dollars.”

“So I think in the coming years businesses of all types will be very amenable in India to paying a SAS company subscription fee for using their product.”

“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.”

“Like in India over the last five to 10 years there have been probably 20 to 30 companies that have hit a billion dollar valuation. And globally, there is like just around 300 to three 50 companies.”

“And in the last 1015 years, the sector has really come out very strong. What started off as a few thousand, you know, or a few lakhs in size is now over two lakh crores in sector size, right?”

“India, the banks are not terribly inefficient in India. And there are 30, 40 times more banks in India, maybe at least 10 X of the number of banks in Brazil, which are high quality. So in the middle of that, I think without being able to articulate how you are…”

“I think our, out of the 12 or so countries we are quite active in, I think India and Brazil are our top countries by far.”

“We have three neobanking investments. We are close to making a fourth one. A couple of them in Brazil and in other markets, right? But we have none in India.”

“18 months back, there was not a single company called neobank in India, and today we have at least 25 to 30.”

“If you look at our focus, we are very deliberately focused on global emerging markets. You know, as, which, as I mentioned in India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and GCC, we do not really invest in the US or Europe.”

“The stock has gone up about 2.5 times since they went public. So it's been the most successful digital IPO in the country in the, in, at least in the last decade, if not more in terms of how the stock has sustained and performed on the back of company's perfor…”

“Almost 90% of the meat is sold through local butchers or the wet market, and there is no focus on hygiene quality, a disease, et cetera, and there is also a taboo In terms of, you know, going to the local vet market and buying your meat. This in a country wher…”

“The company has attracted top tier institutional investors after a round, and yeah, it's on it's on a good track to be the next unicorn out of the country.”

“The reality is there's going to be a global workforce of skilled you know, tech workers, and I think it really stands to benefit the Indian startup ecosystem because India is one of the best labor forces when it comes to deep steam training, engineering, and b…”

“I do fundamentally believe in both the Indian and US ecosystems that there's going to be more faith-based, community-oriented subscription services that supplement a lot of the ad-based models or commerce-based models That we saw the last 10 to 15 years.”

“I am personally hopeful that in my lifetime I'll see a trillion dollar market cap Indian company founded in India and supported by Indian venture capitalists, but that's not going to happen in the next 10 years.”

“I do think one of the problems is the media and the ecosystem hasn't done a good enough job of promoting those role models and kind of putting them into curriculum K through 12 and really celebrating those successes versus taking them down at the first opportu…”

“And so I think audio is another platform where the next generation of Alexa, Google voice will probably be created in India. And there's going to be a lot of innovation happening, both enterprise and consumer in the voice space in the next 10 years.”

“I actually predict there will be in India in particular not just more unicorns form. Cause I think the concept of a unicorn is a little bit myopic. It is a private market mark, private company valuation that a investor puts. To me, the sign of true ecosystem s…”

“Now, actually, if you see broadly Siddharth, the ecosystem in India for venture debt, it's very underpenetrated. If you see in the West, it's a very, very mature market. There's a significant venture debt to venture equity presence. Whereas in India, it's stil…”

“And I think now they are doing about a hundred crores. A month booking, which is phenomenal. It's perhaps the second largest revenue generating company in the country.”

“I strongly believe that in the next five, 10 years we should see multiple five billion dollar, ten billion dollar revenue companies coming out of India in education.”

“So reports say that test prep market in India is a eight to ten billion dollar market.”

“I think 6.5 million people graduate out of colleges in India every year. But the number of number of new white collar jobs being created every year is maybe, maybe less than 10% of that.”

“In U.S. The tech companies are catering to a very thin sliver of the market because of the existence of public and private infrastructure of education. In India, the entrepreneurs are creating, are really creating their infrastructure from bottoms up full stac…”

“It was a confluence of smartphone penetration increase faster internet because of Jio payment infrastructure being large enough and payment penetration in the country being large enough. So because of these reasons, there was already there's already a set infr…”

“And as remote work becomes the becomes a new standard the job, the software jobs in India will actually increase even more.”

“There are twenty-two million kids in the country who pay more than 30,000 rupees a month to school fees.”

“They have more than 5000 coaching institutes now using their platform across India, it's, you know, been built in less than two years, right, so really growing fast, right, and of course the COVID tailwinds are helping them.”

“Applying similar sort of thesis to the Indonesian market, because from a tech wave perspective, they're probably one or two years behind India in terms of sort of the entrepreneurs and what they're building from the business point of view perspective.”

“So I think India will be, you know, second or the third home ground for the next set of companies built on technical insights.”

“And now with the success of Postman in India, I predict that as Postman succeeds, it goes public, people will learn that playbook, more people will leave. And if those other factors can exist around it, then you will see a blossoming of true technology insight…”

“I think what's fundamentally changed is the appetite for risk. There is no stigma attached to failure. People don't worry about failing. People don't worry about getting a job if this doesn't go anywhere.”

“You cannot say I'm building the best video conferencing company for India or in India, because big, big, big, best video conferencing company in India needs to be the best global video conferencing company.”

“To do enterprise technology in India, you're going to need a very powerful US presence.”

“I think US it's already like a 12 to 15% of the VC market size. In India that will be like almost five to six percent only so we have a big headway on that side itself in terms of the expansion of the market”

“Tiger is doing investments in India and all of that in in India also. So since 2006, two thousand even then, but it was all, like I said, public markets and late stage. And, So Lee was focused on you know, rest of the world and China and all of that. I think, …”

“This was a time when most academic institutions were you know, kind of owned and owned by people from real estate, political backgrounds, You know, manufacturing, and all of those kinds of things, and these are not people that were really focused on education,…”

“The call that we took was that to have high quality learning outcomes most people need support and assistance. You know, so our education system in India doesn't really equip us to be good self-learners.”

“And the same thing is going to happen in India as well as we adopt technology more and more, as the transformation happens, as AI It takes, you know, deeper and deeper route across industries. People have to learn or you know, they will find themselves out of …”

“If you look at the education spent in this country, beyond formal education, that runs in like tens of billions of dollars, right?”

“India is not a do it yourself market for that, right? Investors still want to hear a voice. They still want some help when they're making an investment. And I think that somewhere we under emphasize the value of the angel investor, right? Because it is a large…”

“I think we both play a complementary role because this is not a winner-take-all, right? This is a market where there will be multiple players.”

“My view is that what I would love to see over the coming decade is the nice blend of the two where you are coming up with that kind of global product leadership capability as you are building kind of product first companies and marry that up, like build your e…”

“I think, you know, you will see several companies, several IPOs for companies being built out of India in the coming, you know, let's say, 12 to 24 months.”

“40% of people in India when they book a train, they don't get a confirmed seat, right? And their waitlist keeps moving”

“I think every time, you know, I hear this, I'm like, dude, you know, it's going to take 10 more years than what people imagine. But the thing is, this will be the largest market in terms of unicorns in the world when that happens, right?”

“You know, on the revenue divided by total capital raised metric you know, we would be in the top five companies in India. I'm pretty confident of that.”

“And it actually grew to seventy million users in India at a time where Facebook and Twitter had only like one million users in India, right?”

“You're not going to compete with the Google in the Valley. You are absolutely not going to be able to compete without, you know, 10 times, 20 times the capital that you get to raise in India, right?”

“This was 2014, 15, and nobody in India was paying for B to B tech at that point, especially enterprise deals like deep tech like ours.”

“In India, Indian companies have historically taken India mark for 20 years for an IPO.”

“All of them because enterprise tech by nature, and we always say that we work in the Indo-US corridor because companies can actually test their products in India. They can actually achieve scale in India. They can maybe learn from Indian corporations. They can…”

“Today, if you look at the SaaS space, right, it is there are some 10,000 SaaS companies in India and maybe 50,070 thousand companies globally.”

“See in India, unfortunately you can't really build a SaaS business out of India, you know, and it is just our, you know, the Indian, the way Indian enterprises or the small businesses think I don't think they're ready yet to really embrace SaaS in a big way.”

“Logistics in India has been, for example, you know, a very, very hot space in the sense that, you know, we spend close to about 14% of our GDP on, on logistics costs. The developed countries spend about six to seven percent.”

“And we believe that the Southeast Asian market is a good transition market between India and the U S because one, it is a different market than your home market.”

“That is going to happen.”

“So actually we processed 10 by 10 meter pixel. We divided the country, India as a country into 10 by 10 meter pixels. And we tagged that pixel that which, what is the story of that pixel? In 2017, which crop was there? In 2018, which crops were grown? What was…”

“In the smartest product, we have mapped 18 states in the country, and we refresh data of every plot of those 18 states every month. So that is, that accounts to 80% of the farmland and the 80% of the farmer, but we don't have the information who is the owner o…”

“There are roughly 50 companies in India, SaaS companies in India, who have this is, I'm talking data from the Bain report, which recently came 50 companies, SaaS companies in India, which have ten million dollar ARR plus, and most of them are, you know targeti…”

“Currently in India, there are four to five SaaS companies, which are more than a hundred million ARR, which includes Freshdesk, IS, iSertis, Droa, that have all moved to US”

“Look at India as a sandbox where you can build products. You can experiment products because there's so much complex problems to solve here in agriculture. And once you solve this problem, you can scale it globally. And if you can build the product, which can …”

“So we are not only working in India with the banks. We are also working in Southeast Asia and did some work in US as well, where the banks are giving our loans to the farmer and this opens up the black box, right?”

“It's estimated that some two hundred million people have been pushed into debts only because of their medical bills.”

“We've been operating in only the tier one cities, but you know, we really want to reach out to the grassroots level, and that really is our focus right now.”

“In India, there were no crowdfunding platforms really.”

“We're looking at countries that are very similar to India. I think those are the countries that have a lot of potential. So that's where we are going to focus, but right now our focus is, is primarily India.”

“And our view was there'll be hundreds of more than a hundred million dollar each brands created over the coming, you know, 1020 years in our country.”

“Tanmay Bhatt would definitely be cate because he has multi-platform presence. He's, I think, qualified on, on all platforms. He gets a good amount of viewership coverage across all platforms. His PR is very strong. He's been featured on all of the biggest like…”

“Then I joined as one of the proud team members of the first supercomputer from India, from SIDAC, and that was my dream job.”

“So in a hospital, it's about one third the cost of a mammography machine, mammography tests, sorry, which basically can be around 1500 rupees in India.”

“So now we have it in 15 cities in India established in multiple, like Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Mysore, Bhuvaneswar, Dehradun, all of these places, Savopal, all of these places we do have the test available.”

“Here is a problem which is taking away 90,000 lives in India alone and more than 600,000 lives around the world when breast cancer is a completely curable type of cancer, right?”

“I fundamentally believe that given where India is, the size scale, the broken supply chains, the fact that there is still lack of transparency, a whole lot of sectors, this whole area of digitization of business processes is going to be massive.”

“In a way, it is an environment where, The founders tend to be older founders. They tend to be founders who worked in a particular industry for a long time and then come up with propositions within that industry. And therefore what happens is these tend to be v…”

“Finin as you well know, is the first new bank to be launched in India from the consumer side.”

“And today we have customers, teams, and offices present across Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh Berlin, UK, US, and of course, India. And we have customers in, you know, another 20 countries. So with more than 50% of our revenue today coming, you know, from outside our ho…”

“And automating anything in India and Indonesia is far tougher than doing it in say Europe or US, right? Because the infrastructure is slightly better.”

“In India, the issue is not demand. It's really supply of credit.”

“Where India has largely been successful is at the top level, which is building those applications with SaaS layers and all those things. So what has changed in the last few years is even in the past, it was predominantly SaaS. Now we start seeing a lot of com…”

“If you want to become a large, big powerhouse of a software company out of India, ah, still you need to take, tackle the topic, ah, and have this, ah, go to market feature, the U.S. And, as well, in, in Europe, in the foreign part of your, the game plan, rathe…”

“I think it's not about capabilities. It's not about the skills or capabilities. It's about the ecosystem, which is there or exists, the problem exists or not there. And that's why it is a lot more easier when you are based in the US where you have a lot of thi…”

“I still feel that they use less of tech still. they are still, predominantly, of course, they use this, make the sales online, and they make it available online, and all those things, but I am really looking at how you enable more tech in this consumer brand…”

“The bad part is we did not realize the idea was in ed tech, in HR tech and B to B. If you're doing all these three, you're dead in India, right?”

“As, you know, GDP per capita goes up, as the country becomes richer, more and more staples will become, you know, processed, et cetera.”

“My, but my sense is that India will be producing in 10 years or less, India will be producing one hectocon a year and at least five decocons in a year.”

“Practically they met every single investor in India for over a span of eight, nine months.”

“So my sense is that at least one-third of them will be global enterprise software companies, if not more.”

“And in US, I think there are companies which can grow from zero to hundred million revenue in three years. And I expect a lot of those companies to come out of India as well in coming times. So the speed will become very different than what it is today.”

“If I work with 20 lakh people, and if I do the same thing in US with 20 lakh people, I will be valued more than a billion dollars already, right? Because the size of the company and the multiple that you can get, right? Here it will be lesser.”

“Today we are the largest in the country when it comes to onboarding and background verification.”

“So now you look at 15 crore people. And if you do 20,000 rupees per person, that's roughly thirty billion dollar of spend that is happening.”

“Finding pregnant women in India online is very hard because women don't share their pregnancy status. So even Facebook doesn't know that it's very hard.”

“The immediate new thing that we did was by month two, we were already talking to doctors and hospitals, and we were the first brand in India to actually create stores on store in store, the shop and shops inside the waiting areas of hospitals, right?”

“So Prathlipi Comics, I think, is now the largest online comic player in India.”

“In fact, I'm pretty sure, like, I will take, I will give good odds that in the next two years we'll be the largest comic player, like, that's it, like, online, offline, whatever. Both in terms of titles, in terms of revenue, in terms of users, everything.”

“So in Whitehead Junior, for example, I chose to go to the U S very early into the journey into the company. Typically people would like build a company. Spend many years, then eventually go to the US, then go, like, I was so clear that that anything we can cre…”

“Today we're doing about 16 and a half thousand meals every day to doctors and nurses, and in, in about eight cities all over India.”

“In Indian context moving from a customer who is paying zero rupees to who is paying one rupee is a very big move. But from one rupee to a hundred rupees is not a big move at all. If a customer has taken out his wallet and he is ready to pay one rupee, he will …”

“It's both a mix of both. I do think one has to, I mean, diversification is the only free lunch in finance. And if you're not diversifying you are taking more volatility, more risk than it's necessary. And having everything tied to India is fine. India is a fas…”

“Unfortunately in India it is tough to invest in certain spaces because the capital which will be needed to support those investments is not available, right? So, so for example you would want to invest in a lot of companies in in the deep tech space, right? Or…”

“So I, in my view, it takes 1015 years to build brands in India. And if you don't stay the course, right, your compounding doesn't happen.”

“What was happening in 1415 was enterprise SAS, you know, built from India and sell to the globe. That story was really not panning out. Companies were, you know, struggling even companies who had raised a lot of capital were really struggling to that.”

“The electronic health record space in India is, is non-existent. And even today it's kind of non-existent, right? The players were trying to do do things, but neither the patients really care nor the doctors care and the healthcare institution as such do not h…”

“Now I think, you know, we probably in 1908, 1909 when we started from India gaming perspective, we were maybe a decade too early. You didn't have proper internet. You didn't have the devices.”

“And in the next two, three years, you will see that accelerate significantly. So I think that bell has been rung, and now you're going to see a long queue of quality companies. And also a lot of groundwork has happened, right, over the last decade. Investors h…”

“Similarly, I think the Play Simple deal will show a lot of Indian entrepreneurs That gaming is coming of age in India. Also, Indian gaming companies can tackle global opportunities, scale globally, and also create immense value over a fairly short period of ti…”

“So I think in the next three to five years, you will see in-app being the predominant source of revenues for gaming in India.”

“In the U S a Gillette razor cartridge sells for three, three and a half dollars. So Dollar Shave Club could come in at one and a half, two dollars with 80% quality and build out a scalable business. India, a Mark III cartridge you get for 80 bucks is like 1.1 …”

“We always believe that there is an inevitable digital transformation that has to happen in India because their supply is so constrained. Unless we find efficiencies with technologies, we can't reach all the people that are in need from the, you know, very shor…”

“The smartphone penetration in India is about 50% now, which means that 50% audience within Indian ecosystem is still not using the smartphone.”

“And if you look at India's population, 40% of India's population is below 18. 40%.”

“Our first fund, I returned to .7 X. Our second fund, we are returning close to four X. We've already returned to X. And so I know I, we are in the highest performance category. In the top 25, if not the top 10% of fund returns that we have generated from India”

“Literally only of all the funding that has happened in India, 1.5% has gone to women who are CEO founders. They may have been co-founder in some capacity, then the number goes up by a little bit, even then it's not that much, but women CEO is 1.5%, right?”

“These guys are going to change the way marketing and branding is perceived in our country. There's a new wave coming set. This 20 to 2530 wale jo creators hain. These guys are going to be rock solid and going to put, put a place you know, in the new age market…”

“A lot of consumer companies are moving all of their, there is to, Buy everything from China. They're now starting to make, move their manufacturing to India. US companies, which have previously been from China are now buying from India.”

“In fact, if you look at the last 10 years of India, there's been very little new infrastructure has come up. Most of what we do is some form of replacement of something that is already broken, or they want to upgrade you know, to meet the latest pollution nor…”

“I think building in India for health tech was probably a tough thing to do five, seven years ago. It's probably a relatively easy thing to do right now.”

“I think we introduced Calvary Counting to this part of the world and we certainly are the number one in that space even now”

“So today, obviously we are the largest in K-twelve and YouTube in India.”

“It, we were operating at almost 500 rupees per hour, which was very expensive for India.”

“We were the first company in India to start with live interactive classes, live classes, which today is obviously mainstream, but we are doing this, you know, even this talk on this, but way back in, it was a very new concept, especially for teaching and learn…”

“And if you look at unicorns in India, in China, in US, right, almost all of them you will see have raised their first round or raised some money from founder angels in their early round.”

“It's like today we have what? 40, 45 unicorns in India, right? It's possible that by 2035, we may have a thousand unicorns.”

“Within the 12 days that we opened our pre-launch, we had over a 100,000 users signed up before even our product was out, right?”

“So I think within a couple of months, we should be able to reach that one percent mark”

“Today, less than one percent of India invests beyond fixed deposits, which is a very sad number to look at, right?”

“What we saw in the market was less than ten million users were part of the crypto economy in India.”

“It's the first company to be backed by A-sixteen Z in India.”

“If you run the battery at 40 degrees, which is the case in most cities in India, most years, most time of the year, the battery is only going to last half as long.”

“And the reason why e-rickshaws are so penetrated in India, you know, almost two and five million e-rickshaws exist across India, is because someone figured this out very early, that this particular form factor works for commuting, ah, you know, taking people f…”

“In four wheeler, ADAS is already very common and level three autonomy is going to happen. Yes, level five will become very hard in India, but level three is easy, relatively. Those things are going to happen if you are an electric by default vehicle.”

“Almost 70, 80% of vehicles which are sold in India are financed vehicles. Hardly anyone buys them in cash, right?”

“Auto industry constitutes around eight percent of India's GDP.”

“One of the advantages of being an India-centered, India-located fund is our processes are agile. So we don't have to go through a lot of cycles and take investment committees elsewhere.”

“One mistake I haven't made too often, but has happened, is to invest in the idea and not the team, because it's not, there are many ideas, it's all actually, ultimately it's about execution, India, particularly India is about execution, and we cannot be wishfu…”

“So there is such low hanging fruit in India, just in process efficiencies for enterprises as well as for B to C type businesses.”

“We are unique in the world in the sense of having large public digital infrastructure and population scale. So we have 1.3 billion people with a biometric unique ID, right?”

“In terms of split, I would say about 65% of revenue comes from India plus Southeast Asia. The rest of the 35% comes from the rest of the world for us.”

“So I think three to four years, you will see a whole more companies probably I don't know, 25, 30 companies IPO-ing from India in the US.”

“There are fewer than, you know, 10 companies which are above 50 mill ARR in India, pure SaaS businesses”

“You know, if you look at what the pandemic did, it was, it rendered a billion people unemployed. And I think given India's size, the largest percentage of the unemployed people happen to be in India. Probably like two to three hundred million.”

“I would not have predicted the growth of Flipkart and Amazon in India because like every other naysayer you know, I also felt that the last mile delivery problem was a very difficult one in India where, you know, you could not trust people with packages and, y…”