Jan 9, 2023 · 1h 3m · neon-show
Top SaaS startups to watch in 2023 with Alok Goyal, Investor in Whatfix, LimeChat, GTM Buddy
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this in-depth conversation on the 100x Entrepreneur podcast, Stellaris Venture Partners Managing Partner Alok Goyal breaks down the evolution of the Indian SaaS ecosystem, strategies for remote enterprise sales, capital efficiency benchmarks during market downturns, founder evaluation frameworks, and the disruptive potential of AI and developer tooling.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Siddhartha holds 1.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Siddhartha as informed peer 4.8 Guest teaching 4.6 Guest disagreement 2.0 Siddhartha pushing back 1.8
speaking balance: gold is Siddhartha, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 27:17 Alok repudiates the low-cost labor thesis
Alok explicitly states a contrarian position, rejecting Siddhartha's assumption that India's SaaS success stems from cheap labor or cost arbitrage.
Hardest push from Siddhartha ▶ 19:03 Siddhartha drills into the financial reality of US go-to-market hiringSiddhartha directly challenges Alok's optimistic view by highlighting that $3-5M seed rounds cannot sustain $200k+ US executive salaries.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 29:05 Alok explains ecosystem compounding over developer headcountAlok dismantles common developer volume assumptions, educating the host that only a tiny elite slice of engineers and a compounding advisory network drive real venture success.
Siddhartha holds their own ▶ 2:32 Siddhartha lays out granular SaaS milestones and revenue metricsSiddhartha establishes deep market fluency by citing exact ARR progression numbers, public market comps, and ecosystem history.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Siddhartha as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Siddhartha pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Highlights and Key SaaS Themes | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Siddhartha demonstrates solid industry context by rattling off historical SaaS data points including Zoho's billion-dollar revenue and Freshworks' ARR and NASDAQ listing. Alok warmly elaborates on the historical compounding curve of Indian SaaS without any friction. | |
| Sponsor Announcement: Prime Venture Partners | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Following a brief sponsor mention, Siddhartha prompts Alok on portfolio patterns and check pace. Alok openly shares the Whatfix origin story and how his initial SMB thesis was proven wrong by the founders. | |
| Macroeconomic Downside and Startup Valuation Realities | 6 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Siddhartha presses on macroeconomic headwinds and questions how seed-stage startups can afford US go-to-market teams given high executive salaries. Alok politely pushes back, arguing that remote inside sales from India can successfully close enterprise deals up to $100k. | |
| Sponsor Announcement: Zoho Payroll | 5 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Siddhartha asks about valuation corrections and the feasibility of India adding dozens of centimillion ARR companies. Alok outlines shifting multiple drivers from pure growth to net burn ratios and capital efficiency. | |
| India's True Advantage: Ecosystem Compounding Over Cost | 4 | 7 | 5 | 2 | When Siddhartha attributes India's historical SaaS success to low-cost remote labor and marketing arbitrage, Alok directly challenges the premise, taking a contrarian stand that cost advantage is negligible and ecosystem compounding is the real driver. | |
| Stellaris's Evolving SaaS Investment Strategy | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Siddhartha inquires about Stellaris's evolving thesis and quickly prompts Alok on exceptions like Postman and Hasura. Alok candidly admits past cognitive biases against developer tooling and infrastructure startups out of India. | |
| AI Disruption and Developer Tooling Opportunities | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Siddhartha asks about generative AI commoditization and other compelling categories. Alok delivers an expansive monologue on why AI represents a foundational generational shift rather than a mere application feature. | |
| Founder Evaluation Frameworks and Founder Spikes | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Siddhartha explores how Stellaris evaluates founders at the raw idea stage. Alok explains their founder spike framework, emphasizing learning agility over rigid experience templates and closing with investor humility. |
Statements from this episode (26)
Ahluwalia: Freshworks could reach $1B ARR within three years
“I think soon, three years down the line, they might be touching the one billion dollar ARR mark.”
Goyal: Indian SaaS founders can build any software model today
“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…”
Goyal: SaaS market premiums only reward category leaders and top followers
“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…”
Goyal: Large SaaS companies cannot be built without US success
“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 …”
Goyal: Whatfix has 65 Fortune 500 customers
“Today, they have 65 Fortune 500 customers, right? Ah, they sell, their landed revenue in enterprise accounts is north of a 100,000 dollars.”
Goyal: Whatfix beats WalkMe across every SaaS metric
“There was WalkMe in that segment. But today, WhatFix beats WalkMe just in every SaaS metric one can think of.”
Goyal: Stellaris reviewed 4,000 deals and backed eight companies
“Last year, we saw about 4000 deals and bagged only eight companies last year. That's all we did.”
Goyal: Market downturns correct valuation multiples before earnings
“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.”
Goyal: Late-stage venture funding will collapse in 2023
“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.”
Ahluwalia: $10M startup funding rounds will not return until 2024
“And if the ten million rounds have disappeared in starting 2022, and I think they'll not come back till 2024.”
Goyal: Whatfix executes $100,000 deals completely out of India
“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.”
Goyal: Pre-Series A Indian startups should avoid hiring US-based GTM teams
“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.”
Goyal: Profitability has replaced growth as primary driver of US SaaS multiples
“The biggest driver of multiples today is whether you're profitable or you're not profitable, right? Sentiment has changed.”
Goyal: Late-stage SaaS needs Net New ARR to Net Burn >1
“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.”
Goyal: Number of Indian $100M+ ARR SaaS companies will grow exponentially
“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.”
Goyal: Great SaaS companies are not built on cost advantages
“I personally don't even believe in the cost advantage. I don't think great SaaS companies are built because you have lower cost.”
Goyal: Only a thin slice of India's developers matter for SaaS
“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.”
Goyal: Stellaris passed on Postman's seed round due to lacking understanding
“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…”
Goyal: Stellaris now splits diligence 50-50 between devtools/infra and apps
“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.”
Goyal: Bulk of Software Incumbents Will Fail to Adapt to AI
“Some incumbents will get their act together. Bulk of the incumbents will not get their act together.”
Goyal: Developer tooling will create massive value due to developer supply shortage
“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…”
Goyal: Incumbents Like Seismic and Highspot Will Fail on AI Enablement
“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.”
Goyal: Founders succeed through exceptional spikes rather than lack of flaws
“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 …”
Goyal: Early-stage investors must evaluate founder learning agility over domain knowledge
“I think we need to judge people for their learning capability, not their Prior knowledge of the problems and the solutions to those problems.”
Goyal: VCs are just capital conduits, not world-changers
“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…”
Goyal: Whatfix would have died if they followed most of my advice
“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.”