The Exchanges

Q that's how they scaled. And they did it with multiple products. So they were good at creating zero to 10 playbooks with multiple products simultaneously, right? Now companies have, like, a single product which they are going from zero to hundred mil era journey. The salaries have become also expensive, so the India-US divide is becoming, at least on the developer side, the divide is less and less every year.

A And Siddharth, I'll be a little bit contrarian. I actually think that the reason we are successful in SaaS from India is not because of any inherent India advantage. I personally don't even believe in the cost advantage. I don't think great SaaS companies are built because you have lower cost. At least the lower end of the market, if you think of companies as a pyramid, and you look at the lower end of the pyramid, that could not be tackled with a US go to market. Therefore, we could build Me Too companies from India, scale, we had the time. Today, actually, the speed with which new companies come in a space is just scary, right? I mean, initially, it's a race to build the best products, right? And building the best products requires the best talent, and that best talent doesn't come cheap, whether in India or in US.

AI assessment note: “I personally don't even believe in the cost advantage.”

Q And what are the things that you think are outdated that you will not touch?

A Great question. I think if largely process automation, not that I will not back, but I'm going to ask myself probably five times as many questions as I did in the past. I'm also of the view that Most software will become invisible in the future, in the sense that historical model is I go to a software, The new model is software comes to you. It comes where you are. Whether you're in Slack, whether you are in your email, wherever it is, it just comes to you. And if somebody builds a software where as a user I have to go, again, I think about it differently. I'm also of the belief that there was a time where you could push software purely top down. You go to a CIO and say, you need this, and users, guess what, you need to use it. You may not think as a user, it's beneficial to me, but guess what? You have to use it, right? I think that era is going to become much harder. You need to have a value proposition at the level of a user and not just their managers or managers or managers or the leadership. And again, Siddharth, every sentence I'm making, there'll be exceptions to it too, right? Ours is a business of exceptions in the end, but in these categories, I'll think actually a lot harder.

AI assessment note: “I think if largely process automation, not that I will not back”

Q and education, such as MyKate, Quizzes, PlanetSpark, Bold, and Clip. To know more about Prime, visit primevp.in. And you already have, right, WhatFix is one of the poster childs from India helping large fortune, 500 enterprises in US, right, with implementation of SAP, Salesforce. So is there a similar pattern that you are imagining for your portfolio that they are known by this thing in the US market, like WhatFix?

A Two, three comments on your question, Siddharth. Number one, 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 build a large successful SaaS company with India or Asia as a market. So I think you need to be successful there, number one. And which has been, at least so far, Primary thesis element for us as we back SaaS companies. WhatFix in many ways has defied the patterns, and if I may confess, when I backed WhatFix, my thesis was very different than what WhatFix has turned out to be. I should also confess that WhatFix was championed not by me, but initially by my analyst in Helion, right? I was not even prepared to meet WhatFix, in fact. I thought this doesn't make any sense. And my analyst continued saying, Alok, can you just meet them once? And I declined that also until one day he gave me a demo himself because I refused to even spend half an hour. He gave me a demo. I love the demo so much. I said, I got to meet. And in my last 10 years, the fastest check I have wrote was Wordfix. In three days from my first meeting, I wrote the check. My thesis there was that software is becoming complex enough that you need software to use software. But I thought that this is goin…

AI assessment note: “WhatFix in many ways has defied the patterns”

Q And if I have to, you know, summarize your experience as an investor in the last 10 years, right? You've completed a decade. What has worked for Aloguil and why?

A I used to be a consultant for six years. Initially at McKinsey in a firm called McKenna Group in the Bay Area. And I had a partner called Pam Klein. And Pam Klein, by the way, is now an advisor to WhatFix. But, you know, one of those people that I put at a very high pedestal, and as I was getting into my sales role in consulting, she used to tell me, Alok, there is no recipe to be a good salesperson. Figure out what works for you. Figure out What advantages you can draw from yourself? And don't worry about the rest. And I think investing is very similar. I don't think there is any unique background you need or any unique trait you need. For example, I derive energy from meeting people. Right? I'm not the guy who is best at thinking alone. I actually enjoy thinking on a whiteboard with two other colleagues, uh, saying a statement, negating myself just two minutes later, iterating on it, but you just say, Alok, think about this for an hour and come back. I still have a blank sheet and not much to show for it.

AI assessment note: “I derive energy from meeting people. Right? I'm not the guy who is best”

Q So, so for example, you would have done across the two funds more than 40 companies, right? And a part is inbound attracting the best entrepreneurs and the part is outbound. So how much you would say the effort goes in both the sides creating the inbound versus reaching out outbound to the entrepreneurs?

A Again, just to add on to what Ritesh said, in our business, just getting access to the right set of entrepreneurs at the right time does matter a lot. And in our own internal culture, we do emphasize on that hustle a lot. Uh, like Ritesh is saying, we measure coverage. We measure coverage at a firm level, but every quarter, and by the way, this is happening now on, on 11th, next week, we will look at all the deals that happened in the market. Was there any deal that we did not get to see at the right time? Not just because we got to see, but at the right time. And while numbers tell a certain story, I think in general, we are the harshest on ourselves more than anybody else. The moment we'll see even one or two deals, which were in our sectors, we did not get to see. We're always asking ourselves, how did it happen that we did not get to see the deal or not? And that just emphasizing that culturally is just very, very critical. It is also baked into the way we judge people. Um, so, um, yeah, it's a very inherent part. Getting to the deal at the right time is a very critical part of what we, I do. To your point on inbound versus outbound, I would say that has evolved, Siddharth. I think when we started, there were some networks that the three of us, when we started, did have those networks, but we just had to fight harder. People were not necessarily just reaching out to us in t…

AI assessment note: “To your point on inbound versus outbound, I would say that has evolved”

Q And why do you think there are so many enterprise AI applications coming out of India at this moment?

A I think it's not just an India phenomenon. I think that's true globally, uh, Siddharth. We are seeing In general, the value propositions are very strong right in the beginning in the enterprise world, but at least our belief is that even on the consumer side, when you look at education, you look at healthcare, financial services, and frankly, we are seeing even we have evaluated companies, even in manufacturing space, which are using AI in very creative ways. Um, they are just bound to happen. Um, I would give it literally the next couple of years. I think we are going to see a large wave of companies coming on the consumer side as well. Um, the Tisha actually had done one company, which is. Taking your credit report using Gen AI to build a customized video for you that first of all explains to you why your credit scores is what it is because most normal human beings can't interpret that report and then tells you how you should go about actually improving your credit score, right? Uh, that's a classical consumer application, which was not possible literally a couple of years back.

AI assessment note: “I think it's not just an India phenomenon. I think that's true globally”