The Exchanges

Q Bala, ah, so let's dive deep into, you know, uh, your experiences building global SaaS companies, uh, right, uh, what are the few things that you have learned which you still find are the necessary ingredients to build a ten million ERR SaaS company?

A Yeah, so Siddharth, India right now is in an amazing place in terms of very, very high quality entrepreneurs in the SaaS space, and people are coming off very strong organizations, whether it's Freshworks, whether it's Chargebee, whether it is Zoho, etc. So the talent is certainly there, and vast majority of Indian companies that we see that seem to be on a path to scale are the ones that Clearly have a good product, right? So the product becomes stable stakes. Otherwise you can't really compete. But the key determinant for people to hit the traditional ARR benchmarks, if you will, right? Which is if you get to one million, you can grow three X for, for a couple of years, and then at least grow two X from there, which is a one, three, nine, 20 kind of trajectory. Uh, has always been your GTM motion, right? And especially Indian SaaS companies going global, where we have seen the ones get off the block very quickly. Once they get product market fit are the ones that have in the DNA in the founding team. Either it's a combination of co-founders or they've been able to assemble the right GTM team. Where very quickly they are able to establish a foothold, uh, in the largest market, which is the U S but more importantly, build very consistent, smooth GTM motions from India while having some feet on the street in the U S. So I think that that turns out to be a critical determinant of…

AI assessment note: “overall GTM seems to be the crucial ingredient to getting to scale in the ten million ARR range.”

Q part where we cover, you know, the enablers, uh, now we enter into enablers, we have covered the part for the category creators, what is required, uh, for a category creation truly to happen in Indian context now. Now switching over to enablers, what are some of your investments in the enablers side, and how did you decide to make those? What are the parameters that you were looking for?

A Yeah. So some of our investments are, you know, companies like, uh, you know, you know, SignZ is a very, uh, is an investment that I'm very familiar with. We had seed fronted them at, uh, Kalari. Uh, then we invested in them at Arkham as well. Uh, Spot Draft is, uh, is, is a company that we've invested in. They've invested in customer glue. Rahul, my partner in the past has done Mo Engage, uh, which has done very, very well, uh, so on and so forth. So if you were to just take a company like Spot Draft, right? And, and look in this entire conversation, we all know the universe we operate in, right? You, all the discussion we're having is more around at the point of investment and how we feel about them today. But clearly all these companies have their own challenges of scale and some things are going to work, some things are not going to work. But our approach with a B to B SaaS company First of all, we try to understand where is the real critical mass for the first couple of years of this company.

AI assessment note: “some of our investments are, you know, companies like, uh, you know, you know, SignZ”