Recko co-founder Saurya Prakash Sinha reflects on navigating divergent incentives and aggressive negotiation tactics during startup acquisition processes.
Insight
Product usage matters more than early ARR because revenue is lagging
“I think more than revenue, what I would more index on is product shape and product usage, because your revenue is your lagging metric. Sometimes you can have a lot of revenue, right? But maybe you might, you know, just cap out at like five or six mil right ove…”
Opinion
Indian SaaS startups receive lower M&A valuations than their Israeli peers
“I would benchmark ourselves against more, more with, say, Israeli companies, right, and I think I've seen more examples where I think the Indian companies are, say, somewhat similar ARR In multiple cases, the product is much, I think, better, but I think the v…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Myntra hired Recko for reconciliation after Big Four accounting firms failed
“So Myntra reached out to us and Myntra They told us that look, guys, we have, you know, some problem on the reconciliation side. We have tried almost every consultant every engineer, every big four, and nobody has been able to solve our problem.”
Opinion
Over-indexing on cost arbitrage has been extremely detrimental to Indian SaaS
“I feel the amount of over indexing, which I think the ecosystem has done on some of those models, right? And I think it has somehow been extremely detrimental because the challenge is that, I mean, when you start broadcasting a lot of those things Out there, I…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Stripe agreed to lead Recko's Series B before acquiring it
“Then after a couple of conversations, right, so we went ahead with the with our CDSB round where Stripe was leading it. But during that time, we started engaging more with the Stripe team. And I think after close about say a month of deliberation, right. So th…”
Opinion
In 2017, Indian SaaS startups targeted existing categories using cost arbitrage
“And that was also the time where I think generally people were also trying to go more into spaces which were Which were existing categories, and I think the general approach was to introduce some kind of a cost arbitrage and go in and play into those categorie…”