Dilipkumar Khandelwal, former President at SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, explains to Siddharth Ahluwalia how early-stage B2B SaaS startups must balance engineering quality with sales growth.
Insight
Khandelwal: TAM Matters Less for Early Category-Defining Startups
“So I think I put left focus on TAM in the beginning because of the phase, I mean, it is very difficult. If you're investing in a known category, you always know what is the market that exists. It's all the companies which you try to invest or what you try to t…”
Insight
Angel investors should exit when startups hit $150M to $250M valuations
“I think if you're coming at whatever angel round or a seat round, I think the right size for you to exit, I generally feel it is between whatever, one 50 to 200 to two fifty million.”
Disclosure
Khandelwal: Prefer Founders Targeting Very Specific, Narrow Problems
“I rather like the founders who want to go very specific and there is a problem which is very small and very specific.”
Insight
Khandelwal: Large Indian B2B SaaS Companies Must Target US and Europe
“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…”
Insight
Indian startups are expanding into PaaS, but infrastructure still lags
“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…”
Insight
Khandelwal: Consumer brands underuse tech beyond online sales, creating huge opportunity
“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…”