Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Exfinity chose enterprise tech over B2C due to founding partners' expertise

Shailesh Ghorpade · Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India · Dec 28, 2020 · at 3:54

Shailesh Ghorpade recounts founding Exfinity Venture Partners in 2013 alongside former Infosys board members Mohandas Pai and V. Balakrishnan.

0:00 / 0:34exact quote · 34.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“20 13 was a time when, you know, we were just discussing with Mohandas Pai and Bala, both, you know, ex CFOs and members of the board at Infosys. And we said that, look, we should really look at the VC space. And we said, we didn't know, you know, we thought that we know only the enterprise tech space. We don't know the B to C space. So we will focus on enterprise tech and let us build a team, which will have people with strong operating backgrounds who have built companies, who have sold globally, who can actually add value to startups apart from just providing capital.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Shailesh Ghorpade

Opinion
Founders cannot build a viable SaaS business selling only to India
“See in India, unfortunately you can't really build a SaaS business out of India, you know, and it is just our, you know, the Indian, the way Indian enterprises or the small businesses think I don't think they're ready yet to really embrace SaaS in a big way.”
Shailesh Ghorpade Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 38:06 Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Disclosure
Ghorpade: All 25+ Exfinity Portfolio Companies Focus on Indo-US Corridor
“All of them because enterprise tech by nature, and we always say that we work in the Indo-US corridor because companies can actually test their products in India. They can actually achieve scale in India. They can maybe learn from Indian corporations. They can…”
Shailesh Ghorpade Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 40:10 Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Insight
Big tech enterprise sales experience does not easily translate to startups
“Selling a new age product is, you know, you might have done a lot of selling for companies like, say for example, Infosys or Oracle or whatever, that doesn't mean that you can sell a startup product because at the end of the day, you know you have the backing …”
Shailesh Ghorpade Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 50:52 Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Opinion
Ghorpade: Exfinity was likely India's first dedicated B2B enterprise tech fund
“I think Xfinity was probably the first, you know, true blue focused B to B tech fund, you know, so there were many, many funds, which did B to B investments or enterprise tech investments, but it formed a small portion of their overall corpus. The focus was la…”
Shailesh Ghorpade Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 5:51 Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Insight
Ghorpade: All SaaS companies essentially operate as workflow management tools
“All SaaS companies really, essentially what they do is workflow management. So their understanding of the client workflows, their pain points has to be of a very, very high order. And unless you really achieve that, and unless you appreciate the issues of that…”
Shailesh Ghorpade Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 21:21 Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Assertion Supported
India has 10,000 SaaS companies compared to 50,000-70,000 globally
“Today, if you look at the SaaS space, right, it is there are some 10,000 SaaS companies in India and maybe 50,070 thousand companies globally.”
Shailesh Ghorpade Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 22:38 Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.