The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 1,199 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Jain: Afore Capital only requires one team member's conviction to invest
“A lot of the deals, we debate them internally a lot, and as long as one person is excited about it gets done. It doesn't have to be a consensus deal. No, only one person on the team has to get really excited, and obviously my co-founder and I you know, can do …”
Dalal: Founders have invested 70% of their net worth into Matic
“I would say it's kind of a pretty high, like I would say, yeah, 70, 70% of it is in MATIC.”
Soni: Goldcast shifted sub-500-employee GTM to India after retention collapsed
“We realized that retention for us is, is like falls off the cliff at 500 employee mark. So we knew, we dissected the business in three verticals. There's a SMB, which is less than 500 employees, and we shifted the entire go-to-market operations of that front t…”
Sardana: Pronto's 30-year vision is formalizing all low-skilled informal Indian labor
“I think the vision for Pronto, which is like the 30 year vision, and obviously like very far from now is to organize and formalize all unskilled or low-skilled informal labor in India. And that means going across not just B to C, but also B to B retail, constr…”
Sardana refuses to pitch recruits using investor backing or pedigree
“I will never be the one to sell anyone saying, hey, you should come work here pronto because our investors backed all these other companies, right? I'll never be the one to say, I used to work at these places, therefore you should come work for me. That doesn'…”
Siddharth: Turing is likely the largest coding data provider to AI labs
“We are probably the largest provider of coding data to all the labs.”
Turing avoids building proprietary foundation models to prevent competing with customers
“We would not build our own model. We don't want to compete with our customers, but we are building around the models so that enterprises can unlock the fullest value.”
Ravikumar: Sierra Ventures stopped investing in traditional SaaS, focusing on AI-native
“And obviously as early stage investors, we're not investing in any SaaS companies anymore. Most of it is AI native building some sort of AI agents and stuff like that, but we don't see it as a, we don't see the SaaSpocalypse thing as a, as an inevitability.”
Reddy: Capillary Removed An Entire Layer Of External Leadership Overnight In 2015
“So, at the end of those two years, sometime in, I would say, early 2015 or end of 20 14 I actually overnight said, I'm basically removing one full layer of leadership. And we just got like different people up.”
Rajagopal: FirstClub refuses to sell Coke, Pepsi, Lay's, or major biscuits
“We are the only platform. We don't sell Pepsi and Coke. We don't sell Lay's and Bingo's of the world. We don't sell the big biscuit brands in the country, right?”
Ramdas hired sales and marketing leads before building Lumber's first product
“Few things that I did differently in lumber is once I narrowed down the problem that I'm going after, I just didn't go out and hire engineers.
I hired engineers, but I also hired a salesperson.
I also had a marketing person with me.”
Poddar: Passing on Meesho was a "stupid mistake"
“I think Misho was a big miss. And I think the reason was the same. I assumed that this would be a feature on Flipkart or Snapdeal or Amazon. Because you have, they have logistics, they have payments, they have supply base, they have user base, they have consum…”
Shivakumar: Academic degrees never factor into my hiring decisions
“I have never bothered about whether this guy is from an IM or an MBA or this or that. Never bothered. I only look for results. Can this guy work with people? Can this girl work with people? Can they produce results? Never in my consideration has been a degree.”
Tekion bought two live auto dealerships as an early-stage startup for R&D
“And that's what we ended up acquiring two automotive dealerships. It was a very high risk, high stakes. We had to do because Tekyon is a small company. We didn't have a lot of money.”
Tekion accepted a lower valuation to syndicate rival automotive OEM venture arms
“So in fact, we slightly settled on, not too much, slightly, very small, in grand scheme of things, I felt it settled on a slightly lower valuation to make sure that we bring both of them.”
Tekion co-founders took personal loans to buy dealership land for product R&D
“So personally, me and my co-founder, Guru, we took a loan to go buy the land of the dealership because I felt Techyan didn't have money to invest in the land. And then Techyan just invested in buying the dealership only because I felt if we buy the dealership …”
Dodda: MoEngage US pricing is 2.4x to 3x higher than in India
“So broadly, I think it's typically like, two to three X. Okay. 2.4 to three X. Got it. In terms of the, if you take the similar metrics that's an average, and it can be even, there are obviously customers in, in the US will pay, who can pay like four X and so …”
Jadeja is among the first major Indian-American donors backing Trump and Vance
“I, I'm, I think I'm the first one, probably one of the first largest donors in the Republican Party. And I've been working pretty closely on supporting initiatives that, ah, you know, support things that are dear to JD Vance and, ah, you know, President Trump …”
Garg: Six-month-old portfolio startup is about to sign $30M first deal
“I have a startup that's, you know, barely six months off the ground. They're about to sign what might be a thirty million dollar deal.”
Darisi created AI clones of himself for first-level developer review decisions
“I created my clones of me, Where your first part of the review conclusion can happen so that you don't need to wait for me to take a decision so that you can able to take a first level decision. Still, I will come review it, et cetera, but it saves time becaus…”
Makhija: Unicommerce prices its software 50% higher than competing platforms
“We have taken the route of keeping our services premium. We are still about 50% more expensive than the other softwares that are available.”
CloudSEK mandates that product staff prototype end-to-end to remain employed
“From the idea of prototype end-to-end, making sure it's useful, it should be on you. If you are not able to do that, you should not be part of employment.”
Rayapati: Atomicwork has a hard headcount cap of 999 employees
“I also have upper cap, you know, of triple nine for the company saying, okay, we are not going to be more than triple nine, you know, because we also have to build very human capital efficient companies.”
Batti: Whatfix instituted a mandatory five-day in-office policy years ago
“Probably we are one of the very, very few or one of the first SaaS companies to call all people back for five days office. We did like three years, two and a half, three years back, and I've been propagating because we believed it is not going to work. Every l…”
Batti: Whatfix abolished corporate titles to end tenure-based promotion expectations
“We abolished designations. Because what happened, everybody was asking, I have spent two years in my position. I want to get promoted. Now spending two years in your position doesn't mean you need to get promoted. Promotion means you need to take more ownershi…”
Patel: LeadSquared's highest customer ACV was just under $10M
“I would say less than ten million would be more accurate.”
Swaroop: Accel early-stage deals require no voting, allowing single-partner conviction
“So we don't have voting. If one person thinks that we should invest in this team, we do. So even now I think for up to a certain amount of check sizes only one person can just invest if obviously at a risk management, if more larger check size, you know, like …”
Banglani: Alok Goyal and I initially opposed Stellaris investing in Mamaearth
“With Mama Arth with Mama Arth, I'm quite relieved that Rahul did the deal, even though Alok and I were quite opposed to it at that point.”
Quick Commerce Caught BigBasket's Leadership by Complete Surprise
“Both, ah, personally, as a professional or as a management, ah, thinker, ah, and as part of, ah, Big Basket, ah, shareholder, this has caught us by complete surprise.”
Allebest: Chess.com will have single-digit revenue growth in 2024
“I think a lot of people would look at, you know, single digit growth, like we're going to have this year and say, ah, well, you're not ready to be a public company.”
Alok Sama would not have initiated the expensive ARM acquisition himself
“The arm deal, which I'm closely associated with I can't claim Credit for going out and buying that company, merely the execution because I probably would have, wouldn't have seen beyond the fact that the stock is expensively valued and you got to pay a big con…”
Parekh: BigBasket will fully pivot into a single quick commerce company
“We will actually essentially just transform into a completely a quick commerce company. We're not going to have two businesses like we have today, because I think the writing is on the wall.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons hires almost exclusively inexperienced talent
“So we immediately geared up to hire pretty much only inexperienced people and still do to this day.”
Malhi: Zupee has 100M users, raised $130M, and remains profitable post-GST
“So we would have a hundred million registered users. So in the casual gaming pay to play segment, we will by far the market leaders. So we have raised around hundred thirty million dollars profitable even. Post the GST 28% shift because we have built very fund…”
Swami: Prime's dollar loss ratio is quarter to half its failure rate
“Our dollar loss ratio is actually .5 X or .25 X, right? Because we have not Poured in a lot of fall on capital, just blindly because we own so much, the next round is happening.”
StepStone avoids arrogant spinout VC managers who expect LPs to be passive
“There's nothing worse than a fun one or two know it all. Particularly some of the spin outs where they've left and they feel like they have nothing left to learn. And we're probably not the right partner for that. Cause we're just not going to passively sit an…”
Mayya: My last 10 reels were entirely generated by AI
“Like my last 10 reels have been completely AI-generated. Audio is AI-generated. Video is AI-generated. Script is AI-generated. News is publicly available. The editing is manual, right?”
Musthafa: iD Fresh ferments batter inside trucks during transit
“So what we do is, A product which has to be you know, sold in, let's say, kitchen market tomorrow morning. Yeah. Production process partially gets completed today. And immediately after the process is completed, which is product is packed, we load it to a truc…”
Lunia: India Quotient passed on MPL due to insufficient ownership allocation
“One of the companies that I really missed was MPL. Sai, we had funded his previous company. This Creo, the hardware phone, smartphone, right? And he came back and he raised a five million round. Now, of course, there was Bnext, there was Sequoia, Sequoia was l…”
Sudhakar: All older BigBasket business lines are order-profitable before HQ costs
“See, the good thing is all our businesses, especially the older businesses make money on a, If you take that business, you know, per order, I mean, it makes money at a, other than corporate costs, right? Everybody makes money. All the older businesses. That's …”
Shenoy: Buying a House Is Personal Consumption, Not a Real Estate Investment
“I'll buy a house for my own living. But that's like buying a car. It has nothing to do with investment. But you ask me to invest in real estate, I won't. So I won't buy a house to rent it out and all that stuff.”
Rayapati: Minjar rejected an $18M buyout before raising at $11M valuation
“Before Bloom decided to put money, we had an opportunity to sell the company for eighteen million. But we took money from Bloom for, like, less than 12,000,011 million.”
Singh: India Quotient loaned Sugar Cosmetics capital from management fees
“And then after that, when sugar also ke lihe nobody was ready to give us money, they loaned us. From their management fees.”
Mehta: Software upgrades account for 15% of Ather's vehicle revenue
“So in a sense, our revenue is, I would say about 85% is hardware. 15% is already software.”
Info Edge's Venture Fund Is Structured With a 14-Year Fund Life
“It's 12 plus two years.
So it's a 14 year fund.
I mean, 12 plus two.
So you can end up with a 14 year fund.
Which gives you a very long holding period, which means, you know, you can afford to be very patient.”
Whatfix removed account expansion quotas from its customer success team
“We changed that success guys will only focus on NPS, ROI, business reviews, quarterly business reviews, and renewals. That's it. No expansions. Even if it happens, give it to sales guys. Your core KPI is this.”
Whatfix stations 90% of its hunting team in India for better economics
“So I have 80%, 70% account managers, 80% account managers in the region. But my land team is 90% in India, and considering the land economics, like I land at 8000 thousand dollars, and an expansion can happen even at a million, but economics also works really …”
Radhakrishna: Koo filtered out hires asking what the company could do for them
“We explicitly told people who are joining us saying, don't ever ask what the company can do for you. We're not in that stage where we can answer it. If you're in the mindset where you keep asking every single moment that you're working with us, What you can do…”