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 52 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Mumbai Angels Refused Exotel Clawback Relief After Pivot, Says Shivku
“One of them was that there'll be a clawback if it hit 500 customers. After about three 50 customers, we shifted to enterprises. Naturally, The number of enterprise customers is not as important an enterprise as the revenue itself, right? So, so we didn't actua…”
Ganesan: Generative AI on call audio makes CSAT and NPS obsolete
“So actually voice of customer or customer feedback is no longer necessary. You can now run generative AI on all these calls and you'll automatically now know earlier you used to ask for CSAT and NPS. All of those things are not required. You can actually prett…”
Ganesan: AI will eliminate 80% of contact center seats in 3-5 years
“So broadly, I think the total number of contact center seats will come down. My estimation is that it will come down by about 80% over the course of three to five years. By the way, timeframes are actually anybody's guess. As you know, in AI, things are changi…”
Ganesan: Enterprise MRR will 5x despite 80% drop in contact center seats
“So you start with a hundred seats, you go to 20 seats, but you do AI conversations, your bill will now increase from, let's say you started with one lakh MRR, you'll actually go to about five lakhs MRR. So so we find ourselves in a really interesting situation…”
Ganesan: Contact centers will never reach 100% AI automation
“But some of these older processes, I don't ever think they will become hundred percent replaced by AI. You will have people who will be needed for complicated questions, for overseeing the bots, for teaching the bots, for compliance purposes sometimes to take …”
Ganesan: Global AI players likely cannot capture Indian AI market
“I also think that it may be practically impossible for the global AI players to capture the India AI market as well.”
Ganesan: US AI firms will ignore cost reduction and chase AGI instead
“Even at the current inference costs I think that the savings in the west is so high that there will be, there is actually no motivation for American companies to further reduce inference costs going forward. So I think they're going to just forget about this c…”
Ganesan: Startups can disrupt Exotel by targeting left-behind SMBs
“Because of our enterprise focus, we actually now have left a lot of open space in SMB. And so if you are now thinking about getting into our Actually, the way to attack Exotel is to start with SMB and then grow up and then the cycle just keeps on continuing.”
Companies With 40% Growth Are Trapped Between Viability and Venture Funding
“One of the strange things about running a 40% growth company is that you can't shut it down and go home. Because it's still growing customers are still buying, you're, you still know that you're adding value. You're even making profits. So why would you just l…”
Ganesan: Founders Building SaaS, CRM, or AI Should Go to the US
“I also think that if you're building CRM, if you're building SaaS, if you're building software, you should go to the US. In fact, one could also argue that if you're building AI, you should go to the US as well.”
Ganesan: Market timing matters far more than founder ability or grit
“Market and timing is probably very important, much more important. Then how good of an entrepreneur you are. I think you might be the best entrepreneur in the country, but if you are working in a small time or if you're starting five years too early, this is n…”
Exotel Is Exploring an IPO in India, Says Founder Shivku
“We are actually talking about the possibility of taking the company public in India, and I'm afraid that actually that might come true”
Shivku: 90% of Blume's Exotel Seed Term Sheet Was 'Nonsense'
“The kind of terms and conditions that I had then accepted. Looking back, 90% of the term sheet was nonsense.”
Exotel Initially Earned More Per Ola Ride Than Ola Itself
“So I jokingly tell people that there was a period of about a year when we were actually making more money out of an Ola ride than Ola itself. So roughly they were doing about 2.2 phone calls per ride because nobody knew how to use this app, some new flashy, sh…”
Ganesan: 35% to 40% growth is a difficult "valley of death" for startups
“This 40% or 35% growth rate is a difficult place to be. Because it's neither big you're not growing earth shatteringly well, but it's not bad at all, right?”
Ganesan: Ameyo brought ~₹100 Cr revenue when Exotel was at ~₹120 Cr
“So I think they would have probably brought about a hundred crores of revenue. And we were at about one 20 ish crores of revenue at that point in time.”
Ganesan: Revenue drops after most acquisitions due to cultural and process friction
“In most acquisitions, what happens when an acquisition happens is that the revenue actually tanks because new people are coming in, processes are changing. There is uncertainty culture is changing.”
Ganesan: AI voice bot collected ₹3 crore for NBFC with zero humans
“One of our voiceboard agents collections agent about two, three months ago, I got to know that has actually collected almost three crores of rupees in a month for one of the NBFCs completely automated.”
Ganesan: Offering voice AI at two rupees per minute yields zero margin
“While it is practically possible to offer a two rupees a minute even today, actually there is no zero margin left for the vendors at this rate.”
Shivku: Top 500 Companies Hold 80% of Market Value in India
“First of all, in almost all markets, more so in India 80% of the value of that market lies in the top 500 companies.”
Ganesan: India stops being price-sensitive in 20 years at $15k GDP
“So I believe that that will happen when the India per capita GDP crosses 15,000 dollars right now. I think we are one generation away. So India is a price sensitive market. You have to do cost innovation. This is the, I'm connecting this back to the AI part. S…”
Early VCs Rejected Exotel Claiming India's SMB Market Was Too Shallow
“One of the difficult moments for me was that we went to the market trying to raise at that point in time, and most of the investors actually turned it down saying that the SMB market in India is quite shallow.”
Exotel Masked Up to 100 Million Phone Numbers Across India
“So it becomes a given now, but we actually literally safeguarded. 10 to 15% of the country's phone numbers. At that point, then about 80 to a hundred million for unique phone numbers we had. From going into the hands of people whom you never really intended to…”
Exotel Signed an Aborted $30 Million Acquisition Deal at ₹60 Crore Revenue
“No, it was a thirty million dollar, sorry it was a thirty million dollar acquisition deal, and I think we must have been maybe in a 60 crores range, so it was something like a four x five vector of a sort of range.”
Founders Have Plentiful Advice on Starting Startups But None on Quitting
“I think there are a lot, there are lots of yarn about, knowledge about how to start. I don't think there is enough knowledge about material about how to quit.”
Exotel Raised Funding Sequential Quarters and Acquired Two Companies in 2021
“So we actually raised around every quarter. Of the last calendar year. So we went B one, B two, C and D. And then we also ended up doing two acquisitions. One's in June, one in June the merger with Amio was in June and the acquisition of Cogmo in in November.”
Transaction-Based Pricing Enables Faster Top-Line Growth Than Pure SaaS
“Transaction-based pricing model enables much faster growth and in terms of top line, and that's one of the reasons why we've been able to do as much top line as we are.”
Top-Down TAM Calculations Are Useless Beyond Checking Market Viability, Says Shivku
“So this is, I think the top down way of arriving at TAM, which is not really useful beyond the fact that you want to just ensure that you are working in a space that's at least a couple billion dollars in size so that you know that there's enough market to go …”
Shivku: Exotel processes nearly 2B calls monthly as India's largest non-telco server
“We are also the largest call server in India, other than the telcos, and most likely in the top 10 in the world, we process almost about two billion calls a month.”
Ganesan: Exotel laid off 30% to 35% of staff during COVID
“So we had to almost let go of 30 to 35% of our employees at that point in time.”
Ganesan: Exotel closed four funding rounds in 18 months
“So we did round one, round two, actually we did four rounds. In a period of about 18 months. Just in the year of 2021 I did two acquisitions and three rounds.”
Ganesan: Ameyo had twice the headcount of Exotel at acquisition
“In fact, to tell you the truth, Amio actually had double the number of people compared to Exotel.”
Ganesan: Exotel took three years to integrate Ameyo contact center
“My team originally had said they'll take two years to build a contact center. Actually we took three years to integrate Amir contact center.”
Ganesan: Exotel achieved ~20% gross margin CAGR and returned to profitability
“And so we may not have actually grown that rapidly when you stock in revenue terms, but actually we are, we've been giving almost 20% type CAGR growth in the last two years. On the gross margins. And so consequently we are now again profitable.”
Ganesan: 20% to 25% of Exotel's code is written by AI
“Almost if I'm not wrong, about 20 to 25% of our code is now, even today is actually being written by AI.”
Ganesan: Exotel Gets 20% of Revenue Outside India, Growing Faster
“So about 20% of our revenues comes from Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa. So we focus a lot on emerging markets. Our business in emerging market is growing faster than our India business.”
Ganesan: Exotel Deserves to Be Public and Will IPO
“I don't think of it as much as what it means to me to go public as much as I just feel like Exotel is one of those assets that needs to, deserves to be public. So we will take it public.”
Ganesan: Exotel serves ~200 enterprise clients and half of India's Fortune 500
“I think we have a total of about 200 ish odd enterprise customers now. So about half of the top fortune, 500 will be exodus customers in India.”
Twilio Took 11 Years to Officially Launch Operations in India
“So for a long time, when you searched for Twilio in India, you would actually see that the question that I had posted in their consumer forums would turn up as the first link. So I would argue that I was perhaps the first person to ping Twilio and ask them, He…”
Blume Ventures Invested ₹2.5 Crore at a ₹10 Crore Exotel Valuation
“I raised about two and a half crores, little less than two and a half crores at a 10 crore post money valuation. So they got a chunk they walked away with Almost 25% of the company”
Venture-Backed B2C Unicorns Drove 80% of Exotel's Early Revenue
“70%, 80% of our revenues were still coming from. On the back of a venture capital enabled companies in the B to C space. So we were really supporting Flipkart and Ola, Uber and Swiggy and Zomato and all of these guys.”
Exotel Reached ₹40 to ₹50 Crore in Annual Revenue by 2016
“Must be in the 40 crores to 50 crores sort of a range.”
Exotel Co-Founder Vijay Sharma Left in 2014 Over Regulatory Licensing Troubles
“The first one to leave was Vijay Sharma. So he actually left because back in 2014, we also get into, got into a little bit of a trouble with our licensing.”
Exotel Faced a Major 2014 Regulatory Crisis Over a ₹25,000 License
“And it turns out that there is a license that we were supposed to take for the business that we are currently doing, which was, believe it, about 25,000 rupees, which we hadn't taken, about which we didn't know”
Exotel's Revenue Crashed 55% Overnight During the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdowns
“So our revenue is actually crashed by about 55% overnight.”
Exotel Laid Off 50 Employees Following the March 2020 COVID-19 Lockdowns
“And we just didn't have a choice, but to let go of about 50 people.”
Exotel Slashed Leadership Pay to 40% During the COVID-19 Pandemic
“I had reduced everybody's salary to 80% of what it was, and I think I'd reduced the leadership salary to about 40% of what it was.”
Exotel's Pre-Pandemic Ameyo Merger Collapsed Over Valuation Disagreements
“So we then actually attempted to do complete stock swap based merger driven by entrepreneurs... We just wouldn't get everyone to agree on the valuation. And so the out, we were just not able to agree on the swap ratio. And then that just basically just died.”