In today’s episode, we have Anil Goteti and Mausam Bhatt the Co-founders of Protonn in conversation with Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. Tune – in to hear all about the entrepreneurial quest of building the world's largest business in a box platform for individual professionals.

Salonie:

Hi and welcome to Matrix Moments, this is Salonie. On today’s episode, we have Anil Goteti and Mausam Bhatt the Co-founders of Protonn in conversation with Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India. Protonn is a business in a box platform, targeted at individual professionals offering services such as video marketing, scheduling, payments, and CRM amongst others. Anil and Mausamboth have a deep understanding and strong background in scaling large tech companies. Anil has previously heldseveral leadership positions at Flipkart, while Mausammost recently served as a head of product management for Google commerce. They founded Protonn in November 2020, and have recently raised a 9 million seed round led by Matrix Partners India, along with Tangling Venture Partners and 021 Capital among others.Tune – in to hear all about the entrepreneurial quest of building the world largest business in a box platform for individual professionals.

Vikram:

Hi, guys. Thanks so much for doing this podcast and for our listeners I’m just going to introduce the two gentlemen on this podcast. First is Anil Goteti. Both are founders of Protonn, let me start with that. And it’s a startup that we’ve invested in and we’re very privileged to be in partnership with them. Anil started off at IIT Madras, then UIUC Masters in Computer Science and then Kellogg MBA. Went to Qualcomm, ended up at McKinsey, but his longest and most impactful stint was at Flipkart where he -- you know, I was going through the profile and it looks like he played every role there. And ranging from being the category head of mobiles to growth to being the GM of marketplaces and platform and through probably the biggest years of Flipkart from 2012-2020. And Mausam is partner in crime and it was surprising to me how eerily similar their backgrounds were because graduated with a degree in Computer Science, then went to do a Masters at Arizona and then a Duke MBA. And started off in J&J where I think he has pharmaceutical roots so he sort of gravitated there. But then lots of startups in the Bay Area and then I guess joined Anil at Flipkart where he played important roles in leading both product and growth between 2013-17. And then went back to the US, became the head of product, CPO at RetailMeNot and I think his last role was to be the head of Google Commerce. When I went through these backgrounds and I was reminded of how privileged we are to be in business with you because it’s probably the most I would say the highest achievement background that we’ve invested in. So expectations are very, very high. But, first, thank you for allowing us to invest and really excited about the partnership.

Anil:

Thanks for believing in us and investing in us and having us here today. Just a small correction, I wish I studied Computer Science, I always wanted to be a computer programmer but never ended up being one. But this is my indirect way of getting into the Computer Science world over the last ten years but everything else is what you said. So thanks for having us here.

Mausam:

Thanks, Vikram. Excited and honored to be here. Yeah, inspite of slight correction, like at Google I headed the product for Google’s Buy on Google product initiative. So Google Commerce and Shopping is this behemoth so I had a small part to play there. But thrilled to be here. I think you mentioned -- you were quite generous in talking about us but like to be honest like as the founders it’s pretty much back to square one, right, every morning we wake up and the imposter syndrome kicks in every day.

Vikram:

So let’s start there which is you guys as co-founders and we often tell founders that first find your co-founder, then think about the idea and I know that’s how you guys thought about it. And you both looked in your shared history and sort of found each other but what drove you to each other and what convinced you that you want to go on this journey together. And, Anil, maybe I’ll start with you?

Anil:

Yeah. You know, Mausam and I probably met -- the first day he came to Flipkart I remember this was the Ashford office, he just probably flew in from the US maybe a couple of days before and I think he had worked in a startup and we were just building out the app and we were fully desktop business, like you know, Flipkart used to get the peak sales around noon and in the afternoon because people are on their computers not on mobiles. So that was my first meeting with Mausam. I still clearly remember which room, what was the conversation, what time of the day and I was really glad we have someone who is going to be focused on mobile and was going to drive a lot of our growth. But that was just a start of the journey, right, I think after that it’s been I think probably eight years or so since we met and obviously a lot of time at Flipkart where we worked on a bunch of things, ups and downs of the company, you know, a lot of things that we have. When you go through a lot of common challenges together that’s when you actually form deeper bonds. You know, a lot of people share successes but when you actually share a lot of common challenges that’s when you actually get to know each other even more deeply. I do remember a lot of conversations, the best conversations are probably outside the office when we were going to the juice shop on the road in Koramangala or wherever else we went casually. In fact we kept in touch after Mausam moved back and continued to have conversations and I think both of us are I guess wannabe entrepreneurs, how do we start, when do we start. Actually we haven’t met since we started the company physically, obviously we’ve been doing a lot of Zoom meetings but the last meeting that we had when we met were when I was in San Francisco to give a talk at Google Marketing Lab and Mausam was also there giving a talk. We pretty much spent the whole week together meeting during the day in the conference, in the evenings talking about the future, startups. And I think when you -- I’ll talk about how I thought about this and Mausam can add how he thought about this. For me it was about who is it that I have a shared history with, who is it that was thinking along similar lines in terms of building a company for the longer term, building an impactful business that actually I would say empowers a lot of people around the globe. You need people in the similar life stages, you need people who have seen similar sort of journeys to be able to take those small and big decisions. A lot of things come together, right, I mean obviously new system and how you think about culture. It’s not one thing or two things, right, you obviously need a relationship, you would need to have the value system, you need to have the same vision and the same appetite, same life stage. I think for me that was it, I think the whole all of this coming together. The bonds and the relationship obviously is the foundation but a lot of these other things played a big role in how we both came together. I’ll let Mausam tell his side of the story, at least this was how it played out for me.

Vikram:

And Mausam, before you start I’d love to also talk about or hear you talk about how you guys did this over Zoom and how you guys -- because I know it was hours and hours on Zoom before you actually decided to take the plunge.

Mausam:

I think it dovetails really well into like a point I was going to make is when I looking for a co-founder I was looking for somebody I can like trust, trust like there’s no tomorrow. That like is something that should never kind of cross my mind, right, can I trust this person. Which made things kind of easier, right, when we decided to start out and we were cross border, different time zones trying to build a company over Zoom in the pandemic. But we figured a way out, it got challenging, it continues to get challenging at times but I think the overriding factor has been trust. I like second everything Anil said like in terms of we always thought at some point we’ll get together. We never knew when we’ll like start out, we always sometimes to joke about it like sometimes we’re serious about it. We also felt like all the Flipkart learnings would go to waste if we never start out. So, you know, glad it happened.

Vikram:

So I’m just going to recap for our listeners, so, one, I heard shared history but also a common life stage but also a common goal that you both wanted to startup and sort of right place right time. But, second, the value system that both of you share and it just comes out in every conversation that I have with you guys and I think that’s what leads to the implicit trust where you guys are in different time zones, different locations but you trust each other to act a certain way and make decisions with that same value system which is what I think makes this work. And going to the most important decision perhaps that you guys made which is the idea and which space to operate in and for me it was sort of the most iterative process that I have seen and you guys allowed us into the kitchen early so we were able to see that iterative process and I think you killed more ideas than I’ve seen any founding group go through. So and I mean that in the best way and that gave us even more conviction to jump behind this idea. So tell us a little bit about that process and how you went through it and, Mausam, I’m going to start with you this time.

Mausam:

Yeah. I think we initially kind of started, you know, both of us wanted to do something that scales and scales to like millions of kind of users and makes them successful. I think when we looked back at our Flipkart journey I think the one most satisfying thing is like literally we help hundreds of thousands of sellers be successful in the platform, right, people who are unemployed, underemployed, working from home. So that was always kind of in the back of our mind so then we started looking at spaces like what spaces are there where we can influence and help lot of people find financial freedom. And that can take kind of many directions, right, so we looked at like what can we do in Fintech, and can we look at like something else like in help people communicate better. And as you said we evaluated a lot of ideas, killed a lot of ideas but ultimately it boiled down for us, you know, two things. Like is this something that we feel is going to help a lot of people and at the end of the day like I think Anil mentioned career and life stage, right. I think we’ve done enough of like chasing kind of companies and careers and titles and in a good spot that way that we can afford to now take a step back, have a beginner’s mindset and look for challenges that has wide global impact. So that was the starting point and the other thing that came about was as we’re looking at all of these ideas I think one of the ideas that we were quite excited about around like Fintech and neo banking and like one day I told Anil, this feels like homework, this doesn’t feel like fun. We killed that idea, right, it was like if we’re doing something and we’re going to do it for a long time it should not feel like homework.

Anil:

I agree with that. I think like you said we probably had enough ideas that we can give out to other founders that you know, by the way it’s not that the ideas were bad like I think what Mausam was saying it’s more of like how you need to find the fit towards that idea for yourself. You know, I think if you look at the spaces there is Edtech, there’s commerce, there’s Fintech, there is SaaS, there is like health.

Vikram:

Sorry, I’m going to pause you there and you’re actually right, bring me back to the fact that you had one idea in each of the big spaces. So maybe more systematic than I thought but the most important question that everybody are going to have and I want you to address it is why aren’t these guys doing commerce.

Anil:

No, see, we did look at commerce as well. I think a few things that we both looked at is like what are we both excited about, what are we both most suited for in terms of building. Also structurally what are the verticals that we wanted to be in longer term in terms of growth, margin structure, all of that stuff. Commerce by the way is fantastic, it’s great, both of us really love this space. Even now when the founders were looking at commerce we both loved to get the founders out into the commerce user spaces there are. I think for us having spent the last ten years it’s a combination of looking for something new, different, you know, with new spaces come new challenges and new learnings and that’s when you also grow as an individual, as a professional. There’s also a lot of learnings that you bring from the previous verticals, it’s not necessary that you need to stick to the same vertical to apply all of these learnings. I think it was personally what are we going to have most fun in in the next decade, what are we most excited about along with where do we want to be in the business side of things. So like you were saying pretty much every idea in the sectors was good. I think one of the other idea that came was the education idea, right, Mausam was talking about a neo banking idea, the education idea was something that we were very passionate about in terms of how do we build a really good long term Edtech company for college professionals in grad. But the realization was we didn’t want to do this in a hacky way in a short term and get quick growth. Venture scale takes a lot of time and we want to be patient enough and build something like this. You know, different businesses obviously require different levels of growth and scaling. We felt this is just not something that we want to be in on the education space though it was a -- like every idea has to be given its merit. I think, Vikram, one of the things that both of us did very diligently on each idea we practically probably spent time talking to 20-30 customers, lot of professional experts in each of these fields, some of the relationships that you guys brought to bear in terms of talking to those folks. Only then you get a overall perspective to be able to say is this something that we’re excited about or not. So that diligence is what helped us go through the motions of do you want to do this or not. And then I think the way it played out in the end is after several months Mausam and I practically went back to the original thesis we had and we were like this was the original idea and this was where we have the most conviction, I think we feel pretty confident about this and what we wanted to do. It was like we believe in video, we believe in empowering millions of professionals and actually making them very, very successful, this is the business we want to be in. So when you have the conviction you dive in, so that process is as important as actually anything else in forming a company and now I believe it after having gone through it.

Vikram:

So I’ll tell you a few things that really stood out for me in that process. The first was this breadth of ideas but then there were very clear criteria. I think the first was just market size because you guys didn’t want to take a scale risk. And then it was associated profit pool as well because you guys didn’t want to take a profit pool risk either. But then after that it was actually just primary research, you guys were immersed in just talking to people, right, and talking to users, customers, experts in that space. And I know that you guys also made a lot of mockups which most people don’t do, you just ended up doing very quick product mockups and testing those product mockups. And then said, hey, this doesn’t work, I mean, we thought there’s a pain point but this doesn’t work. But I also think that doing those mockups and so on helped you live that startup and in a sense that’s what gave you that insight, right, this feels like homework, so this doesn’t feel like it’s a fit because you did all of that. And I would encourage all founders to actually follow that part of the process which is a primary research and the mockups. The last thing I would say is that through those conversations I always felt that the excitement for this particular idea and we’ll come to that just kept growing and that’s probably the best indicator that that’s what you want to do with a significant part of your life. So let’s talk about the idea and at least you guys had me with this three words, which was Snap For Business and that’s what I still remember. And it was essentially a video first business in a box platform, and that’s the best way I can describe it, but I’ll turn it over to you guys to describe what the pain point is and how it felt by lots of users across so many different roles that they play in life and either of you can start there.

Anil:

So I think like I mentioned earlier video was something that we were very excited about and while we were going through the pandemic we realized like millions of professionals want to take control of their lives, want to be flexible, do not want to be beholden to any company. They want to be able to take their business beyond their local neighborhoods not just the people that they meet in the coffee shops or the small offices. Pretty much like what commerce did in the early ‘90s in the US or 2000s in terms of being able to take their business to hundreds and thousands of customers around the country. So we were -- when we spoke to at least 30-40 professionals cutting across various verticals like a therapist or dietician, a nutritionist, realtor, a whole bunch of folks that we spoke across there were a couple of insights that came again and again and again. One, we want to be able to market ourselves and be able to grow our business and we want to do that in a very human personal, you know, I would say with a touch where you’re almost meeting that person in an office or a coffee shop, that was number one. Number two, I want to focus on my business, I don’t want to run after payments and invoicing and sending this and that and all of that. I want to focus on my business, can you guys help me with the rest. So these were the two that consistently came about in every single conversation and that is what we’re focused on at Protonn, what we’re doing is building a video first marketing platform and a business in a box for all of these independent professionals. What we do is when a professional comes, we get them to setup their business in less than five minutes. We’ve been onboarding users for the last several weeks. We see that they can do it in literally 2-3 minutes, they can start their online business in 2-3 minutes. They create content on our platform which is very video first, I would say we’re very proud of the kind of capabilities that we’ve built to be able to bring documents and artifacts just like you would do in an office room and presentation, market yourself on social media, get clients, get clients to book time on your calendar, increase your business and then we take care of everything else, you know, accounting, invoicing, payments everything. You continue to focus on your business and delivery. So this is the idea in a nutshell and the insights that drove it. I’ll let Mausam add more to it.

Vikram:

And, Mausam, before you begin let me just give you a couple of questions to answer in your part of the conversation. One is maybe bring this to light with like a individual and consumer persona that you focus on and realtors and individual freelancers and so on. And second, I know you guys focused a lot on how fast somebody can be onboarded and how fast they get an aha and talk a little bit about that as well.

Mausam:

Absolutely. So I think this to connect to your earlier question like why not commerce, you know, in my mind this is commerce, right, this is a different form of commerce. It’s not physical commerce but it’s service commerce, right, where in almost like a funnel kind of an approach like how do you help kind of somebody create like a presence, how do you help them market themselves, how do you get clients, how do you convert them, how do you service them. So all steps of kind of the funnel that we learned in our commerce backgrounds are pretty relevant here. I think this all while we wanted people to be able to go live and all of that it came from all of these conversations we’ve had with users. So typically we would ask them like what tools are you using today, what do you do right now. So most people would answer that oh, when I create content I’ll hire like a videographer who would like create videos for me once a quarter and I’ll put it out there. Whereas it’s end of taxes and I want to like talk about what rules have changed and send it out to like all my clients or post it on social media, I’m not able to do that because there’s a long lead time for me to like hire somebody like professionally looking to kind of do that and put together like a good video for me. The other thing was what tools they were using, so it was a complete mishmash of stuff, so either people would like hire external agencies to do that for them to stitch everything together from calendaring, payments, tax, all of that which meant like they had to be on top of like making sure that all the integrations work first and anytime they hire external people to do that like it cuts into their margins. You know, maybe you’re making like $100,000 a year but like the moment either you hire an employee or hire an external agency to manage some of these things your margins kind of go down if you’re a solo practitioner. So those were some of the things that came up so like when today like when we talk to professionals like say for example there’s a dietician who focuses on helping people manage their diabetes we wanted to make it very easy for somebody like that to be able to very quickly create a profile, put their intro video, configure their services. Here’s my free 30 minute consultation, if you want to meet me, help you manage diabetes and meet like once a week I charge $100 an hour. Create like packages like that, very quickly configure all of that, accept payments, open up their calendar so that people can see the free and busy slots to be able to book time very easily. And just almost like making all of that like a non issue, right, you practice your craft. Like if you’re a dietician you should hundred percent of your energy should be on like how can I be a better dietician, how can I create good content and help my clients or patients be successful. And that’s what we want them to focus on like you practice your craft like we’ll help you take care of everything else. And then also what happens is a lot of these professionals they acquire clients through all kinds of channels, they’ll acquire like through Facebook groups, communities, Instagram, what not, but then they don’t really own the user, right, the user is actually owned by their platforms. So helping them kind of collect all of that into one CRM kind of product within Protonn which helps them market their services again and again that let’s say you’re a dietician you walked into Whole Foods and found like a power food which is very friendly to people with diabetes how do you quickly create like a video from that and send it to like select sort of clients or your entire client list very quickly. You don’t want to wait for a videographer to come in and think through all of that content and all of that, right, but if you don’t have that capability to do that and the other thing is if you don’t have like your own mini CRM that you can use all of this becomes like a painful process where you end up not doing anything because you’re not going to wait to create the video, you’re not going to e-mail it to clients. So stitching all of these together almost in e-commerce funnel has been kind of one of our biggest learnings which is appealing to all the professionals we talked to.

Vikram:

Everyone who hasn’t seen their product launch I would encourage you to follow Mausam and Anil and they’ve been onboarding their employees on Protonn and that’ll give you a great visual cue on what the product can do. Anil, one thing I want to pick up on from Mausam’s point is you guys have invested a lot in the video IP and I know it’s taken some doing and it is something that you built from sort of from scratch, why that choice? There’s so much out there where you could just have picked up a readymade video stack but you chose not to?

Anil:

Yeah. I think, Vikram, we believe that video is where the internet was in the ‘90s, pretty much with 4G in the last few years and more importantly 5G that is actually going to open up bandwidth much, much more. And, second, camera lenses and what’s out there is phenomenal now, right, if the pandemic hit ten years ago would we all be able to do these things that we’re able to do today, absolutely not. We would have probably had figured out other means of communicating, yes, but would we have been so video forward, I don’t think the world had the capabilities in terms of you know, internet technologies and bandwidth and camera lenses to be able to do that. We’re at that inflection point right now where the internet was in the late ‘90s to be able to open up I would say various used cases on video and bring to bear pretty much what a human does in terms of a physical interaction maybe obviously not a shake of a hand or being able to do everything else that they do in person but bring all of the emotion out when you typically meet a person and see each other and judge them, make a decision based on what you see. A lot of that is very nascent right now even with the best software which is out there. I mean if you look at how we share things with each other in terms of presentations and all the stuff all of us figured out how do we do a share screen and then talk about it. We’re pretty much actually looking at it, you know, taking a step back, how do we think about it with a very fresh perspective and innovate from there because we believe in the next ten years how we’ll use video will be very different from how we’re using video today. We’re at video 1.0, the video 2.0 and 3.0 will all come with various dimensions to it. We believe that just like you’re in an office presentation room and then being able to present a document we should be able to just turn around and point and say this is my presentation. That’s the sort of IP and investment we’re making in video which is going to make it interactive, easy to create, as personal as possible, almost like in person. I’ll be foolish to say that it’ll always replace an in person meeting but we’ll almost be there. But there’ll be situations where somebody has to meet in person but that’s what our belief is in, that’s what our investment is going to be in and I’m very sure it’ll reap rewards as the years progress and people get even more comfortable using video than they were in the last one year. That’s the reasoning.

Vikram:

Mausam, you were going to say something?

Mausam:

Yeah, I also feel like business kind of use cases always follow kind of innovation in consumer so like all the innovation we’ve seen in the consumer side of video be it like TikTok, Snap or all of that the business equivalence of them have not been kind of created and that’s where I think lot of like the opportunity is like in terms of making professionals be successful using video. So very simple things are also not possible like today if I would just pull in a pdf on my background pension Zoom without having any learning curve of -- for example if I’m trying to shoot a video, authentic video, how do I get teleprompted without that text kind of being shown up or like very easily to convert like take out all the filler words and everything. So slowly those tools are emerging kind of across the world they’re emerging in different kind of pockets and all but our goal is to kind of combine all of that into one simple video tool and personally like I don’t like editing at all videos. You know, one of my biggest pet peeve about videos is editing, so like the challenge to the team is like make it so good that nobody has to edit anything like everything kind of happens on its own. It should be a breeze, you know, that’s the goal, how do you bring all of this business related innovation in video all kind of combined into one package that somebody who is not tech savvy can do it.

Vikram:

If you solve the edit video problems Salonie who manages everything that we put out there will be your power user. I just wanted to point out one thing to founders which is -- you know, that a lot of people talk about this vision which is what Anil talked about, which is you’re at video 1.0 and you’re actually betting on video 5.0 in five years. But then to bring to bear the vision to decision that you’re making today that hey, that means I need to invest more in video today. And I think a lot of founders don’t make that connection, just that the vision that then that’s going to influence choices today and I think you guys are very thoughtful about the fact that okay, if that’s the vision then I need to invest in that today. I think it’s a fantastic learning for founders. Moving on to fund raising and you guys have raised what most founders would consider a pretty large seed round. Talk a little bit about who you’ve raised from and so on but also what process you followed in order to select who you finally ended up going with.

Anil:

Maybe I’ll start off and, Mausam, please add to it. I think as we started the company we knew this was going to be obviously a very tough journey that we’re going to go through a lot of ups and downs. When you go through something like this you want people alongside you who believe in you longer term, who go through the ups and downs with you, who are there to help you, who are there to show you the right mirror. Let’s say you’re drinking the Kool-Aid versus believing in the vision there are various dimensions to this. And there are going to be always lot of folks only see the successful outcomes but don’t necessarily get into the garage world of all the tinkering and the challenges and the breakdowns and everything that happens in a car. For us it was very important to actually go with folks who believed in us personally, who we have long term relationships with who can show us this mirror, who can actually give us those strategic guidance that we need from time to time. There’s a lot of things that come into it, obviously I don’t want to dismiss the fact of appetite to invest in further rounds and being able to put the capital, there’s a lot of things that come into play. But fundamentally at the root it comes down to relationships, how well we know each other. This is a long term game, who do we want to work with. I think that was the foundation and I would say the way we thought about it more than anything. Mausam, you want to add to that?

Mausam:

Yeah, I think rounding off like we’re looking for people who are like patient with kind of results, at the same time very good with providing us very good counsel. Vikram, you want to say something.

Vikram:

Yeah. I was going to pause you there. But how do you find that guy, lot of people want the same thing but how did you guys get comfortable about -- how do I find out -- if you had advice to give to founders -- how do I find out that this person will think this way?

Mausam:

Maybe like, you know, that journey kind of at least for us started like we were very fortunate that we were able to build those relationships over long period of time and knowing people like from our past lives, jobs, careers. So we had an unfair advantage kind of that way but I think my advice is like try to like -- maybe the one thing I would like encourage other founders is can you be your authentic self in front of your investors because if you’re not able to have honest conversations and you feel like the need to position and posture and sell every meeting maybe you should think about that a little bit. Right, you know, you need to get comfortable and it’s not on the investor, like the investor may not even expect that but like do you personally feel comfortable with the people that you’re working with and raising money with. That was important to me and Anil and it reflected eventually in our cap-table.

Anil:

And also vice versa, right, you also want the same relationship and you expect the same thing from the investor also. I mean are they being their honest self or are they only trying to sell or make a judgment. I mean you want a partner in crime whose going to stick with you longer term and you know, we’re fortunate that we had lot of past relationships. I think the biggest learning that I would say and the advice that I have is also invest in relationships which bear results if not today maybe three years down the line or maybe one year down the line or two years down the line. We’ve had some conversations where there was no investment on the horizon but we don’t know the folks, they don’t know us but we came to know each other. But these are conversations that you need to engage in for the longer term. And it could be partners, this could be investors, this could be potential in future hires for the organization. You know, these things don’t happen because of one meeting, two meetings, these things happen because you get to know people over a long period of time. So I would say that would be my biggest learning.

Vikram:

So I’ll call out two things that I really remember from that fund raising process, one is Anil and I actually know each other for a long time and we have this periodic quarterly dates set we used to do midway between our homes at like 7:30-8 am. And then even then after knowing each other for so many years Anil made sure that he did references with my founders before he actually decided to do it. And I think there is a big learning in that and I encourage a lot of founders to actually do references about investors but they are sort of -- they’re just shy of pulling that trigger. And I remember Anil saying we’re friends but I want to do this and this is what I’m going to do and I truly respect that in the process. The other thing I remember about the process is that I think it was very important for Mausam to get to know me because I think he was getting to know me through Anil and one of the best conversations I’ve had through this process was maybe like 8-9 pm for me and or something like that and you were just back after your cycle ride so maybe it was like 10 am for you and 10 pm for me. And then we decided to have a drink on a Sunday, so 10 am for you on a Sunday and 10 pm for me. And we just talked for a long time and I think that was a meaningful conversation for both of us to say we want to go on this journey together. So both of those I think are big learnings for founders, right, the references and investing in this one on one time. Last thing and I know we’re going to run out of time because I can talk to you guys for hours is on team building. And I still remember the LinkedIn message that Anil sent out saying I’m leaving, last day at Flipkart and all of that and it was like it broke LinkedIn, everybody started pinging you immediately. And the same for Mausam when he finally said that at Google. So the followership that you guys have is just fantastic but you’ve been very careful in building that initial team. So what do you guys look for in that team and what kind of DNA and culture are you trying to create?

Anil:

See, Vikram, I think this is again comes down to some of the things we spoke about earlier, right, I think in the beginning the journey is very different from a series VC kind of growth stage or maybe later stage where you’re a much larger company. The challenges and the kind of problems that you solve here are very different from what you do later in the stage as company. So this stage of the company I think more than anything the culture and the value system matters a lot in the sense are they great fit in terms of how entrepreneurial they are, risk taking they are, do they believe in this, how collaborative are they, are they learning from each other, are they helping us learn. I think all of us are like the founding team here everybody who’s coming in at this stage of the company are actually building and hand crafting this company from day one. So the struggles and the challenges and the problems that we solve all of these only can work out if it’s a great cultural fit. So we spend a lot of time actually getting to know the people from a cultural perspective. Obviously we do look at it from a functional perspective and what every individual brings to bear in terms of how they can help solve the problem but I think I would say to every founder there or any team member it’s like 70-80 percent is a lot more on the intrinsic hunger culture fit versus the other pieces because all of us have been in those life stages where we didn’t know anything when we started off in our jobs and in the companies and it’s the attitude and the culture and the fit that matters that helps us give all those learnings and everything else will fall into place from there. So that’s the focus.

Mausam:

Yeah, I think as a startup you can’t promise much, like it is a big bet that people are taking on you, on the idea. So they have to like first believe in the vision, they have to believe kind of in the founders that they will invest in individuals. So ultimately it attracts people like what I like to tell people is that I would encourage people to startup and like the culture I’m building with Anil is like around things that we value. We’ve always valued like a high degree of autonomy in agency over what we do, right, and then both experienced that at Flipkart. It was great for both of us that way that there was no limit to like the amount of agency and autonomy we were given. But that comes with like a high degree of accountability, right, that’s the flip side of it. So while we had a lot of agency autonomy we were accountable for like some significant kind of results. And with that like if we could continue to deliver like in a responsible manner our growth was not capped in the company, we kept scaling with the company. And that’s the promise that we provide like I talk to kind of employees that it is pretty much on you. Like you’ll have like all the guardrails and support from us but how you grow and scale within the company is not like capped and that’s what attracts people to startups. Right, you know, in some ways if people are joining startups for money I think there are lot more easier ways to make money, I’ll just be very honest. You can make a lot of money elsewhere, right, but this is it takes a very different DNA, right, to be in startups and be successful. I think the sense of accomplishment is very, very different.

Anil:

That actually reminds me of an incident. When I joined Flipkart in the first early days I was in Delhi, as soon as I took over the books business it was pretty much my first day or second day. You know, Binny calls me and says yesterday we lost 5 lakhs of business, what happened. And that’s when it really sunk into me that I’m leading one of the big PMM for the company and I’m fully accountable for it and, you know, this is the kind of empowerment that I’m getting to be able to run this whole thing which is important to the company. That’s the sort of mindset and how we operate right now in terms of every person coming in, you own this and it’s your success, your failure, our failure as a company. We help you actually take that risk with the ability to take that risk comes a lot of ability to learn new things and fail. I mean I’ve personally made a lot of mistakes in Flipkart because of that empowerment and I’ve learnt a lot. And we believe in that, like you know, there are plenty of opportunities to learn and make mistakes but along with it comes a lot of satisfaction of trying something new, owning a lot of stuff, building something and riding that wave with a lot of ups and downs and hopefully getting on to a space shuttle. So that’s the promise.

Vikram:

The best thing I can tell you guys is one question a lot of investors ask is would I work for these guys and I will tell you a lot of young folks in our organization said yes, that question that I would love to go and work for you guys and that’s probably the best compliment that I can give you. Don’t take our guys.

Anil:

Vikram, you did bring this up but one of the things --

Vikram:

I think this is a good point to end this podcast.

Mausam:

Before Anil takes out this list of people, oh, these are the people we think.

Anil:

No, on a serious note, Vikram, I think one of the things that we did enjoy during the conversations while we were going through the fundraising process was the quality of the folks in the team and how we had a lot of good problem solving alongside like they were part of our team. So, yeah, would like some members of your team, of course, yes.

Mausam:

I think everybody from Matrix like all the partners were so deeply engaged and vested in the conversations, I think that was also a big plus. It was not very long even though we were working with you, Vikram, directly I think the level of support and outreach was outstanding. So thank you for that.

Vikram:

Thank you. And appreciate it and I will just say that we’re just doing what we normally do and it just felt very, very easy with you guys and that’s why you’re getting sort of the commitment and access to everyone here. Guys, thank you so much for the time. I’m super excited about the product launch so wishing the launch the best and lastly I’ll sign off with saying again privileged to be partners with you guys and really looking forward to the journey.

Anil:

Thank you, Vikram. Yeah, we feel the same and really looking forward to the next several years building this out.

Mausam:

Thank you.

Salonie:

Thanks for tuning in. For more Matrix Moments episodes, you can head to www.matrixpartners.in/blog. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more updates.