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Built for scale - OneCard's Company building journey
In today's episode, Anurag Sinha, Co-founder and CEO, OneCard, in conversation with Avnish Bajaj, Founder and Managing Director, Matrix Partners india, tells us what it takes to build for scale, learnings from his Company building journey & much more. Tune in.
Avnish:
Hello. And welcome to a very special episode of Matrix Moments. i have with me Anurag Sinha here whose the founder of OneCard. it’s special for me on multiple levels, first of all i think this is the first one i'm hosting one on one with any founder, so that’s one. Second, special for Anurag and the company because the company became a unicorn. You guys would have read about it, we’ll ask Anurag whether to confirm it or not.
But third and most importantly, you know, having been doing this for 16 years it’s very seldom that at the beginning of our journey typically in Company building it’s 0-1, 1-10, 10-infinity. it’s very seldom that it is obvious or it is clear at the beginning that a company is being built for scale. So that's the topic that we’re going to talk about which is building for scale but building for scale right at the beginning and that's the tough part. So with that, Anurag, welcome. Great to have you here, very excited, thank you for coming by.
Anurag:
Thank you, Avi, pleasure to be here. i’ve listened to so many of your podcasts with founders as well as your own ones to explain the Company building journeys. We’ve learnt a lot, so happy to be here.
Avnish:
Well, okay, thank you. i’ve learnt a lot more from you which we’ll cover here. Anurag, so let’s just get started with – for the audience just talk about your background, how you built the various phases of the banker journey. Actually, maybe even with iiT and what led to OneCard and why OneCard?
Anurag:
Okay. So let me just start from the beginning, come from a middle class family, went to engineering did my engineering in ’99, worked for a couple of years and then did my Masters from iiM Bangalore. Did not quite understand then what tech can do, this why i decided to do an MBA and happened to join iCiCi Bank from campus. Now we were lucky, this was around 2003 and india was for the first time witnessing the growth of retail financial services or consumer finance as we call it. This wasn't the case, before that largely banking was take money from retail customers and give loans to big companies.
And iCiCi happens to be on the forefront of it, so we got a frontside view to learn. We grew big time and then 2008 happened which was a lot of us learnt real banking during that period. And everybody was hit but iCiCi went through a tough period especially in the unsecured lending because it was the largest lender. So we learnt lots of new lessons and post 2010 as it was over that was again a big learning that you got to stay on course, one of the big learning for financial services is that you have to plan for long period, build a large business. You know, because these cycles will come, it’s a cyclical business. The infrastructure layer, it’s like a base layer of economy.
So post 2010 it was a very different era of building businesses in india, more data oriented, customer centric and things like that. And happened to run payments also as part of my vertical so got a good chance to see the emergence of Fintechs. if you recall this was the first area in Fintech which got disrupted, the payments. So i could learn very fast that probably the future of consumer interfaces in financial services Fintech will play a large role. And because this is an extremely tech oriented area iterative process so i jumped the ship and built my first startup in helping people track money, build docket product and then OneCard happened.
So that's been a journey so fortunate to work with some very great teams both in the bank in startup journey and i think --
Avnish:
So i'm just curious, Anurag, that’s a fantastic background given 2016 UPi kind of started taking off you started, you decided to do credit cards in 2018 it seems like that credit card versus the direction in the market was more UPi and i still remember our discussions at that time. What was the why now, what was the conviction that credit card still makes sense?
Anurag:
So i think credit card is a dual product built into one, on one side it’s a payment product and other side it’s a credit product. You know, but if you look at the business model of this product it’s hardcore credit oriented. So we were more bullish on consumer credit as an opportunity as a team. Now idea was what do you want to solve for, there are various product vehicles to solve for. My earlier product which i did in this market was a consumer loan product which is like a line of credit which you can take in your bank accounts, beautiful product, people loved it. Problem is loans are need based products and usually these needs are very time sensitive ones. Unless they remember about you it was very difficult for you to reaquire the customers.
So loans are need based products and usually they’re time sensitive ones so how do you build a long term relationship with the customer on that. Even if you look at the lending products of banks the customers they source from outsourced channels they don’t make money on the first time, they actually make money on the cross sell and the customer who is coming back again, again because they have a long standing relationship with the bank. So we thought as a tech company we have to build a model which is more engagement oriented rather than disbursement oriented. And that's how we came about to do credit cards.
Now i just wanted to step back that the way we define ourselves, a very important context to remember, you know, credit card is a very large consumer credit product across the world and in india it’s also becoming large. The overall balance sheet of credit card business in india is more than 1.5 lakh crore now, so growing at almost 30 percent CAGR for last five years. But if we have to take a 5-10 year review from here on someone like us has to define our role much more generically. So we call ourselves a transactional credit company, we don’t care whether you use credit cards or some other product which we don’t even know today. And the reason i'm saying so because things are moving really fast.
Avnish:
There’s UPi on --
Anurag:
We have a young generation which has completely onboarded themselves on mobile, they’ve not followed the traditional path of banking evolution where you open account, get debit cards, ATMs, then pause, then internet banking. They’re just directly onboarding themselves and forget about banking they’re consuming everything online, everything on mobile. So we don’t know what product will actually suit their – and we’ve demonstrated in UPi. Now specifically because you asked this question and we’ve been debating this for last i would say three and half, four years, in the company also we debate a lot. i think what UPi did, UPi built a massive infrastructure there, it made indians comfortable using money on mobile and that is a big, big adoption problem to solve.
A single producted company cannot solve this, this was a collective effort done by all of the industry players led by of course NPCi and RBi and government, all banks, apps like PhonePe, Google Pay, everybody contributed to it to drive it. And this creates on which products like ours gets built. i'm like 50 percent of our repayment happens from UPi so we’re super excited now that UPi is being opened for credit.
Avnish:
With credit cards, yeah.
Anurag:
So again as a tech company we will innovate on all of that.
Avnish:
And i think you’re defining your problem statement as solving consumer credit, consumer needs backwards rather than the form factor. i remember you telling me that it’s not about the plastic it’s about the credit.
Anurag:
And i’ll tell you what the way we define 65 percent of india is below 30 and this is one of the most aspirational indian generation at least we have read about it, forget about seeing it. Their aspirations are here, affordability is here, because naturally incomes are catching up and all that. So there is a big gap and consumption is the biggest i would say pillar of indian economy, we want to play a part in that. You want to make it simple for customers to use.
Avnish:
Connecting back to your banking background i remember a few years ago when i started Vikram pulled me into Fintech and i used to read about how all the US banks used to say there’s fin-financial services and there’s tech in Fintech, right and basically all the incumbents said financial services is going to win Fintech also, the tech also. There are some famous names, i won't take, who really went saying panned Fintech and then adopted it later.
in india i’ve seen it to be very different, even the banks seem very collaborative. They all have digital officers, you came from the banking side, now we’ll come to regulations later but just in terms of the synergy between banks and Fintechs why is it playing out differently, is it playing out differently?
Anurag:
it is playing out differently, very differently the rest of the world. So the first part of the context is the market itself, now a lot of developed markets in many product credits is zero sub game. The only way you can grow is take share from someone else. On the contrary if you look at india you pick up any product category, banking, credit, life insurance, mutual funds, markets, general insurance, penetration levels still very, very low. in fact i would say PMJDY solved savings, UPi solved payments, still even after UPi growth 80 percent transactions still happening in cash.
So we have a huge play there, so one of the reason why it’s such a symbiotic relationship is because there is a large market out there, we’re not actually competing with that. So that's why the propensity to partner is much deeper, that's one. Second thing is like indian banks the core banking stack is fairly new because it’s all built by indian partners. So Finnacle, Banks 2000 from TCS or i-flex from Oracle all of these have been built in india. So indian banks have reasonably good tech stack as far as the banking is concerned. And i think we all know tech talent is abundant in india, so these are very potent combinations.
Avnish:
That's a very important point.
Anurag:
And the third point is – i think a lot of people have already been writing, the biggest innovator in Fintech is actually Government of india and RBi. They have been innovating at a very different scale the way Aadhar came about, Pan databases, video KYC, all of these are infrastructural play which a single entity can't do. They’re actually improving the UX for everyone.
Avnish:
That's a great point.
Anurag:
So i think all --
Avnish:
For penetration digitally enabled banks and government enabled.
Anurag:
Absolutely. So this becomes a fairly potent combination but i’ll give you one more angle to it. So this is now what we call it the third stage of Fintech revolution in india. The first stage started somewhere in 2010-12.
Avnish:
With Razorpays, payment.
Anurag:
Payments, PTMs of the world where banks were largely bankers to the tech and then came 2016 play where the UPi revolution happened where bank walked little more extra like regulations came, allowed third party apps to do payment transactions and all that. Till then banks were looking at more of this partnerships as a nice to have. Now the current avataar banks are actually building business models around it and this is we’re seeing all across large banks, mid-sized banks, small banks. And so this is very different if you ask me, this is becoming much more i would say a rational economic play business model driven and i would say all of this underling is that consumer is becoming more and more enterprise so they have no choice but to do it.
Avnish:
So that brings me to the core theme here which i'm hoping that the listeners can learn from, so i still remember coming to Pune maybe early 2019 when you guys were in one room with the white board. And i maybe spent 3-4 hours and you just went on the white board and went driver by driver of the business and what the thoughts were. And i remember taking a picture of that and sending it to the team saying unicorn in the making. So congratulations, it’s clearly worked out.
it seems to me but it’s not as easy as it may seem from the outside when people say unicorn in two years, three years. So i wasn't going to ask this but now that we mentioned what things have actually played out better than expected and what things have been harder than expected?
Anurag:
So like i’ll answer differently. Some things which didn’t look so good actually turned out to help us a lot. For example i’ll tell you the biggest unknown for our business model was Covid, we were about to launch, we ran a waitlist, we had 300,000 people signed up, we were supposed to issue credit cards and then Covid happened. And we just went into – and we didn’t know how long this will last and all that. And as soon as the Covid lockdown got over in June’20 i was rearing to go because we wanted to capture this data into our business model. And thankfully our bank partner supported it and like but the way Covid shifts consumer behavior is way different.
Avnish:
Yeah.
Anurag:
We’ve seen some of these traits in 2016 during demon -- as well but this was very different. i think we got a benefit of the work being done during that period and merchants really made digital payments like a mass product. So i think this played out very well for us and i think the second thing is that some of the work which RBi did during Covid times along video KYC, lot of digital assets to be used this is very important for us, came out better than that. i think if you ask me what we should have done differently probably we could have scaled even faster. i think we did not understand that Covid will go so fast, we thought probably it will be much longer. We became more conservative, we went little slow in our development cycles, but i think in long journey these are --
Avnish:
No, but in your preamble you discuss the 2008 cycle and one of the lessons are again coming back to this theme of building for scale you said that taught you that and we won't get into exactly what happened then but to plan for long periods i remember just for the audience’s benefit our chats during Covid, June-July and i remember telling you, Anurag, why would we launch a credit product at a time of income disruption. And you telling me about the 2008 cycle and how these things turn and it’s kudos, i think it’s amazing it worked out better than expected but to your credit. At that time where it was very unclear what the right answer was you were still going back to the lessons of 2008 and saying we should not make these mistakes and we should do continue in a calibrated fashion.
Let’s back up, so how did you going back to the theme of building for scale every time i spoke to you, you said i'm not doing this for investors, i'm not doing this to sell. i'm going to create a legacy, a large company that goes public. That has gone into a number of your choices and i want to hit most of those. Start with the founding team and the fact that it seems like all of you moved to Pune and almost lived together. So how did that all come about?
Anurag:
So i think it was very obvious for us to think of an idea in financial services because we came from a background but i think when we started digging deeper into this problem consumption credit and now that we have much better clarity than even 2018 then how large this looks like. We were very clear that this is looking a fairly large opportunity and i have a strong belief that if you want to build a long term business you have to stay long on a problem. So my first task was that okay, can i find set of people who believe as passionately about this problem as i feel about it. And especially because we’re building that we want to build our own tech stacks, lot of design choices we decided early on so we had to believe in this opportunity fairly long term.
So naturally the first step is to go look for people you already know very well and i think you will see this trait not only in founding team but also beyond founding team. We rely a lot on references because i don’t know, it’s some of our thinking. i’ve heard lot of your talks also around that.
Avnish:
if you can please convince everybody who’s listening and people at Matrix that references matter --
Anurag:
i don’t think you can do justice in an hour and two hours’ time. You know our style, even when we raise money we don’t like to meet investors and say, put a gun in the head and say would you like to invest in us. We want rather them to know us well, we want to know them well because these relationships have to last long. And like so i think the same thing goes here, we were getting into regulated area, we were getting into extremely domain specific area, we wanted to find people who stay long on this problem as well.
And i’ll give you an anecdote, one of my co-founders, Rupesh, he actually was part of the team which build UPi. imagine how much discussion we both of us would have gone through to figure out where should we start or like somebody who was part of the journey, he was part of the team which built Google Pay, launched it. But these discussions helped us clarify our own doubts what kind of company we want to build in. So i would say --
Avnish:
And just coming back to your point i was going to ask it separately but just connecting it here i have seen this followership. Even now we’ve hired somebody in legal who you’ve known for decades, generally it’s not 1-2 years, it’s decades. So that is fantastic. How does that result in – if i were to ask you what is the culture at OneCard what is it and how does that all come together?
Anurag:
So i think in fact many a time when i take interviews and to be fair i have a luxury of not checking people on technical because when i get interview lot of those things have been done. You know, i’ll give you a secret, many of the time, half of the time i speak rather than the candidate speaks. And the important thing is i want to make sure they understand what problem we’re solving. And for me that is really important because i think like good people always have options to go but they need to buy in the problem as much as we’re buying. So i spend a lot of time explaining them the problem we’re solving. As long as you're able to get past that then it is about like what do you want to contribute on and how much comfortable you are with the Leadership team and the founding team because that kind of defines your energy in the team.
So lot of people work with us in different parts of our life they come back because they’ve seen our genuineness the way we solved. And i would say a lot of credit to my alma mater, in iCiCi we were given lot of freedom, we build great products, did learn off our set of mistakes but this camaraderie stayed with us and that's why we’re able to attract people.
Avnish:
And that's very obvious when i sit in your office, i think it’s clearly highly performance driven yet you feel that people are, the camaraderie is the right word, that there’s a lot of camaraderie.
Anurag:
And you asked about culture, there are three things i repeatedly tell people and this is not a statement which i'm making now when we’re little bigger, even when we were smaller we used to talk about these two things. One, alignment. You know, like alignment or shared goal is nonnegotiable. it’s probably rather not to get the person in because if there’s no alignment we just – like the team gets distracted, that's one, number one. Number two is about we tend to be extremely humble because we say that we win in the markets we don’t win against each other. And it’s even more important for us as we become big that we remain committed to this virtue of being humble, whether partners, we like to retain this in our culture.
The third part is strive for excellence, so keep building it. in fact keep shifting in the sense that we don’t care in short term what happens we want to make sure that we build things – i'm like we have debated a lot in our board meetings also many a times that why can't we use something off the shelf but we’ve always said no, this is not going to help us in short term.
Avnish:
Which brings me actually to that question again going to building for scale, one of the big choices you took upfront which also would have taken a lot more time was to build your own tech stack. And in general in the startup world there is this view of run fast, break things, do things faster. Whereas you said, no, i have to build it bottoms up, it’s going to take time, it may take 12 months, 18 months, we’ll launch after that. There are off the shelf solutions you could have integrated with, so how should entrepreneurs think about which pieces is it okay to potentially outsource and go faster because i know you guys have also gone faster and i’ll come to some of that. And which pieces you have to build yourself?
Anurag:
i think so you know our view on that but let me just give you some color to it why do we feel so. it also got to take the context and the category we’re solving for. For example if one is solving for category which doesn’t exist probably they themselves don’t know what they’re building in. But for a category like ours which is a fairly well established need and we did lot of hard work in establishing that. Second thing you also have to remember that this business model needs to be long term, you know, you cannot – you know, the cost of errors are very high, you also have to remember it’s a regulated area. So there are regulations involved and the cost of doing errors is just like fairly high. it’s a trust based business, you know, the cost of errors in trust based business is really high.
Avnish:
Yeah.
Anurag:
And this is part of a culture so like i have a 70:30 rule, we always tell people spend 70 percent time in thinking and designing and do 30 percent in executing. And this rule pertains to not only for engineering, for product dev, for data science, models, everything. We follow this to the last T even in customer service, we say 70 percent time just think of designing 30 percent just execute. And this is again weaving in from a long term, so from very early on, i mean you know like in early stage we had options when people say why can't you launch with somebody else’ stack. We say what are we solving for, these products already exist, so we don’t see any value we’re bringing to the market.
And somewhere this become part of our i would say thinking and strategy so i think we got a – so just to rephrase my answer we got a benefit of this category being so large under penetrated being regulated you have to think long term and which kind of forced us to think. it’s not that we don’t do experimentation, we do experimentation but at a feature level not at a strategy. in fact i don’t know, you might not recall but you mentioned to me once that having a very articulated strategy in a startup is like going with Google maps. You know, you will reach there but you will reach more efficiently if we have a much well defined strategy. So forget about us, we want to make sure that our team also knows what we’re building one year hence, two years hence.
Avnish:
No, i think this 70:30, 70 percent of the time thinking and designing and 30 actually doing summarizes a lot of what i have seen in the build for scale. And which as an investor sometimes may have felt okay, this is taking longer than what one has seen and then when it comes out of the gate it is so well thought through that it gets off the ground faster which brings me to your GTM. i remember when we were first chatting i hadn’t thought as much about what the go to market strategy would be for you and i remember in our second or third meeting you said the thing that i'm thinking most about is that. So why did it matter and what did we finally do and how has that played out?
Anurag:
So i think we have debated this also, a lot has been written about it, india is not a uniform market, there are many india underneath, the global indian, and there is the affluent indian, affluent mass, and then you have bottom of the pyramid. So indian market is not uniform, so i think if you talk in our language product market fit you will arrive at certain segment for sure, you build any product you will find a product market fit. But are you finding product market with the right segment and whether you’re reaching it in the right way or not.
So i’ve somehow i’ve always believed for a market like india GTM is more – it’s a precursor to PMF, i'm like otherwise you get a false sense of PMF. You believe that you’ve found like a product market fit but actually you didn’t do the right way, so is it scalable. So that's why i think a lot of this also because we have worked in this category so we understand there is a very, very large need to serve or we were obsessed about am i able to reach the right customer in the right way. And that's why go to market was super important especially you're working in a regulated area in partnership with banks so there are certain norms you have to follow.
The way we solved this, credit card is a cyclical business, it’s a highly risky high yield business. We’re also keeping an eye on that that if we have to build a large business here it’s also our responsibility to build a community of credible users. So you got to educate them, enable them to access credit. And other thing we saw during our go to market strategy was out of 110 million users rather indians we estimate eligible for a product credit card we saw almost 100 million are already there in the bureau. So we just combined these two thoughts very easily and said probably a credit score could be a good way to reach out to these customers. it’ll help us to address their need also educate them and actually give them credit cards.
So now it sounds very easy but --
Avnish:
And that's one, and now it’s 20 million downloads later.
Anurag:
it sounds very easy but forget about investors even internal teams were very dead against it because in early stage you have limited engineering resources and you're seeing that your credit card tech stack will take 9 months to build now you're saying that first three months let’s build one score, are you crazy. And like now of course everybody believes so it was a good call.
Avnish:
And that's gone much better than expected.
Anurag:
Yeah. i remember like fighting internally within the team that why are we – we want to be a credit company why are we spending time on that. But we believe that if you have to think not today, we have to think five years, ten years hence you need to build that.
Avnish:
Super. You spoke about bank partnerships and relationships and then regulator also in the same breath so the reality is in the last six weeks and maybe last six months even more every 2-3 weeks there’s a heart attack, right, from the regulator or a peer on the outside. What is your view of how best to stitch together this ecosystem of the bank partnership, the regulator and the Fintech?
Anurag:
So i think being a regulated area regulations are to follow, there are no two ways about it.
Avnish:
it’s a feature not a bug.
Anurag:
Exactly. it’s a feature, you’ve got to learn in fact I’ve done many podcasts with engineers, and they talk about how do you teach this to like engineers in product. I said everybody who is working in fintech is supposed to understand regulation, it’s a hygiene factor. But let me tell you how to look at regulation especially for a fintech founder or even investor. Regulations are policy making, you know, they’re directionally long term by design, they don’t look at individual business model in short term because they’re looking for long term policy objectives. So whenever somebody has to evaluate regulations I would say 6-8 weeks is too short a period. They have to look at, at least 2 months, 6 months, if not longer to figure out where the direction is going.
And let me give you some anecdotal examples here in our area in fintech. In November ’21 the digital lending working group people happened where RBI kind of acknowledged most of the innovations happening in digital lending. It was a big plus for the entire sector. Then came the creation of fintech department itself, that means RBI is actually setting up a different department to look after. I'm like, you know, the different department their mandate is to actually grow and manage this fintech as an ecosystem. So in my opinion it’s a big plus.
Then came master circular for cred debit cards, then came – the digital lending guideline just came out a couple of weeks back.
Avnish:
Then from the ministry you got digital banking.
Anurag:
Absolutely. DPI have published two sets of paper, then you also have outsourcing draft circular came in. So if you look at direction so the regulator is trying to define the guardrails under which they want to grow this ecosystem. Now in short term there might be some hiccups in certain business models because people have to align to that. But if you ask me as a investor as well as a founder what both of us want is that clarity in long term.
Avnish:
You would rather get clarity in it.
Anurag:
So that we can align ourselves to that because what we’re interested is that rules of the game have to be known to everyone. The good thing for us in the past has been in financial services, the rules have been followed for everyone which is a big thing by the way. So I think if you personally ask me it’s actually --
Avnish:
It’s actually helped you guys differentiate even more, right, because you’ve always done things by the book within the guidelines and then always there are some things that may happen outside and I remember discussions that should we be thinking about that and it was always been first principles and that ultimately plays out.
Anurag:
In fact, many of the people messaged me and asked me that how do you navigate regulation. I said you don’t navigate, you follow.
Avnish:
Very good.
Anurag:
That's a very simple statement.
Avnish:
Very good line.
Anurag:
It’s a very simple statement to make but I think this is how we do, there is absolutely no two ways about it.
Avnish:
So, Anurag, two questions on fund raising. One, I remember when you started out raising money you almost had a few names in mind. We were lucky enough to be one of those and I remember when I didn’t follow up you were here the following Tuesday, you said let’s meet and you pretty much stated that you are somebody who I would want to partner with and tell me how I can help you get there, something like that, which I really appreciated. You have continued to do that even with later stage investors, so both for a early founder and then you lately gave me some very interesting idea about if you don’t need money don’t have rounds, don’t structure big rounds, just bring people with conviction.
So what’s the theme and specific advice for people at early stage as well as later stage?
Anurag:
Okay. So I think one is that we spend a lot of time defining our idea and execution plan so I think in my opinion that is the first thing to do because that will define what kind of investors you want on our cap table. And the reason why we chose those four names actually five, we just met four, is because we wanted to work with investors who understand this long term game, especially when if you recall our product was supposed to get launched after 15-18 months so we wanted people who have huge conviction on us. And literally we were meeting on paper, we had no prototype, nothing. So but we had a big plan and we wanted to find – so we looked for those investors who have invested early and stayed long in problems.
So we met, we were lucky to get and like I remember just to replay the statement which I made is that I have a very simple thesis. I think investors will figure out their own way to evaluate that's their business. They meet day in and day out founders. As a founder what I request all my investors is that decision is yours but please give me feedback so that at least I carry back something out of the meeting. Whether you like something and you don’t like it. In fact I don’t know if you recall or not even when you said yes, I asked you why are you saying yes to us, I want to understand that.
And this is part of our learning process, what I have seen that when you approach investors like that they kind of have a very different level of respect or kind of maturity towards you so I tell all the early stage founders that please like don’t question the decision but do take the feedback. Because we’re trying to do a matchmaking, it’s not that your model is bad or investor didn’t understand, he just didn’t find a fit, it’s as simple as that. So that is our early stage thinking, we were looking for people who can stay long and that has continued, so we don’t like to run like a weak structure that okay, fine, we have a weak running, please come invest.
A lot of investors we have spent months together even before they even came to our cap table. You know, even the current investors knew they had been to our office three times over last 12 months. And this comfort gets built over a period of time and the reason is we’re little more cagey about because we’re very long term we want to make sure that everybody who comes on our cap table.
Avnish:
No, no, and I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that in the past where you’ve said no to certain investors because you thought they would push you for unsustainable growth or – what is that latest thought. So clearly “conviction” runs as one of the things, conviction on both sides.
Anurag:
And the second thing I will say like if you look at our journey when we were started we were largely a tech product company even though we called it fintech the first 18 months we did nothing but just do tech. So our investor profile reflected exactly like that, the first three investors were all tech heavy investors. You know, after that as we started getting into our business model become more and more finance oriented we attracted lot of investors which come from financial profiles and the idea is that so that we get complimentary skills on our cap table who are able to bring the depth of financial services investments over decades. They’ve funded banks, they’ve funded large non-banks across the markets so that we get a good mix of inputs as a shareholder level.
And I remember when we were raising, and we kept requesting early stage investors to create space for others. So that's one part of the strategy that your strategy, your stage and as well as your business model should reflect into your shareholders so that they’re able to give inputs to you and there is a better consensus between the shareholders, that's number one. Number two, another big strategy we have always followed I think which I learnt from you which is dilution specific not valuation. What we say that valuation is driven by markets dilution is driven by the founders. Especially if you want to work a long term company you have to chase dilution because valuation is not in our control.
Avnish:
And now you’ve taken that learning to the next level and you were telling me that round tou karna he nahe chaiye , what was that latest one.
Anurag:
You know why, because now let me ask --
Avnish:
And this is of course companies who have the luxury of not needing to raise money and they have investors chasing.
Anurag:
Absolutely. No. Let me give you – why I say so.
Avnish:
Yeah.
Anurag:
If you believe you're a long term going concern isn’t the fund raising just a part of the process?
Avnish:
It’s like a public stock, it’s a trading stock.
Anurag:
Yeah, as long as if you are thinking yourself like a going concern in long term fund raise will keep happening, the different part of – as long as there is a – you keep meeting investors so we don’t like to run like a fund raising process. Many other times, series D, series B, all of them got preempted, you were part of it. Because it’s not that they just came on and said I want to put up, they knew us, they knew us for a good amount of time, we’ve also allowed lot of investors to come in with small cheques before so that they learn about us, we learn about them and then double up their holdings in us.
Avnish:
That's actually a very actionable takeaway for later stage. One, you’ve generally let sometimes that people in with small cheques into existing rounds such that they get to know the company over a period of time and they have always doubled up in the next round.
Anurag:
Absolutely. I do remember we used to get some of the feedback there what if these guys don’t follow up I said that's the capability I'm thinking about myself that if we’re going to execute the way – in a way we’re a fairly boring company, we’ve done exactly what we’ve told you three years back. But I think at some point in time investors then start expecting you that if you’ve done for last 3 years probably you will do also nicely.
Avnish:
I need more boring companies. So where do we go from here, what do you guys want to do in the next 5, 10, 15 years, what should people expect?
Anurag:
So I think we’re super bullish on India, our consumption credit story, that will not going to change. It is going to be the mainstay of our business model. But how will it look like ten years hence we don’t know because it’ll depend on --
Avnish:
But you're not going to sell the company?
Anurag:
We don’t want to sell the company. We want to outlast us, we probably want to let someone else run it ahead of us, that’s what we want to build.
Avnish:
That's also building to last and building for scale.
Anurag:
Absolutely. And, you know, a lot of this will depend how the regulatory landscape changes because we’re in regulated area. Having said that we want to do all adjacent businesses around this consumption credit but keep the focus there.
Avnish:
Yeah. Any summary things you would like to tell people who are starting out from your own entrepreneurship journey both what you think, how you thought about it that went right or anything you would do differently?
Anurag:
I think one thing like I learnt and I don’t know whether I picked up from you or somebody else but I used to always have this doubt that why the company get a higher valuation in developed market versus Indian markets and lot of time it is linked to GDP, size of the market and all that. But I got a very different insight was that lot of the markets the idea makes more like bucks because you can always change the team to do it but in India you don’t get to change the team.
Avnish:
Markets will – team, yeah.
Anurag:
So I think this is a very different insight so I always tell people please overemphasize on team.
Avnish:
Very good.
Anurag:
And that is my single advice to early stage founders, please focus on team. Because many a time you build teams with people who bring complementary skills, that's important but not at the cost of not alignment of vision. So team first is super, market of course is second, these are the two most important things people have to search for. But within the two also I would say overemphasize on team.
Avnish:
Superb. Thank you, Anurag, congratulations again and thank you for taking the time for this wonderful learnings for everybody.
Anurag:
Thank you, Avi.
Avnish:
Cheers.
Salonie:
Thanks for tuning in. For more Matrix Moments episodes, you can head to www.matrixpartners.in/matrixmoments . You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more updates.
