Starting, Fundraising & PMF: navigating the seed stage journey

Revant Bhate, Co-founder &  CEO at Mosaic Wellness, shares advice on building for growth at the seed stage, in conversation with Aakash from the Matrix team. Tune in.

Akash:

Hi, and welcome. Today with us we have Revant and i'm Akash. Revant is the founder of Mosaic Wellness, a wellness and health platform. Revant is also a prolific angel investor, he’s had a fascinating journey of having been switching over from the investing side to being an operator and a founder now and is very well versed with the early stage.

Today we’re going to talk about what are some of the critical aspects of that seed stage early stage when founders are contemplating their journey. We’ll also think through what founders can do about their approach to that stage given the current market environment. But before we dive in, Revant, would love to get a quick view of your journey so far both at Mosaic and prior to Mosaic.

Revant:          

Sure. Thanks a lot for having me here, Akash. i’ve done one of these before but i’ll still give an intro because maybe the audience is different and as i keep telling in my own marketing journey you have to first introduce yourself to the audience as much as possible. So interesting journey for me, right, before starting this, yes, i was a VC doing pre seed seed checks with Kstart. Before that i was an operator with Rebel Foods for almost six years. And before that i used to be in investment banking actually helping Startups  raise capital much before it was sexy to start out.

So in banking i used to actually do more of growth fund raises, when i joined Rebel i sort of helped raise the series B, C so let’s call it the early growth post PMF kind of fund raise. i used to invest in obviously pre-seed seed mostly pre product idea stage companies and then obviously my own journey with Entrepreneurship  over the last two, two and a half years. So in some way not only have i seen cycles over the last 12 years i’ve also seen every stage of fund raise for different kind of companies. So that's been a very interesting journey. And, yeah, i think over the last two years i think it’s been fun building out a couple of health platforms that we have in terms of men’s health and women’s health and hopefully as we’ve just entered our third year of operations we’ll be able to get scalable PMF and as everyone keeps asking when’s your next round of fund raise hopefully that as well.

Akash:

i'm not going to ask you that question, Revant, but i'm going to ask you something more specific. So when you started Mosaic after that great journey that you had across multiple goals, banking, operator and then even Kstart, right, summer in 2020 when you started what was your mental model when you were trying to think through taking that entrepreneurial branch and more importantly also what was playing through your head in terms of thinking space, market, how do you start on this journey after having been an investor?

Revant:          

So i think it was relatively simple for me, i was very passionate about building B2C as a business inspite of having known as an investor and an operator that capital efficiency in B2C businesses in india is super hard as such. But if i had thought from a VC mindset i would not have built a B2C business. The reason i wanted to still do a B2C business because that's what i'm passionate about, whether it is consumer psychology, whether it’s the fact that we’re a very hard heterogeneous market where it’s just hard and we’re a low trust nation. Like everyone now knows this, there’s enough gyan on Twitter on all of these things.

But the challenge is something that i enjoy. Second, i had some sort of experience or i would call it i had done enough mistakes in trying to build out let’s call it brands with Rebel. i had worked as an investor with B2C consumer internet companies and sort of helped them in their journey as part of Kstart. And what i realized is that the more i understood the ecosystem the better i could get at building something. So i was passionate, i think the skillset matched something.

And the third aspect was what are you thinking of let’s say over the next 10-15 years if you have to build something what would you be really keen to build out. And that's where the health and wellness space i was 35-36 so was my co-founder. Like today i’ve come in from a very deep health checkup so it’s just that age where you start realizing that we’ve not taken care of our health and this is something that is neglected overall as a country. So passionate about space, passionate about thesis and segments where you want to build. Some sort of expertise in terms of if you can think of a thesis or a go to market strategy you know you have the skillset to build it out.

Or you have the creds to sort of at least make sure that you're also able to raise Venture Capital l because as two 35 year olds, even my co-founder is actually from the venture background. So, yes, we’ve done a lot of 0-1 things on our role in the first 18 months but it will be great if you could have some amount of starting capital so that you could also build out a good team from day 1.

So like these were the potential considerations that we had or each of them would be different. Like what is more scalable across different entrepreneurs i think passion for the space is something that's important. Ability to let’s say the founding team’s ability to crack open that model or the thesis that's important. if you're 22, if you can bootstrap your way to an initial hypothesis maybe you don’t need to think about the venture backability of your business as well. But different stage founders, different segments would need different kind of hypothesis.

i think what we did worked for us, we were able to raise a seed round right off the bat and in the next 18 months sort of actually execute show PMF and then raise our subsequent series.

Akash:

Got it. And, Revant, those are the things we actually do want to spend time, more time talking about, talking about that venture backability. And i remember you raised a sizeable seed round and the best of the investors  backing you even in the earliest days possible. Given your experience not just with your own i guess but also your experience as a seed investor earlier what should be the considerations for founders and you did mention and allude to being able to bootstrap the first 18 months, 500 days, how do you navigate those? But besides that if you were to dig deeper what should be the considerations for founders when they’re thinking of their very first raise and if they’re starting up?

Revant:          

So as i said in the end if you really need capital to start out then you need to start thinking about raising, otherwise i think raising should be the second consideration. Arriving at that one thing that you're really passionate about and what you think is a good white space where you would enjoy building that is the first step. Now let’s say you’ve arrived at that, let’s say you’ve arrived at, okay, i want to build in Fintech  because i see this is the gap. Have you really tested out your hypothesis and done a few Beta experiments to make sure that you're on the right path.

i think a little bit of this equation change in the last 18-24 months where there was a lot of excitement about thinking about venture backing before you were actually even got passionate about this space. So if i go back to my days of seed investing with Kstart most of the founders i would meet and even most of the founders i meet today are looking for their first cheque. The only thing that i used to evaluate then and i still evaluate today is what i call founder market fit because every founder will have or every founding team would have a different sort of skillset. Not everybody is the same, not everybody may be a storyteller, not everybody may be a great digital marketer or a great product person or may have a CTO from day 1.

But is the personality and the thought process around why you want to build for this space and solve the skillsets that you have in the founding team are those aligned to the problem statement that you're looking to solve or not. And at a pre product pre-launch stage that's it, right, what else do you have to go on. Now, yes, VCs do a bunch of market research  understand how large the market is and potentially how large a prospective business on that thesis could become.

i mean i'm not sure whether right or wrong i didn’t do a lot of that even at Kstart. Yes, maybe i didn’t take a lot of bets that turned out to be large ones but in the end it’s a fund that will return 6x so i'm pretty sure that i didn’t do a bad job there. So and even as an angel i don’t have an army of folks to sort of dissect the market and understand how large the market could be. As an angel your job is to primarily help founders think through some of these aspects and over a period of 10-12 years now in this ecosystem you have a broad sense of target markets or at least in the end the share of wallet on a B2C or a share of wallet on a B2B business is the same in the sense that you wouldn’t know that potential tams would be the kind of spends household incomes etc.

So basic top down analysis will help you there but most critically it’s is the founder really or is the founding team really passionate about this space, do they have the right thesis to crack open this space and do they have the right skillsets between them or even if they don’t have they identify those weaknesses and thought through about how they will solve them. That's about it, if you have thought about that as a founding team not only are you able to actually raise capital you’ll actually be better at the business that you're trying to build out. The rest of the things will get solved over a period of time.

We ourselves entered into a questionable TAM in terms of elective health and wellness. And i keep telling people that there is roti, then there’s kapda, makaan and then there is health and then there is elective health. So when people have to start thinking about spending money we come way back. So that itself sort of puts a TAM as a little bit of a question mark, right. But we’re pretty confident that if you look at the innate consumer psychology to improve their lives they want to do that. And the problem statement is very simple that is there something which is frictionless, enjoyable, something that is habit forming for them that will just help them improve their lives.

And if you're able to crack that then TAM refuses to be -- and we’ve seen time and again examples of these. You can take a look at something like Urban Company where for the last eight years every year i hear that the TAM is unclear. But today they’re the largest salon in the country for example. So some of these aspects get if you're able to in a B2C business or a B2B business really understand the pain point of the consumer or the business that you're looking to serve and your thesis is correct i mean the sky is the limit.

So i really don’t think a lot about the TAM aspects but as a founder also you should keep working a little bit more on really identifying the pain point and building a team around solving for that pain point.

Akash:

Revant, obviously as investors  TAM becomes something that is super critical and you mentioned this, right, that if you have a differentiated insight, you have a deep empathy and understanding of the problem statement, you're shaping a 10x value prop that can still be outdone. But still going back to the same question you’ve reached that point, you’ve found that out that you still do want to raise, you need to raise capital, you have all of this in place. How should founders go about putting together or building their roster of investors  because investors  are a critical part of the journey, they’re almost your partners, they’re not just passive backers. How should a founder approach building their investor pool?

Revant:          

i think it was much harder about ten years back like i still remember for the series B at Rebel i met 74 investors  in a year and i didn’t know 74 investors  existed back then. Like you’d just keep figuring out from your rolodex as to who else is there who can help you in this journey. Today i think the market’s much, much deeper. So i don’t think it’s a worry that hey, are there enough investors  or are there enough folks who would want to back this idea. i think the question today for most founders is who’s the right set of investors  and what is the way i should approach this list of potential investors . i don’t know if there is an exact strategy to this but i think even the founder pool or the operator pool is now deep enough where everybody has had good enough experiences or not with different kind of investors .

So you talk to five founders they’ll tell you who are the top three in their mind that somebody should approach. And even if there are differing names eventually you’ll end up with a list of 10-15, that's your first set. Then you obviously ask the most relevant question, right, what is the top ten don’t want to back me or the next ten i should approach. And i think that still works in my view, now i don’t really guide founders to prepare a list and then go after it one by one, i just think that’s an insane waste of time for most of the founders because in the end if you're not trying to – i mean bankers can do that, that's their job, they’re a cell side firm where people are supposed to be working that way.

i think as founders your time is very, very precious and therefore one thing that you should do is figure out a way to get a few angels onboard who can quickly like why do you want to do one to one stuff when you can have one to many. if you have five angels onboard each one of them reaches out to five potential investors  and puts in the right word to at least have a conversation just works and even if the investor doesn’t think that this is the right team or this is not the right space at least you’ll get a yes or no directly through that connect itself. So i actually advice founders to maybe get on a quick pool of angels in the beginning not worry too much about valuation.

Once you get those angels onboard just ask them to quickly because as a founder at some point of time 20-30 percent of your time will go into fund raising because you will have enough stakeholders on day 1, there’ll be more stakeholders on day 10, there’ll be even more on day 100. So more and more of your time will end up in that, in the beginning 18-24 months it’s actually advisable to just focus as much as possible on getting your PMF right. So it’s a little counter because lot of founders tell me that hey, but i may dilute a lot if i raise a 500K from angels and let’s say only a $5 million valuation. Potentially VCs will give me $15 million.

i think everyone underestimates the amount of time it takes.

Akash:

That's true.

Revant:          

And you end up just – and that -- don’t dilute 10 percent, dilute 2 percent to angels but just get some people onboard who can help you do stuff that you don’t want to spend time on. Building business like i actually see this at reverse, lot of people today approach me saying that hey, i need help in marketing and therefore i want to speak to you once a month and why don’t you come on the campaign. Yes, possible to do, understandable, right. But i fail to see the reverse approach where people say that hey, if one founder can help me in marketing and one can help me in let’s say technology and building out a tech team and stuff like that your day 0 problem is always going to be getting enough capital so that you can build out those teams.

So your first approach to angels should always be that i want to figure out a way to short circuit my time and i'm not saying that this is the job of angels, right, it’s just that because they’ve been doing this for a while they know the shortest possible route to get stuff done.

Akash:

Maybe just put the fund raise behind you and get back to building, great, and i think rather spending more time on you mentioned product market fit and focusing on the right things how do you discover or find product market fit. As a founder when do you know that you’ve hit PMF? We do keep saying it’s super critical in the early days for setting up a venture for success. if you were to look back at your days the first 300 days at Mosaic and your journey to discovering and figuring out PMF what advice would you have for founders today?

Revant:          

i myself for the last two years have kept asking this question to a lot of folks that how do you define PMF, right, how do you know when you have PMF. And i’ve learnt terms like early PMF, stable PMF, scalable PMF. i watch Matrix Moments where some of these terms were very clearly articulated. Honestly as a founder for the first one year, two years you need to make sure that whatever paper hypothesis you had either is proven or disproven and you’ve moved on to a new hypothesis and you're looking to prove that.

Let’s call it a minimum viable product kind of situation. People sometimes get happy that hey, i’ve built an app because i'm this hypothesis is there and let’s say 1000 users are using it and they’re loving it. Cool. Now go and get the next 10,000, right, and you’ll discover 20 other problems. i think in a country like india only when you hit for a B2C business something like a million consumers served will you really get to understand all the 20 sides of potential problems that you will face in your thesis.

in a B2B business because you have SMD, you have mid-market, you have enterprise, even if you're only enterprise focused unless you get 5 clients you're not going to discover every possible thing. And you're not just going to talk about signing five clients, it’s not about signing the contract. Like i’ve seen a lot of young SaaS companies after the signing the go live takes like nine months. So then you figure out what is the onboarding process. For onboarding you need a separate person altogether, right, when you need delivery then you need customer success.

Like if you go through the full cycle for like let’s say five enterprise clients that will take you 18 months easily. So it’s not about 12 months, 18 months, 24 months but you have to get through the cycle where you’re confident that hey, i have understood all it takes to get five and complete five and keep those five happy. Now the next 20 i can now teach a team how to do it. So whether it’s a B2B or B2C business it’s very hard to say when you have exact let’s say stable PMF but if it’s a B2C business people will say okay, why don’t you track NPS, why don’t you do the Sean Ellis test that if i disappear tomorrow what’s going to happen.

Right, so there are different ways to get an answer as to how sticky your product is, how loved your solution is for a platform but it in my experience it takes anywhere between a year to sometimes three years to get to that situation where you as a founder like okay, i'm now in a state where i have done the 0-1 and maybe i can start giving a few handing off a few things to the team. in that period if you can avoid being distracted by 20 other things that’s the best that can happen. And tough because not all founders will get funded for the first 18-24 months but yeah, i think that's what i also see sometimes taking time. Like i think we were very lucky because we raised pre-launch, we had the luxury of not worrying about the next 36 months and therefore we could just relentlessly focus on execution and get to PMF within 12 months itself.

i have seen in my journey with Rebel for example because we had to manage okay, we have 18 month runway, do we need to fund raise 20 different matrix may come about that investors  may want to see. it sort of stops you from relentlessly pursuing the core PMF that you want to do. So i think it’s a tough one that's why everyone says i mean in fact the data says that 90 percent mortality for seed stage Startups . Largely because those first 18-24 months where the founder needs to be relentlessly focused on getting that PMF is something that they may not get considering maybe they’ve bootstrapped, they’ve not capitalized enough, they’ve not been able to get in the right teams etc.

So advice i mean even in the last 18-24 months a lot of the founders that i had backed would usually come in and say that hey, we’re thinking about raising another round, what do you think. And my feedback to them would be have you built what you wanted to build in the first 12 months. if the answer is no then why are you even asking me this question?

Akash:

Revant, actually just to dig deeper on that one given that it’s a good year, year and a half, journey many a times be it B2B, B2C does the first raise matter in terms of you having more shots at the goal because it is iterative. You could be testing your hypothesis multiple times, you could go wrong, does that first raise become critical in that regard?

Revant:          

i think so. in fact it’s a little counter again where my advice to most founders is if you're not getting the right size, if let’s say you wanted $2 million to test out this hypothesis and you're not getting that $2 million don’t take half a million and just say i’ll figure out 6 mahine ke baad dekhenge. Then clearly there is something incorrect because if you thought you wanted $2 million and you're not getting it then clearly either you’ve not got your thesis right or the capital that you wanted to test out this hypothesis is too much and you need to figure out a more capital efficient way.

Saying okay, i’ll take a half a million and then figure a more capital efficient way doesn’t work. So if you can still go back and test your hypothesis because then it becomes a harder spiral to climb because once you take that half a million then you’ve undercapitalized. But you will not change your plans. With the comfort of money is trust me it’s a different thing. Like it was very hard for us like when we got our series A term sheet out of the $10 million seed round we have only used $4 million. And the question was why have you in over 20 months just used $4 million.

That was a big question among teams also that we’ve raised this much money so why are we not getting more people onboard. i don’t think getting more people onboard or spending more money is going to get your PMF sooner. And this was i think learning from hindsight because like when i in my third stint at Rebel after i was CFO and then CMO Behrouz happened because of survival by us. Because i had 2 crores and i had to figure out how to build a biriyani brand in 2 crores over six months. Whereas i had actually burnt $30 million to get Fassos to a sizeable shape.

But it happened because you have to figure out a way, right, and that's where the real value gets created. And that's what then everybody would enjoy not just you, your team, investors , stakeholders, everyone. So sometimes it’s okay to wait and go back and course correct versus just saying okay, let me take what we can get. But, yeah, i think if you're going to raise make sure you raise for 24 months, right, because anything less than that then is going to always be a problem for you.

Akash:

And you went through this journey yourself in that 0-1 phase of starting during Covid or overlapping a lot with the Covid phase. 0-1 prior to that earlier at Rebel would have been very different, it was a very different environment, you will not promote. Now when you think of it and obviously now you're getting back to normal to a state where people are collocated and working together. Do you think for early stage founders the remote or this hybrid work environment is a challenge and does it render itself better in terms of your agility or you're able to hire across, you’re not dependent or restricted to a single location or is the tradeoff too much.

Revant:          

So i think honestly i think 1-10, 10-100 may actually work okay remotely, 0-1 is super hard. You're right, for us the 0-1 phase considering we started in May 2020, right, we just launched after the first lock down. Super hard for us to do what we did, the benefit we had was because i had done this before we set out in a very structured form we wrote down objectives every month, we wrote down what we want to achieve for those objectives. What are the success matrix and just tried to be as precise as possible on the how. Like let’s say if you want to achieve and objective of scale with low CAC how are you going to do it and just focus on that.

i don’t think first time founders will have that experience because in the end you're sometimes throwing darts, right, and you just need to iterate on a much faster level. i think it’s going to be hard to do this remotely, talent i absolutely agree. i think product and tech also works great remotely because it’s a very, very structured thought. Even if you're in the 0-1 phase your engineer is not going to hustle out something which is going to break. So while product and tech can be remote i think business folks need to – if you need to iterate to PMF i think it’s super important that you are talking to each other as regularly as possible and see, conversations also spark a lot of ideas.

And structured conversations are not the way to get to the real creative ideas. You need unstructured unfiltered conversations would just work well in person like.

Akash:

And, Revant, you have been an active supporter of early stage founders backed many cos and you continue to do that. in the past few years you also mentioned we saw multiple pre PMF companies raise larger rounds that luxury of capital was there, you could also raise follow on rounds for your growth. Even maybe just different types of payments that you spoke about in today’s world when there is a lot of chat and a lot of talk about a longish winter for venture activity a lot of doom and gloom. Do you think founders would have to rewire themselves and rethink and get prepared for facing a new reality.

And if so what could founders starting up today who have been let’s say looking at the past 3-4 years as a precedence do about their own psychology and approach in these times?

Revant:          

So honestly i think founders are the most flexible in their thought process because life for them changes like i think i forget the quote but you have to zoom in at 10 feet and sometimes you're looking at 10,000 feet. So i think they get used to this and changing funding environment is something that i think founders will adapt to pretty well. They will adopt it and they will figure out their own base. So for sure decision making your psychology will change basis how the market is evolving as well.

i think it’s a super power of a business if your strategy doesn’t need to change or your thought process does not need to change as per the market cycles. Very few businesses like that exist but yes, they do and if you're building that kind of business then you as a founder know that i don’t need to change anything because market cycles may change, our business does not, because nothing in our business is so dependent on the market in that sense. Yes, you know, inflation may hurt consumer demand, consumer demand may reduce a little, it doesn’t mean okay, so instead of 3x we’ll do 2.5x this year, doesn’t change anything in our lives in a 10-15 year journey.

Right, so these sort of cycles happen, very few businesses are actually built like that today in my view. if founders can build such businesses from day 0 that's a great thing but i think we’re still a little nascent in our journey plus overall we’re an over capitalized nation with a lower demand than what most other countries would have. Their GDP to VC capitalizing ratio would be much better than what we have as in our country. So, yeah, most founders will end up sort of recalibrating a little bit.

if you are a early stage founder or you're thinking about starting out today yes for sure you need to recalibrate a little bit of the euphoria that existed in the last24 months where if you're from any unicorn plus company at a VP plus level living today and then 20 people would be jumping and saying oh, let me fund you because you have a good idea. Today you need a great idea, you need a good to much better thesis than what folks were getting funded at before. You would need to exhibit a very strong skillset and the thing that i mentioned in the beginning of the talk will just come back in vogue a little bit more stronger. i don’t still think that it’s bad for the ecosystem because honestly a lot of folks who are getting a little bit of FOMO that, hey, i'm earning a lot but, you know, these founders are becoming richer by building unicorns in two years, i can also build.

That's never the right reason to start out a company, we were seeing a lot of that in the last two years. in fact i’ve met so many great operators who like keep saying that you should just continue what you're doing, why do you want to start out. Because you have a great career, it’ll even get better sometimes. And some of them listen some of them didn’t but that's fine. in my view you should never start a business because you just feel that hey, i'm wasting my life because i hear that a lot. That, yaar 10saal hogaye mein kaam karrahu, i'm doing so well but i think i can start my own company.

Of course you can but unless you really have a passion to grind it out for 10-15 years you should not do that in my view. And it is a super hard journey, it’s a super, super hard journey. in fact a lot of people ask me that hey, because my experience with Rebel was as an EiR it was almost like an entrepreneurial experience and you’ll say but you’ve done this before, you're almost like a second time founder. i said yeah, but i was 27 then i'm 37 now, right, it’s just much harder to do when you're 37.

Yes, a lot of the advantages are there but you need the energy levels that i see in a 24 year old today are amazing. it’s hard for me to keep up with them, the kind of information assimilation that they do is tremendous. So i think you need to be very sure that you want to become a founder, you want to start a company, you want to build something which is unique which will be sustainable, which will be long term in nature and something that you're passionate about, because if you're not passionate about it then you're not going to last the journey. And these cycles will come and go, only passion takes you the full distance in that sense.

So i think it’s actually a good thing where we will go back to situations where founders will become founders because they really wanted to start something versus it being a situation that hey, there’s a lot of money available so this is the right time for me to start out now. And that's happened, we’ve seen that time and again when cycles 2015 was similar.

Akash:

The why now is basically the capital availability.

Revant:  

Correct. If your why now is capital available, then that's the worst reason to start out.

Akash:

And before we part ways, Revant, one last thing, and you mentioned about this reason to start when you think of your journey now in this 1-10, 1-100 phase you would always have talent which is entrepreneurial and you would have talent who probably do not have a compelling reason to start, how do you carry forward an entrepreneurial culture now when you’re growing you're adding more people, you would be adding more senior leaders coming in. How do you create an environment where they’re able to exercise the way let’s say Rebel, you have this EIR sort of a setup, how do you do that in Mosaic now?

Revant:          

So I’ve just continued what I did at – because what Jaydeep did at Rebel with getting the EIRs onboard and really creating a lot of that business that we see today is what I have done from day one. So I hired my first EIR who setup the entire tele health platform, today he’s a CXO in the company managing or making sure that we do about 1 lakh doctor consults a month. And super hard problem to solve, everything build ground up. Another EIR who joined me to setup Man Matters are men’s health platform today leads the entire business. So today he owns a P&L of 100 crore plus in terms of revenues because he built that.

I just posted on LinkedIn a couple of weeks back looking for an EIR for offline experience because for me if we’re a digital health platform that is interconnected and wants to help create better habits it’s not about product sales and offline. You have to figure out a way to bring those individuals also into the fold, right. And I'm having a few conversations with folks again same thought, if you can build out that business and even if you fail it’s okay because you would have learnt like an entrepreneur ground, there was full independence to these EIRs.

We’ve just actually started a fellowship program again where we’re rotating young graduates into different functions and then we’re going to give them some project to sort of take and scale up. I would like to believe that the entire org is setup in a way where high ownership entrepreneurial thought process will get rewarded. We’re in fact now in Beta for a third health platform which is being created by someone who led a large channel for us. He could have ended up owning or running 30-40 percent of the revenue for the business but he wants to become an entrepreneur, so I said thik hai that's great, why don’t you do a 0-1 with me on the side on this.

Every year we do some 0-1 and I need now my 0-1 niche also needs to get satiated and but I can't do it all myself because I have a full company to manage. So I end up working with at least one or two folks on some 0-1 project at all points of time. And if they are able to crack it I sort of let them run the entire P&L over a period of time. And that’s something that we have not structured yet but very soon we will actually have a very structured program where we may onboard an EIR let’s say every six months for something or another.

Super important because I think Amrish had tweeted this that there is no 1-10 in India, you're always in that 0-1 phase however big you are. And it is true in my view again if you go back to what I said lot of capital lot of talent low GDP per capita the competitive environment is so strong that you need to figure out a way to continuously innovate, right. And that innovation cannot happen if you're a business that is just very, very structured and does not have that entrepreneurial talent coming in.

So let’s see, hopefully we’ll be able to crack something – I think everybody should see something new coming from us next quarter and once that hits hopefully next year again like I think the only way we could have built men’s health in 2020 and then launched women’s health in ’21 while men’s health was getting PMF there was enough work going on, on the women’s health platform as well. There was a lot of debate on because, you know, if you go to most operators they’ll tell you that you first get core PMF then you go for the second one. The reason we built it the other way was because we knew that our thesis was that we would need multiple consumer segments and my view is I had seen the counter happen where Fassos was large, it was a 100 crore business and when I wanted to build Behrouz nobody wanted to work on it. Because why would someone want to work on something new.

Akash:

On a smaller, new.

Revant:          

I see that even today in our organization. I may have solved it with one EIR like the third platform that we’re building there’s an EIR and there’s a small team two people that they’re working on it. But when they want company’s resources the company’s resources are working on already something that is chugging along. They’re like, hey, there’s 200 crores of revenue happening here and I'm working on this yet I don’t know why I should work on this aspect. How do you make sure that everybody in the company is aligned to innovation also.

Akash:

And are you happy even if it’s an AB20 or it needs to be --

Revant:          

It’s a tough, I still haven’t found the answer yet. You know, in fact I was debating this with the EIR yesterday night itself and he was like we should align everybody’s incentives such that it’s one third or something like that. I remember when Be Bodywise the women’s health platform was being conceptualized and it hit and we were trying to get PMF nobody was working on it because there was so much to do with Man Matters. I think both get solved if innovation still lies centrally. So I was assuring the EIR yesterday that don’t worry, 0-1 is my responsibility as well. In the end you have advantages of being a CEO and calling veto, right, all this is great. I just need this to be done, just make sure this happens.

Akash:

I think the EIR has unfair advantage at least at Mosaic.

Revant:          

Absolutely.

Akash:

You enjoy doing 0-1 and I think that’ll just keep rubbing off with the talent. Thanks, Revant, this was super insightful. Thanks, everyone, who joined us today. We’ll see you soon next time.

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.