Aakash

Kumar

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Focus areas

Crypto

Enterprise & SaaS

Media

Social

Gaming

Ecommerce & marketplaces

Fintech

D2C

The initial early stage of a startup's journey is the most exciting, challenging & fun.

Aakash likes to partner with founders in that early stage to enable them to generate maximum momentum, which makes the most significant difference to all value creation that comes after.

He believes that how you start as a company mostly determines how far you can go, and thoroughly enjoys partnering with founders in those early days of the hard and lonely startup journey.

In the past, as an active angel investor, he has enabled 100+ founders to start and build compelling businesses, and even today he spends time talking to founders at the earliest possible point - even incomplete

Ideas or when they're in stealth mode!

Having experienced the wild ride of starting a company twice as a founder himself, he provides his unwavering support to entrepreneurs. He continually strives to make it super easy to unlock tactical company building advice from other fellow founders and the larger startup ecosystem.

A leading voice on user growth and product-led monetisation, he is most excited about collaborating with founders on all things GTM.

Journey

Before Z47, Aakash spent four years at Hotstar, driving scale up for ads and subscription led monetisation. He first helmed advertising revenue growth till early 2020, and shaped the ad-tech and ad product offering, led GTM strategy and built out the customer success and revenue operations function ground up. Later, he was instrumental in driving 20X growth of the paid subscriber base from early single digits millions, making Hotstar the most widely subscribed video platform in India.

Prior to Hotstar, Aakash gathered operating experience across a variety of functional areas, including strategy, product management, business development and operations, with two early-stage cos: IndusOS and Housing.com.

He began his professional journey as an entrepreneur and attempted to build a classifieds business followed by a gaming company. Both those experiences helped shape his product thinking and established the criticality of rapid iteration and robust GTM/distribution strategies in the earliest stage of a venture.

Combining his learnings from his entrepreneurial journey and experience as an operator, he made a number of personal angel investments in various companies during 2014-2021 and is well known in the founder community for his unvarnished opinions, enthusiasm and curiosity for what the future holds.