Ananth Narayanan, CEO, Myntra on protecting “the founder’s mentality”
India’s booming startup ecosystem has been mostly about the founders and the investors writing cheques to fund their ideas. But building a startup takes a lot more than just founders and investors. It takes exceptionally talented individuals who take the leap of faith to become part of these startup journeys as employers. And while these […]
Mettl’s Ketan Kapoor: ‘I think it is inevitable to be an entrepreneur and not fail’
So who is the quintessential Indian entrepreneur? This is the question we keep asking while analysing success and failure of Indian startups. On one hand, large scale platforms such as Flipkart and Ola have high profile founders at the helm, always grabbing the headlines. On the other hand, a bunch of low key, reticent and […]
Sandhya Menon on life beyond hashtags for India’s #MeToo
This week’s Outliers Podcast is with Sandhya Menon who triggered a revolution on Twitter and elsewhere by sharing her own story of workplace harassment.
Balaraman Ravindran on what AI really means for India
Professor Balaraman Ravindran and Pankaj Mishra sit down to try and make sense of the over-hyped and often “skin deep” AI ecosystem in India.
80+ investors said no to Kabeer before he raised funding from Google; Here’s how he built Dunzo
“The biggest investment you make in a startup is your time; it’s not capital or anything else.” The first big lesson for Kabeer Biswas, from his first startup Hoppr is that entrepreneurship is more about the time than anything else. Biswas, who co-founded Dunzo, is potentially building the next unicorn, or the startup with over […]
Indus Khaitan on the curse and joy of entrepreneurship
“What can I do that I haven’t done in the past, or trained for?” At 44, Indushekhar Khaitan has been an entrepreneur, a VC and a corporate executive. Khaitan’s journey across these assignments was triggered by the restlessness to do something he had not done before. And that meant long, painful journeys apart from discovering […]
Arpita Kapoor of Mech Mocha on making “India play games”
“If I wasn’t running a startup, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.” If there’s one thing most of the entrepreneurs will agree as the biggest influence while building their startups, it’s the personal transformation they go through. For Arpita, who comes from a small village called Pihani near Lucknow, the capital of Uttar […]
Sunit Singh on designing Cleartrip
Amid India’s smartphone boom and the rise of large consumer internet companies such as Flipkart, Myntra and several others, profitability and funding rounds have dominated the narratives. Designing these consumer products, creating engaging user interfaces hasn’t really made any big headlines, though. Cleartrip, with its simple, uncluttered mobile web interface, has been an outlier on […]
Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao on shaping the future of eye care with compassion, disruptive tech
“Always remember the poor who gave their bodies for you to learn medicine. You owe it to them.” Every time a new batch of ophthalmologists joins LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, its founder Dr Gullapalli Nageswara Rao tries to instill a sense of empathy for India’s poor. “The rich didn’t even let you touch […]
Anu Acharya of Mapmygenome on being called a woman entrepreneur
Anu Acharya, the founder of bioinformatics startup Mapmygenome, comes from a traditional “Marwari” family but not a business household. She grew up in Bikaner in a family of academicians. “I learned the value of money early in life.” When Acharya came up with the idea to do a bioinformatics startup in 1998, there wasn’t even […]